tagged w/ headley
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Tahawwur Hussain Rana, Mumbai attacks co-accused, had an ambitious plan to enter Bollywood by launching Rahul Bhatt, son of film director Mahesh Bhatt, in a movie that he wanted to make.Tahawwur Hussain Rana, Mumbai attacks co-accused, had an ambitious plan to enter... more
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The trial against Tahawwur Rana , co-accused in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, is expected to be a high drama affair. The trial, which will commence on May 16, will be aided by Rana's confession, which was made before the Chicago court.The trial against Tahawwur Rana , co-accused in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, is... more
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After terrorist conspirator and “former” U.S. government agent David Coleman Headley received promises of leniency and extradition protection from American prosecutors for his role in the 2008 Mumbai massacre, speculation about his true masters was set ablaze as outrage erupted across India.
Headley — a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and the son of a Pakistani diplomat — pled guilty to various criminal charges on March 18 in connection with his terrorist activities in India, Pakistan and Denmark. He is reportedly “cooperating” with investigators.
In exchange, the government vowed not to allow foreign authorities to question him or subject him to trial. Prosecutors also agreed not seek the death penalty, and he may not even serve a life sentence. Links to U.S. intelligence agencies will remain classified. And his guilty plea ensures that there will be no drawn-out trial that could publicly reveal any relationships with various intelligence agencies — most notably, the Central Intelligence Agency-linked Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.
Headley admitted in the plea bargain that he helped plan the bloody massacre by conducting surveillance and selecting targets, gathering GPS coordinates for the terrorist team’s boat landing along the coast, and more. He was also helping to plan an attack on a Danish cartoonist. And while the Federal Bureau of Investigation was given almost 10 hours to question the only surviving attacker in India, a team of Indian investigators who traveled to the U.S. to interrogate Headley was turned away.
The plea deal and the lack of American cooperation immediately sparked fury and despair in India, as the U.S. is reportedly bound by treaty to surrender Headley to Indian authorities. It also fueled accusations in the media that Headley still may have been linked to the American or Pakistani governments in some capacity. He began his terrorist training around the time that he was working for the U.S. government. But the connections, however, remain shrouded in mystery.
The terrorist group he was known to be working with —the ISI-linked Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba— carried out the devastating Mumbai attack in November of 2008 that dominated headlines around the world. The terrorists rampaged through the city with machine guns and grenades, leaving over 150 dead and hundreds more wounded. And as it turns out, the terrorist group was actually created with the help of Pakistan’s secret services, which have well-known ties to the American Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies.
He also noted that the Obama administration was “behaving very strangely” and that it had something “extremely explosive” to hide. “The speculation gaining respectability in Delhi is that Washington knew in advance about the Mumbai attack and deliberately chose not to pass on details to Delhi,” the ambassador noted in the piece, entitled ‘A spy unsettles US-India ties.’ “Clearly, the Obama administration was apprehensive that Headley might spill the beans if the Indians got hold of him and the trail could then lead to his links with the CIA, the LeT and the Pakistani military.”
Headley’s involvement with the U.S. government began when he was caught trafficking heroin. To reduce his sentence, the DEA convinced him to work as an undercover agent in Pakistan. And in exchange for his cooperation, he only served two years. After 9/11, the agency worked closely with other government outfits, and they were forced to share information. So anti-terror operations had to have been aware of Headley’s activities. These facts have led Indians to conclude that he was, in fact, still working for American intelligence.
“Many Indians are convinced that Mr. Headley is a CIA agent, perhaps gone rogue, and that the U.S. intransigence represents an attempt to shield him and his past activities from scrutiny,” said writer Akash Kapur in a piece published by the New York Times. Another New York Times piece, entitled ‘American Scout for Mumbai Attacks Was Jokingly Called ‘Agent Headley’ by Friends,’ points out that Indians who knew Headley had long suspected that he worked for the CIA.
“I had a hunch then and I have a hunch now that he was an American agent of some sort,” Headley’s Indian friend Rahul Bhatt told Channel 4 News. “I nicknamed him Agent Headley. I thought, and I suggested to him, that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, and he used to not like it.” Apparently, Headley even “begged” Bhatt to stop calling him “Agent Headley” in public.
An important former Indian government and counterterrorism official was blunt with his conclusions as well. “The mishandling by the US is due to its anxiety to prevent a public admission of the US intelligence community’s links with him and to protect Pakistan from the legal consequences of its role in the 26/11 terrorist strikes,” noted security analyst Bahukutumbi Raman, a former top counter-terrorism official with India’s foreign intelligence service.
“The plea bargain entered into by the FBI with Headley last week has created strong suspicions in India that the FBI wants to avoid a formal trial of Headley and was reluctant to allow Indian investigators to interrogate him because Headley was a deep penetration agent of the US intelligence,” he added. Raman explained that Headley “was not a double agent, but a quadruple agent.” He also allowed for the possibility that Headley may have gone horribly “out of control.”
Speculation about the U.S.-agent-turned terrorist continues to run rampant in the Indian press. But how much is really known? In court documents, Headley’s associates are referred to simply as A, B, C and D. So the truth about Headley may never be known to the public. And while that is a veritable tragedy, the truth must still be sought. The theories remain as varied as they are numerous, but the secrecy and strange deals seem to confirm people’s suspicions that their governments are totally out of control and out of touch with the citizenry. Pakistan and India have even moved their “proxy war” into U.S.-occupied Afghanistan, complicating matters even further.
Even more importantly, the government must respect the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The terrorists stormed through the city unhindered — slaughtering everyone in their path — for more than two days! As famed Indian pacifist Mohandas Gandhi wrote in his autobiography: “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.” And still, decades after independence, the government continues its counterproductive and dangerous policy of keeping law-abiding people disarmed, and therefore, easy targets.
For Americans, there are serious implications too. If the federal government would stick to the Constitution and quit meddling in foreign nations, these sorts of issues would not even crop up. The anti-American animosity and suspicion built up around the world would not exist. “Blowback” would not threaten American citizens and interests around the world. And the billions of dollars saved could be returned to the citizenry. So for the sake of U.S. taxpayers, victims of terrorism around the world and all of the casualties of the “war on terror,” it’s time for some serious changes in American foreign policy. The people must hold the government accountable, or the tragic consequences — death, oppression and confusion — will continue to mount.After terrorist conspirator and “former” U.S. government agent David... more
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Does this sound like the underwear bomber scenario or what? This is true of most homegrown terrorist plots, they usually turn out to work for the FBI, CIA, DEA or some other government organization.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An American charged with helping plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, moved effortlessly between the United States, Pakistan and India for nearly seven years, training at a militant camp in Pakistan on five occasions, according to a plea agreement released by the Justice Department last week.
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The Lede Blog: Not Amused by ‘Agent Headley’ Jokes (March 26, 2010)
The odyssey of David C. Headley, 49, included scouting targets in several cities in India and meeting with a senior operative of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These and other new details of Mr. Headley’s activities, contained in the plea agreement, raise troubling questions about how an American citizen could travel for so long undetected from his home base in Chicago to well-established terrorist training camps in Pakistan.
The document shows that Mr. Headley made two trips to North Waziristan, the heart of Qaeda operations in the tribal area where the United States is still pushing Pakistan for a military offensive to clear out militants. His handlers, the document reveals, included a former Pakistani military commander with ties to a Pakistani extremist group and even Al Qaeda.
From there, Mr. Headley not only helped plan the Mumbai attack, it says, but he was put in contact with a Qaeda cell in Europe that may still be operative. The document shows the cell was well supplied with weapons and money and primed for an attack until the moment Mr. Headley was arrested by the F.B.I. at O’Hare airport last October.
Mr. Headley divulged details of his life as a spy and militant as part of a plea agreement that will spare him the death penalty, his lawyer, John T. Theis, said this week. Mr. Headley’s maximum sentence would be life imprisonment, he said. As part of his plea, Mr. Headley has volunteered to talk to the authorities in India, Pakistan and Denmark, where he was plotting with a Qaeda cell to attack the Copenhagen offices of the newspaper that had printed derisive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the agreement says.
The revelations around the European cell were particularly disturbing, said Bruce Riedel, who was a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration and is now at the Brookings Institution. They showed that “Al Qaeda still has a significant operational infrastructure somewhere in Europe,” he said. Mr. Headley’s story also showed in clear contours the close relationship between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, he said.
Mr. Headley was able to use his Pakistani and American heritage to great advantage, playing up his American descent on his mother’s side in India, and then behaving as a Pakistani in Pakistan, where his father was born.
As he became more intensely involved in the web of militant activities in Pakistan — sometimes training for months at a time — and then making five trips to Mumbai from 2006 to 2008 to scout locations, Mr. Headley kept his base in Chicago, the document says.
Mr. Headley started his career as a militant scout with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group established decades ago with the help of the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies to fight against India’s control of disputed territory in Kashmir.
Lashkar was supposed to have been outlawed in Pakistan in 2002, but it remains active behind the veil of a public charity in Pakistan and, according to Mr. Headley’s plea, continued to be assisted by former Pakistani military officials in recent years.
From 2002 to 2005, Mr. Headley trained at Lashkar camps on five occasions, learning about explosives, small arms and countersurveillance techniques.
The plea names a retired Pakistani military officer, Col. Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed, known as Pasha, as Mr. Headley’s main contact with Lashkar. Earlier prosecution documents said that Colonel Syed was arrested last year in Pakistan on unspecified charges, but then released. In early 2009 Colonel Syed introduced Mr. Headley to Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri, a Qaeda operative in North Waziristan, according to the document.
Colonel Syed then served as the go-between for the men, who all met together in North Waziristan, according to the document.
The visit in February 2009 may finally have put Mr. Headley on the radar of the American authorities, who started tracking him in the late spring of last year, Mr. Riedel said. Mr. Kashmiri is considered to be one of Al Qaeda’s most dangerous commanders. The Long War Journal, a Web site that specializes in reports on militancy, says he is a former member of Pakistan’s elite commando Special Services Group, though Pakistani intelligence officials deny that. He was the target of a drone attack last September. After initial reports that he was killed, it appears that he survived, according to Pakistani officials and militants.
It was Mr. Kashmiri who asked Mr. Headley to help plan the attack against the Danish newspaper, the plea document says.
After Mr. Headley’s second trip to North Waziristan in May of last year, he was told by Mr. Kashmiri that the “elders” had approved the attack in Denmark, a remark that Mr. Headley understood to mean the Qaeda leadership, the agreement says.
The attack against the newspaper, which involved a Qaeda cell already in place in Europe, was planned to be particularly gruesome, with suicide attackers trying to kill everyone in the building, the plea says.
As the planning for the Copenhagen attack unfolded, Mr. Headley returned to Denmark for a final scouting mission last August.
He then met with the Qaeda team in Europe, according to the agreement. The precise location of that meeting with Qaeda operatives is not specified in the document, apparently in deference to investigations by Western intelligence agencies. When Mr. Headley was arrested on Oct. 3, 2009, he was headed to Pakistan once again to meet Mr. Kashmiri in North Waziristan to hand over 13 surveillance videos he had taken in Copenhagen.
Mr. Headley’s plea agreement with the government was not his first. After being sentenced for drug trafficking in the 1990s, he served as an informant in Pakistan for the Drug Enforcement Agency as part of a deal for a lighter sentence. He was in Pakistan for the drug agency from the late 1990s until at least 2001. By 2002, he was training with Lashkar, raising the possibility that he had made contact with the militants while still working for the drug agency.
In addition to sites in Mumbai, Mr. Headley scouted targets in Pune and Goa, the document says. He was sent to Mumbai several times, it says. There, he made videos of the targets, including the Taj Mahal Hotel, took coordinates with a GPS unit, and scouted sites in the harbor where 10 Lashkar militants landed Nov. 26, 2008, in inflatable boats. They killed 163 people.Does this sound like the underwear bomber scenario or what? This is true of most... more
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