Mumbai 26/11: Exposing the Politics of Terror

Feroze Mithiborwala

We Demand a National Judicial Commission of Inquiry.

The Mumbai 26/11 terror episode was undoubtedly an attack on the nation & on all of South Asia. Thus there is a need for a far more extensive, transparent & honest investigation. Over the course of the past several months, a number of questions and doubts have been raised in the media as well as other public fora and there is a growing discontent & sentiment amongst the people to demand a thorough investigation into all the aspects of the terror attack.

We also need to understand as to why the nation was attacked on precisely the 26th of November. Communal riots & terror attacks have been planned & orchestrated around specific times of political, economic or social crisis. Thus the Babri Masjid was demolished on the 6th of December, which is the day of Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar’s death anniversary. The primary agenda of the Brahmanical forces was to counter the upsurge & growing unity of the OBC, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims as well as other oppressed minorities in the wake of the Mandal Commission.

The 26th of November 1949 is a very special day for the people of India, as it was on this day that the President of the Constituent Assembly of India accepted & signed the final draft of the Constitution, whose main author & architect was Bharat Ratna Dr. Ambedkar.

On the insistence of the Bahujan & progressive movements, the Government of Maharashtra has accepted & announced the 26th of November as ‘Constitution Day’. The intention is that the Government of India too would soon adopt & declare the same. This announcement came as a major blow to the Brahmanical forces centred in Maharashtra & thus 26/11 was marked out as the day of the terror attack that was in any case underway & being planned. Their agenda has always been to destroy or manipulate Bahujan culture, religion & symbolism by foisting their agenda by deceit, manipulation, communal riots or terror.

Thus now both the 6th of December as well as the 26th of November have become days of infamy, fear, hatred & communal strife. We need to reclaim both these significant dates & restore them to their pristine historicity.

As the normal refrain has only alluded to the fact of 'systemic or intelligence failure' we wonder as to why the State & Central governments are refusing to table the entire ‘Ram Pradhan Committee Report’. Moreover this report in itself has a limited parameter & scope, as it has primarily looked into the role and the failures of the police machinery. Here to many critical areas have been brushed under the carpet, especially with regard to the Shri Hemant Karkare-Cama Hospital episode, where the entire role of the Control Room and the officers-in-charge need to be further investigated. It was during this encounter with the terrorists that the brave Police officers Shri Karkare, Shri Kamte and Shri Salaskar lost their lives.

On this episode alone, there is a lot of discontent amongst the people. As yet there is very little clarity as to exactly who sent Shri Karkare to the site and having done that did not send in reinforcements, even though they had been supposedly dispatched. Here the records and transcripts of all the telephone calls to and from the Control Room to the various Police personnel, as well as between other important political leaders, bureaucrats & other personalities need to be investigated and made public.

More over till date, the very 'bullet-proof jacket' worn by Shri Karkare is missing. The jacket would reveal the kind of bullets & the distance from which the shots were fired that killed him. The mobile records would reveal as to who actually directed Mr. Karkare to that spot and later did not respond to his desperate appeals for enforcements.

There are also reports of two cars having passed the three slain officers during that period & we want an explanation for this bizarre affair.

According to information that we have garnered, Hemant Karkare was shot in the neck with 9mm bullets, thus fired from a revolver & they went down vertically downwards into his body! We also demand that the ‘Post-Mortem Report’ of the same be made public immediately as even that basic document is being kept under wraps. The 'Panchnama' filed by the Police clearly shows that the 'bullet-proof jacket' never reached the hospital. Undoubtedly, this crucial piece of evidence was discarded by the police officers who transported Hemant Karkare' corpse from the site of his murder, enroute to the hospital.

Another major factor in this story is the death of Sub-Inspector Durgude, who was killed on the footpath outside St. Xavier's college at the very entrance of the lane leading into the Rang Bhawan barely 25 mts from where Shri Hemant Karkare was shot dead much later. Durgude was shot even before Ismail & Kasab reached the spot at the Corporation Bank. This clearly indicates that there was another assassination squad that was operating & their target was Shri Hemant Karkare. The very fact that though for more than a hour and a half, the embattled police led by Shri Sadanand Date and later joined by Shri Karkare and his team, kept on sending messages for help to the Control Room, as well as calls from the Azad Maidan Police Station (barely 50 mts from the Cama Hospital), proves the fact that certain elements within the police echelons & the Central & State Intelligence Bureau (IB) are culpable of a high degree of complicity & criminality and this needs to be exposed for all the nation to see.

The entire worthless canard that 'there were 10-12 terrorists' defies all logic and is an insult to our intelligence. It is not humanly possible merely this number to have hijacked a city for 59 hours. In our estimation there were no fewer than 50-60 odd terrorists operating at the minimum and this fact is easy to discern. Moreover they could not have functioned without local assistance required for logistics & planning. This factor will uncover the terror network within our country that has colluded in this terror attack.

Thus even though the Intelligence, police, the government as well as the media regularly claim of more than '5000 terrorists' being present in the country, all that the police could do is to try & frame Fahim Ansari – pathetic. Ansari was exonerated by the Court & the judge clearly alluded to the fact that false evidence & witnesses were fabricated by the police to attempt to implicate him as one of the alleged masterminds of the 26/11 attack.

The Mumbai 26/11 terror attack was a massive International operation & as per the investigation of the Interpol & it was planned across seven countries. Surely the ‘Ram Prahdhan Committee’ does not have the mandate to pursue the same. We thus demand that the government also make public the findings of the ‘Interpol Report’. The ‘RAW Dossier’ that was paced on the table of Mr. MK Narayanan by November 19, 2008 will also reveal the level of information that was garnered by the intelligence agencies over the period of 10-11 months during which this entire operation was underway. We therefore demand that the RAW Dossier be made available for public scrutiny. We also demand that Shri MK Narayan (former NSA chief) be prosecuted, as it was primarily he who had access to all the prior information that lead to the attack.

The fact of the matter is that even the notorious American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warned the Indian Government in mid-September about the impending attack. One wonders as to why the CIA did not warn it's friends in Pakistan that include it's partners within the ISI & the Military (whose salary bill America foots) as well as the political leadership.

The biggest CIA-FBI operation is currently underway in Pakistan & it is unbelievable that the CIA did not bother or remember to warn Pakistan. It is clear that the CIA as well as the Israeli Mossad & the British MI5 & MI6 would have benefited from this terror attack as a war-like situation develops all across the India-Pakistan-Afghanistan region. Also the linkages between the CIA and the ISI as well as between the CIA and Dawood Ibrahim need to be investigated and discussed in the media. The relationship between narco-terrorism - the international drugs cartel and terror networks needs to be analysed & investigated as well.

It is now clear to one & all that David Headley is an American CIA agent & not a double agent as was misconstrued. Headley's task was to penetrate the LeT in Pakistan & then draw his contacts into the 26/11 attack. The very fact that Headley's Visa documents were waived without due diligence, despite the fact that he was born in Pakistan & was moreover a convicted drug smuggler speaks volumes at the level of complicity at the highest political & bureaucratic levels. As soon as the Headley story broke out, the Indian Consulate in Chicago stated that his Visa papers were 'missing'. They were later located . . . & lost . . . . . & located . . . . . .

The role of the Navy too has been largely unexplored and they have escaped public scrutiny. The fact of the matter is that the RAW spy plane was following and photographing the Al-Hussaini after it left Karachi for Mumbai & the specific coordinates (24.16. 36 N and 67.02.04 E) were provided to the Navy which did not pay heed. Later the Coast Guard did intercept the 'Kuber' but ID cards from Porbandar were flashed & the terrorists went on to fulfill their murderous task. The story is far from clear here & Admiral Suresh Mehta should be held accountable to the nation for his failures as well as his apparent negligence & should be asked to resign forthwith.

By the interceptions of September 14, the targets - Taj, Oberoi & the Marriot & later even the Leopold cafe were clearly mentioned. On November 19, the timing of the attack was also mentioned & it was known that the boat was to arrive in Mumbai between 9.00pm-11.00pm, it could not have not been more clear or ‘actionable’!!

But Director General of Police (Maharashtra) AN Roy maintained there was no specific input. Also Mumbai Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor even ruled out the possibility of local logistical support. Why?! The current Commissioner of Mumbai Police D. Sivanandan was appointed or rather promoted to this crucial post - after his (supposed) failure as the Chief of the State Intelligence Bureau. Mr. D Sivanandan too refused to agree that actionable intelligence had been provided. As his first task, D. Sivanandan flew to Israel . . .

This proves that it was neither a failure of intelligence or either the system for that matter, but reveals a high level of complicity in the planning, execution and implementation of the terror attacks on India - & it goes to the highest levels of the political & security leadership of the nation.
The owners of the Taj and the Oberoi to received repeated warnings, yet they did not take the necessary precautions and therefore the role of the management to needs to be investigated. The quantum of weapons stocked in both the hotels did not come in a mere rubber dingy. They were being stocked within both the Hotels over a period of time and that is a matter of simple logic. Thus elements within the Taj and Oberoi would be complicit in this terror attack & the role of the labour agency that provided the skilled & unskilled contract workers needs to be probed. More importantly even the entire guest list, over the last year or so needs to be investigated as undoubtedly some of them were complicit in the entire operation.

As to why the terrorists were allowed to continue to keep in contact with their handlers in Pakistan is another riddle. The standard operating procedure (SOP) is to deploy 'jammers' so as to cut of all communication systems, then why was not this simple plan adhered to??

Even the SIM cards that were used by the LeT were supplied by the IB informers who were moles within the LeT. We know that 35 SIM cards had been supplied of which 3 were used during the Mumbai attacks. What was the double game here?? Intriguingly, between 23-28 November, the terrorists using Voice Over Internet Telephony (VOIP), made calls to locations in Mumbai, Pune, Nasik & Delhi. In all, calls were made to 23 mobile & 12 landline telephones. The police is not tracing any of these calls, leave alone identifying the people thus called or investigating the matter thoroughly.

Calls by the way were made to the Israeli Consulate in Mumbai. Interesting, but not interesting enough for the authorities I guess.

The Nariman House episode continues to remain an enigma. Newspapers and credible eye witness reports stated that the terrorists were already living in the Nariman House and this needs to be explained. After much pressure, the Mumbai police finally accepted the statement of a key eyewitness - after 11 months. In our analysis, Nariman House was one of the ‘safehouses’ provided to the terrorists before they launched their attack. How is it possible that 'Muslim Terrorists' were living in Nariman House? This question has never been answered with any degree of logic or satisfaction - it can’t!

A thorough investigation of the same is the need of the hour, as the Mossad is the most dangerous and reviled of the agencies and is known to engineer assassinations, terror attacks & wars. Undoubtedly the biggest political beneficiary of Mumbai 26/11 has been Israel as it is now rapidly deepening it's tentacles into the government & private security systems across the country.

Thus the probe needs to delve into the ‘Specific & Actionable Intelligence’ available, the ‘Warnings’ thus issued by the RAW & the IB, which were not subsequently acted upon, the role of the ‘Navy’, the terror attacks on the ‘Taj-Oberoi Hotels’ – ‘CST-Cama Hospital’, the planned murder of Shri Hemant Karkare & his associates and the ‘Nariman House’. The role of the chain of command within the political and security apparatus will also sought to be undertaken. The various international linkages, with both State and Non-State Agencies will be critical to the analysis. These are only amongst some of the major areas that we request you to focus on.

The game of International terror whereby a new breed of mercenary-terrorists are imported and exported by Intelligence Agencies, with the connivance of their Governments in order to expand the agenda of the Global and National Political-Corporate Oligarchs, needs to be questioned and investigated by the media and all patriotic citizens across the world.

We thus appeal to the PM Shri Manmohan Singh & the Home Minister Shri Chidambaram, to reconsider their stand and constitute a National Judicial Commission as a matter of national security & thus a matter of grave urgency. The outcome of the report will only help strengthen national security and the nation needs to know the truth of Mumbai 26/11.

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Feroze Mithiborwala has been an integral part of the social movements since 1987 & drew his inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi & the ideals of the National Independence Movement. He is an expert on the Palestine-Israel imbroglio & at the core of organizing Palestine Solidarity both in India & across the world. More specifically Feroze Mithiborwala [is the]

a) National President of the Awami Bharat, an organization that is committed to the International Struggle against Imperialism & Zionism.
b) Also is the National President of the Bharat Bachao Andolan (Movement to Save India), which is a common platform for the anti-Imperialist resistance.
c) Founder of the Indo-Palestine Peoples' Solidarity Forum.
d) The National Co-ordinator of the Free Gaza Movement-India.
e) Amongst the core of the International Co-ordinators of the "Cairo Declaration" (2010), that has called for the "End to Israeli Apartheid" & for the "Liberation of Palestine". This process includes members from over 43 countries.
f) Was the National Convenor of the Rashtriya Yuva Sangathan (1994-95) & Yuva Bharat (1999-2000), Gandhian youth organizations.
g) Was also one of the National Convenors of the National Alliance of Peoples' Movements (1994-96).