So here’s another rabbit hole to fall into. You probably heard about this guy David Headley, arrested in Chicago for involvement in the Mumbai terrorist attacks as well as attacks on a Danish newspaper? Healey’s real name is Daood Gilani. He was arrested in mid-October.

Who is this guy? Long story. Dramatic story.

For the record, my last post on Mumbai wondered why the terrorists’ bodies lay unclaimed in the morgue for a year.

Mumbai/New Delhi: Almost a year after they were killed during the terrible assault on Mumbai last November, the bodies of the nine terrorists continue to remain in Mumbai’s J.J. Hospital morgue. There are no claimants and the authorities are clueless on what to do with them.

They continue to remain in a room sealed with round-the-clock security and where the temperature is set at four degrees Celsius to prevent any decomposition.

The 10 gunmen killed over 170 people in a series of coordinated attacks that began Nov 26 last year. Mohammed Ajmal Amir alias Kasab, currently undergoing trial, was the only one captured alive after the strikes that targeted two luxury hotels, the city’s main train station, a hospital and a Jewish centre.

So please, if you haven’t read that, go right ahead because it’s pertinent. Bottom line: we really don’t know who committed the Mumbai terrorist attacks, but it was a big operation with a double cross involved, and plenty of gruesome torture — not your typical killings but the sort of thing that gives forensic doctors accustomed to murder in big cities nightmares.

Like 911, the official Mumbai story has some glaring problems. For instance, the Mumbai attacks were supposedly carried out by just 10 gunmen. These 10 gunmen were able to hold several huge buildings and multiple hostages for a couple of days while simultaneously fighting off swarms of heavily armed Indian forces. It doesn’t make sense, of course, but since there are only 10 people accounted for — 9 in the morgue plus Kasab — the narrative remains stuck on 10. If there were others, then how would they have gotten away, hmm? They couldn’t, see, unless they were for some inconceivable reason *allowed* to get away, like the people who did 911. Pfft. But that can’t happen, that would be a conspiracy, and conspiracies don’t exist, so these mystery terrorists don’t exist either. Simples.

But on the other hand, *somebody* must have helped these 10 guys land undetected. This is supposedly the “missing link” in the narrative. And so this is where Gilani comes in.

December 09, 2009 Edition 1

MUMBAI: Ever since his arrest in Chicago in October, India has been gripped by the case of David Headley, a Pakistani-American man who is alleged to have helped plan last year’s deadly attacks on Mumbai.

The plot, according to the media in India, reads like a movie thriller: a well-built fitness fanatic and white Muslim convert befriends Bollywood stars, using an alias and visa business as cover as he scouts out possible targets. He then reports back in coded e-mails to shadowy Pakistani agents directing operations, preparing for the high-profile strike that will kill 166 people, including 25 foreigners, sending shockwaves around the world.

With Headley now facing charges in the US, Indian security analysts believe the FBI could have found the vital missing link to the November 26 attacks on Mumbai.

The question about whether the 10 gunmen had specialist help to land undetected by sea and strike their targets with such precision has been posed ever since the attacks.

Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute of Conflict Management, agreed, suggesting Headley assumed “a very significant role” in the attacks.

The US Department of Justice said Headley made five trips to Mumbai from September, 2006, to July, 2008, “each time taking pictures and making videotapes of various targets, including those attacked in November, 2008″.

During those trips he reportedly befriended the gym instructor son of a Bollywood director, met a top actor and dated an actress and stayed in an expat enclave in south Mumbai, near the US consulate.

He is also said to have stayed at one of the targets, the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower H0otel. Sahni said the charges against Headley, plus a Pakistan-born Canadian and a retired Pakistani army major, would put pressure on Pakistan. The charges against Headley could raise questions about the supposed role played by two Indians on trial in Mumbai. The two men are accused of also being key planners behind the attacks. - Sapa-AFP

So what else do we know about Gilani? He’s from Philadelphia.

A former Philadelphia tavern operator-turned-terror suspect played a key role in planning last year’s deadly assaults in Mumbai, India, according to new federal charges.

David Coleman Headley, 49, who was brought to Philadelphia from Pakistan as a teenager, spent nearly two years scouting locations that figured in the attacks on targets including the Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels, a cafe, and a Jewish center, federal authorities say.

…The Mumbai charges, filed yesterday in federal court in Chicago, added a chilling new dimension to the already strange saga of Headley - born Daood Gilani, the son of a prominent Pakistani broadcaster and a striking Main Line woman with a taste for adventure.

A U.S. citizen, Gilani attended Lashkar training camps beginning in February 2002. In 2006, after learning that the organization wanted him to perform surveillance in India, he changed his name to Headley in Philadelphia so he could travel more easily, authorities say.

Posing as a representative of an immigration-services business, Headley began traveling to Mumbai in September 2006, the charges say.

Actually it sounds like he was a bit of a fuck-up.

Headley was born in 1960 in Washington to Serrill Headley, who grew up in Bryn Mawr, and Syed Saleem Gilani. Headley married Gilani at age 19, according to an Inquirer story. After Gilani’s job in Washington ended, the couple returned to Pakistan.

The couple divorced. Headley married and later divorced a second Pakistani - an executive - before returning to Philadelphia. After several attempts, she was able to get her son Daood out of Pakistan in the 1970s and later bought and renovated a pub at 56 S. Second St. that she called the Khyber Pass. She died last year.

The boy - described by family friends as sullen but handsome, with one blue eye and one brownish-green - had trouble adjusting to life in the States after his conservative upbringing in Pakistan, friends said.

Headley later took over the bar but drove it into bankruptcy. He also took accounting classes at the Community College of Philadelphia in the 1990s but did not earn a degree, and he managed video stores for a time in Philadelphia and New York. In 1998, he was sentenced to 15 months in jail in New York for smuggling heroin from Pakistan.

The current case has been huge news in India, with media chasing scraps of information about Gilani’s comings and goings.

On Saturday, Danyal Gilani, a spokesman for the Pakistani prime minister, confirmed that Headley is his half-brother, but said he had little contact with him since 2002. He last saw him at his father’s funeral in 2008, according to a report in the Times of India.

He said his family was not related to the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani. The prime minister did visit his house after his father’s death last year to offer condolences, he said.

You know the funny thing about people who have connections, they get a little tone deaf to reality. Those of us *without* connections know very well that if you bankrupt a bar, don’t have a degree, and get convicted for smuggling drugs from Pakistan, then you can not reasonably expect to get a good job. That’s how life works for us mere mortals. But the connected have different rules. The least you can do is become an informer for the DEA, and then use that cover to plot terrorist attacks.

Headley, 49, who was born Daood Gilani, the son of a Pakistani father and an American socialite mother, agreed to become an informer for the Drug Enforcement Administration as part of a plea deal after his conviction in 1998 on heroin-smuggling charges.

Law-enforcement and diplomatic officials say they are barred from speaking publicly beyond the court record in the terrorism case against Mr. Headley, who is alleged by American officials to have adopted his Western name in 2005 to make it easier to travel on terrorist missions.

But they acknowledge privately there is the possibility that Headley traveled to Pakistan on behalf of the DEA, which is part of the Justice Department, and used the trips instead as an opportunity to meet with leaders of the Pakistan terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba and plot attacks on Indian and Western targets.

You can also hook up with a couple of guys running a visa company, and use that as cover to bring suspicious people into the US. It helps keep the war on terror going.

The Justice Department has also not disclosed much of what it knows about the two immigration companies linked to Headley and a Pakistani-born Canadian, Tahawwur Rana, who is also under arrest in the United States and charged with terrorism.

News reports in the U.S. and India have identified the two men as owners or managers of First World Immigration, which had offices in Chicago, and the Immigrant Law Center, a much smaller company based out of a large air-conditioned market in south Mumbai. Both firms advertised their ability to help skilled and unskilled Indian immigrants obtain visas to enter the U.S.

Federal authorities say they believe that Headley used his connections to the companies as a cover for terrorist surveillance ahead of last year’s attacks in Mumbai, as well as surveillance of the offices of a newspaper in Copenhagen, Denmark, that was condemned by Muslim groups around the world after it published cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammed.

Headley’s affiliation with the visa companies raises an even more troubling concern for American law-enforcement officials, because there is the fear the firms may also have been used to obtain visas for extremists to enter the United States and Canada.

News reports in India this month said that at least one of the companies’ former Indian clients has already been deported from the United States after immigration officials here determined that he had false documents.

…The immigration companies put advertisements in Indian newspapers last November, only days before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, promoting the firms’ ability to help ex-military officers obtain jobs in the United States and Canada.

Allright??!!! If you really feel adventurous, read this to see connections to Mulla Omar, Benazir Bhutto, etc. All this is totally normal see? He could have been your mailman, no?

Either Kafka is playing a joke on Gilani, or he is an intelligence operative being hung out to dry. I vote for B. And by the way, the correspondent for Dalit Voice has the following to say (scroll down):

26/11 Bombay attack was planned to kill Karkare

OUR CORRESPONDENT

Bangalore: S.M. Mushrif, a retired IG of police of Maharashtra, in his sensational just released book, Who killed Karkare? directly accuses the Brahminists in the Govt. of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), (virtually taken over by the Brahminical terrorist force, RSS), for bungling in the 26/11/2008 Bombay terrorist attack. In the country’s most famous terrorist attack on Bombay, he says the incident has to be divided into two parts. The CST-Cama Hospital-Rangabhavan Lane episode of the attack is mysterious because Maharashtra’s most famous ATS chief, Hemant Karkare, noted for bravery, impartiality and efficiency, was shot dead here at the instance of IB to save the notorious Brahminists involved in the Malegaon bombing.

Malegaon terrorists released

All the Malegaon accused who were arrested by Karkare are about to be released and will come out as heroes — thanks to the IB complicity, he says.

The two Pakistani terrorists, Ajmal Kasab and Ismail Khan, arrested in the CST-Cama Hospital episode are not foreigners but fluent Marathi-speakers, he says giving eye-witness reports in Bombay newspaper. Karkare was led to the trap laid by the IB.

In other words, the 26/11 terrorist attack was used by the IB to solely kill Karkare.

The 320-page book tears into pieces the country’s premier intelligence network IB, and says the IB is more interested in the micro-minority Brahminists but not in the 130-crore Indians and their security.

Object is to eliminate Karkare

The CST-Cama Hospital “terrorists” were not part of the terrorists from Pakistan but were local ones.

American warning suppressed

The operation was planned, directed and executed by the Brahminists under the IB with the sole objective of eliminating Karkare who had unearthed many Brahminist terrorist plots to establish Hindu Rashtra.

CST-Cama hospital part had nothing to do with the Taj-Oberoi-Nariman House attack. The Brahminical media cooperated with the IB.

Another sensational disclosure is the IB had received the warning of the terrorist attack on Bombay from the US but it deliberately suppressed the warning as it wanted to club the murder of Karkare along with the 26/11 so that the blame for the murder would go to Pakistani terrorists.

The author reveals that even top BJP leaders like L.K. Advani and Narendra Modi were not aware of the Brahminist conspiracy. This shows the Brahminists have no confidence in these two non-Brahmin leaders and even the Shiv Sena whose chief Bal Thackeray was called “a danger to Hindu community”.

Abhinav Bharat becomes hero

As soon as Karkare was got rid of by the Brahminists in IB, it managed to quickly appoint a top Brahmin, K.P. Raghuvanshi, IPS, to succeed him. The new ATS chief completely changed all the records and painted the Abhinav Bharat Brahminical terrorists involved in many murder cases, in glowing colours. Soon all the Malegaon accused in jail were released. They are now free to pursue their Hindu Rashtra-building mission.

Lt. Col. Purohit, heading the Malegaon bombing and other murders, is being hailed as a great patriot who sacrificed his life to protect India from Pakistan’s terrorists. Abhinav Bharat, a super RSS outfit with close connection to zionist Israel, has already resumed its “patriotic activities” with the support of the IB to rebuild the Brahminist Rashtra.The book is a fantastic documentary proof that defends all that we have so far said in Dalit Voice on this 2% micro-minority terrorist forces holding the country to ransom.

DV congratulates the author Mushrif, for his painstaking study, his bravery in exposing the IB — that too being a Muslim.

DV has proved right in all its report on the 26/11.

************************

“National” media gagged

OUR CORRESPONDENT

Bangalore: Representatives of all the national print and electronic media descended on the house of S.M. Mushriff, retd. IG of police Maharashtra, at Pune on Oct.28 as soon as they heard about the release of his sensational book, Who Killed Karkare? They spent almost the whole day interviewing him.

But nothing came out either on the TV or the “national” toilet papers the next day — because there was a gag order from their bosses. What transpired is not known but media sources in Pune and Bombay said the Intelligence Bureau threatened them in the name of “national security” — once again confirming our charge that the entire Indian media and our government machinery are controlled by the mere 2% Brahminical rulers.

It is these people who always harp on “freedom of press”. What they mean by this is they need the “freedom” to vilify if not eliminate the Bahujan forces fighting for human rights.

************************

WHO KILLED KARKARE?

(The real face of terrorism in India)

S.M. Mushrif, former IG, Police, Maharashtra

For the first time, it probes deep into the “Islamic terrorism” in India. Of particular interest is the book’s detailed study of the 26/11 attack on Bombay during which Maharashtra ATS cheif Hemant Karkare was killed.

2009 pp.320 Rs. 300 (US$25)

Pharos Media Ltd.,
D-84, Abul Fazal Enclave-I, Jamia Nagar, New Delhi - 110 025

Email: info@pharosmedia.com

Same shit, different country.

UPDATE: Lots more about Gilani at aangirfan.

Remember how before 9/11 somebody made a killing on stock puts but then never claimed the money? Nah, that wouldn’t look good.

Well, similarly, nobody has claimed the bodies of the Mumbai attackers.

Mumbai/New Delhi: Almost a year after they were killed during the terrible assault on Mumbai last November, the bodies of the nine terrorists continue to remain in Mumbai’s J.J. Hospital morgue. There are no claimants and the authorities are clueless on what to do with them.

They continue to remain in a room sealed with round-the-clock security and where the temperature is set at four degrees Celsius to prevent any decomposition.

The 10 gunmen killed over 170 people in a series of coordinated attacks that began Nov 26 last year. Mohammed Ajmal Amir alias Kasab, currently undergoing trial, was the only one captured alive after the strikes that targeted two luxury hotels, the city’s main train station, a hospital and a Jewish centre.

Nobody wants these bodies. Not the Muslims in India:

The Muslim Council has flatly refused to allow the burial of the bodies of the slain terrorists in the Marine Lines Bada Qabrastan (cemetery). The council said it also sent a message to all cemeteries in India that none of the bodies should be buried on Indian soil.

The influential Muslim Jama Masjid Trust, which runs the 7.5-acre Bada Qabrastan graveyard, said it would not bury the gunmen because they were not true followers of Islam.

Some outfits had even suggested soon after the attack that the terrorists’ bodies be dumped outside the premises of the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi or thrown into the Arabian Sea.

Pakistan doesn’t want them:

“We had informed the Pakistan government about the bodies. However, there has been no response from them so far,” Nikam told IANS.
…Joint Commissioner of Police Rakesh Maria said: “We had sent evidence to Pakistan to claim the bodies of the terrorists with their Pakistani addresses. We have sent another reminder last month but are yet to receive any correspondence from them.”

The Pakistan High Commission on its part washed its hands off the entire affair.

“They are not our friends, they are not followers of Islam. We have nothing to with them at all. Why ask us?” said a senior official.

The FBI doesn’t want them:

So far, apart from the investigators from Mumbai Police, state and central agencies, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) representatives have been the only ones permitted to view the bodies.

Yeah, I’m not sure either why the FBI is involved there, but they claimed to have jurisdiction, and there are more curiosities like that here, but…anyway, the bodies just remain in the morgue:

Shortly after the attackers were gunned down, their bodies were brought to the hospital where a team of doctors performed autopsies and filed post-mortem reports with police.

Thereafter, the bodies were embalmed and shifted to the room where they lie.

According to hospital staff, the bodies are still in “perfect condition, recognisable and identifiable”. But the big question is how long will the bodies continue to remain in the morgue? A decision will have to be taken sooner or later.

I found this over at There Are No Sunglasses, but the original story is from msn. That means it is fit for public consumption, which means it advances a sanctioned narrative.

Let’s recall that the approved narrative claimed the terrorists were highly sophisticated Islamic extremists from Pakistan.

Now let’s review some of the early details. The terrorists were very young, and they targeted British and Americans guests as well as the Chabad Lubavitch headquarters, portrayed as harmless Jewish scholars. They killed mostly bystanders. The situation quickly became very confusing. Experts suspected Al Qaeda.

Les Blough at Axis of Logic unpacked it quickly:

Motivation: The only difference between the factors used by the capitalist media and ours is motivation. Regarding motivation, CNN states “they (Deccan Mujahideen) want to create as much damage and attention to themselves as possible”. CIA/Mossad are masters at destruction, but the last thing they want is bringing attention to themselves. Motivation for the U.S. to take it’s war to Pakistan fits perfectly with these attacks. As a matter of fact, Barack Obama and Joe Biden already declared their intention to take the war to Pakistan and stated with certainty that Obama’s “mettle would be tested” by a major international “incident” in the near future. If the perpetrators want to draw attention to themselves, their method (i.e. killing civilians), simply does not make sense unless one buys the Bush regime’s religion-based simplism that they are simply “evil”. Militant’s fighting for causes such as independence or national sovereignty want least of all, international negative attention or popular hatred. The only thing missing from the corporate media explanation is George W. Bush’s idiotic claim that “the terrorists are jealous of our freedoms”. Using this the corporate media’s methodology, it is entirely reasonable and just as easy to implicate the CIA and Mossad.

Then Qasab/Kasab, the tenth one captured alive and caught on camera, became a little problematic because he was “too fat to be a Jedi,” to quote Yoda. Plus he had the wrong haircut.

From Wayne Madsen:

According to PTI, one LET terrorist captured by India, Ajmal Qasab, said he and his fellow terrorists sailed from Karachi and entered Mumbai’s port area with the help of Ibrahim’s agents who run several customs facilities in Mumbai. However, there are some questions being raised about Qasab and his claims. The so-called security camera shot of Qasab, who is being billed by the media as the “lone surviving gunman,” at Chatrapathi Sivaji train terminal in Mumbai, appears fake. The angle is too narrow for a train station which would have a wider angle and be shot from higher up than the photo being shopped by the Indian police. However, according to Asian intelligence sources, Qasab may have been trained by Hindu militants and was rushed to the scene of the attack for a photo opportunity hastily arranged by the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) propaganda team. One Asian intelligence source who has spent a great deal of time in Pakistan reports that he has “never seen a haircut like his [Qasab’s] in Pakistan or on either side of Line of Control in Kashmir.” He also pointed out that Qasab is a bit overweight for an average “mujad” who slim down in training by exercising and eating a sparse diet of lentils and flat bread.

Hmm. That’s not what it says here:

The heavily built men, who had undergone training at a special marine camp established by the Lashkar-e-Taibat (LeT) terrorist group in Pakistan, had also used steroids to build a tougher physique….”These men were all toned, suggesting they had been doing some heavy training for the attacks. This explains why they managed to battle the commandos for over 50 hours with no food or sleep.”

…The 10 men who attacked prominent Mumbai landmarks were able to hold off hundreds of India’s best trained special forces by mounting sophisticated ambushes, maintaining a constant, steady rate of return fire and a superior knowledge of the layout of the buildings seized.

The gunman captured during the attacks on Mumbai has told police he underwent months of commando-style training in an Islamist militant camp in Pakistan.

Or maybe he just came from somewhere else entirely. Nobody has ever heard of him in the village where he supposedly came from.

So. Who could they really be?

Nobody wants to claim the bodies. Just like after 9/11, it wouldn’t look good. And the last thing the perpetrators want is to bring attention to themselves.

In addition, allegedly the bodies are *not* in “perfect condition, recognizable and identifiable.”

Rediff.com has interviewed the doctors who conducted the post-mortems on the dead hostages and terrorists, and it is their expert opinion that a battle of attrition took place over three days at the Oberoi and Taj hotels. The mutilation of the bodies was unlike anything they had seen in their careers in forensics.

For one, the bodies of the victims bore horrible signs of torture. Now this is understandable if the victims are being tormented by half-human beasts, but it seems strange that two terrorists could simultaneously fight and keep Indian commandos at bay for 62 hours, and also have the time to torture their victims. Yet the doctors were emphatic that:

“It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood.”

To my mind, it seems apparent that the terrorists who kept the NSG commandos engaged and those who tortured and killed the hotel staff and guests were two separate groups.

This suspicion is intensified by the startling revelation that the terrorists also did not meet a clean death. Doctors who conducted the post-mortem said the bodies of the terrorists – especially their faces - were beyond recognition. The security forces identified the bodies as those of terrorists [on TV they said it was because of the presence of weaponry near the bodies].

One terrorist was shot through either eye (i.e., both eyes!!!). As the NSG commandos never got to such close range with the terrorists, and nobody commits suicide by shooting both his own eyes, it follows that the killers were somebody else. Since none of the hotel guests could have the kind of weaponry used in the conflict, this suggests the presence of a mysterious third party, making the terrorists the victims of a classic double-cross – the stuff of spy thrillers. Actually, it reminds one of the convenient murder of the alleged killer of President John F. Kennedy.

Hence it would be entirely in order to closely interrogate each and every guest, especially the foreign guests, before allowing them to leave the country. Without false emotionalism, we should also fingerprint them for the future; who knows what Interpol cooperation may throw up.

Top Russian counter-terrorism expert, Vladimir Klyukin, an Afghan war veteran, opines that the Mumbai attackers were not “ordinary terrorists” and were probably trained by the special operations forces set up in Pakistan by US intelligence prior to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. In his view, the nature of the Mumbai events suggests the signature of the ‘Green Flag’ special operations forces created by the Americans in Pakistan, just a year before the Soviet withdrawal.

Guerrilla operations of the Mumbai kind require at least two-three years of preparatory work with experienced instructors. Raw trainees cannot hold four huge complexes in a city to ransom for so long. The Russian Interfax news agency reported the former KGB veteran as surmising the involvement of at least 50 terrorists, given the geography and sheer scale of the attacks. This seems like a legitimate estimation.

What is more, the only way 9 coordinated attacks can occur simultaneously is by using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) or live maps for communication and control. These are not normally owned by private parties. Initial investigations also suggested that as many as seven terrorists included mostly British-born Pakistanis, and one does hope that these leads are not covered up. The reports also suggested some gunmen were captured, but later media reports highlighted that only one terrorists was caught alive at the railway station. So there is a lot of confusion here that needs to be cleared up.

Indeed. Go over and read the whole thing.

And as for mutilating the faces beyond recognition…what does that mean? Probably they peeled the skin off, which I’ve read is a CIA calling-card going way back. So nobody wants to be incriminated by claiming the bodies, and the faces have allegedly been mutilated beyond recognition so now nobody *has* to claim the bodies. How convenient is that?