Special Reports
US intelligence ties to Mumbai 7/11
By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor


Jul 13, 2006, 00:45

On July 11, eight bombs exploded aboard commuter trains in Mumbai, killing 190 people. No group has come forward claiming responsibility. But according to mainstream coverage, such as the yesterday's report in the San Francisco Chronicle by Anna Badkhen, the prime suspects are �militant Islamic groups with ties to Pakistan."

What the mainstream press fails to report is the direct connection between the terrorist groups they name, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) -- a virtual branch of the American CIA. This in turn leads back to the same (alleged �al-Qaeda�) apparatus also responsible for the Bush administration�s 9/11 and other post-9/11 terror events.

Saeed Omar Shiekh and the ISI

The San Francisco Chronicle report, perhaps unwittingly, provides a damning trail directly back to possible covert Anglo-American involvement.

It quotes the Times of India, which cites Indian intelligence sources saying that two radical Muslim groups are behind the attacks, �one of them based in Pakistan, which has fought two wars with India over Kashmir. That group, the newspaper reported is the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, or Army of the Pure . . . The other group . . . is the Students Islamic Movement of India, which has been in a loose alliance with Lashkar-e-Toiba.�

The Chronicle report also offers this: �In Washington, a US official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity pointed to another group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, or Army of Mohammed, which is also affiliated with al-Qaeda, according to the Bush administration. Targeting trains at rush hour traffic is a tactic Jaish-e-Mohammed favors, the official said.

�The US government has designated Jaish-e-Mohammed a terrorist organization. One of its members, Shiekh Omar Sayed, has been sentenced to death for the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.�

Michel Chossudovsky has exposed this network, including the two groups named. Through the ISI, a branch of the CIA, US-allied Pakistan has promoted secessionist movements in India for decades. The ISI has been instrumental in the creation and ongoing guidance of the militant Islamic groups, including �al-Qaeda� terror cells.

From Chossudovsky�s groundbreaking book, America�s �War on Terrorism� [my emphasis in italics-LC]:

�The December 2001 terrorist attacks on the Indian parliament -- which contributed to pushing India and Pakistan to the brink of war -- were conducted by two Pakistan-based rebel groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Mohammed), both of which are covertly supported by Pakistan�s ISI. The timely attack on the Indian parliament, followed by the ethnic riots in Gujarat in early 2002, were the culmination of a process initiated in the 1980s, financed by drug money and abetted by Pakistan�s military intelligence.

"Needless to say, these ISI-supported terrorist attacks serve the geopolitical interests of the US. They not only contribute to weakening and fracturing the Indian Union, they also create conditions which favor the outbreak of a regional war between Pakistan and India.�

Attributing the incident to a Saeed Omar Shiekh-affiliated group also brings us full circle to the original 9/11 �al-Qaeda� network, which, in turn has been exposed as a US military intelligence apparatus.

Here is Michael C. Ruppert, from his book Crossing the Rubicon, on Omar Saeed Shiekh [my emphasis in italics-LC]:

�He is variously known also by the names of Ahmad Umar Shiek, Ahmad Omar Saeed Shiekh, and Umar Shiekh. He was raised and educated in London, and by whatever name he is known, it has been acknowledged that he was an ISI agent. When the Times of India revealed that by examining his cell phone records (obtained through Indian intelligence services) they could prove that he was the leg man who had wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta in Florida just days before the [9/11] attacks, they did not know that he was going to be arrested and convicted for the murder of [Daniel] Pearl. It was the cell phone records, among other things, that tied Shiekh directly to the ISI. And before this link to the ISI Chief General Mahmoud Ahmad became known and corroborated by major US papers, the American press had been setting him up as the number one al-Qaeda bag man.

�The ISI connection changed all that and became a liability for the US government.�

Finally, as Ruppert noted, �with so much damning evidence stacking up to suggest that the CIA had actually helped to finance the 9/11 attacks, there was nothing left for the mainstream press to do but engage in a game of confusion.�

This game of confusion was analyzed by Chaim Kupferberg�s in �9/11 and the Smoking Gun that Turned on its Tracker� (Part One and Part Two), another analysis that leaves no doubt about US/Bush administration involvement behind 9/11, and CIA connections to �al-Qaeda."

Bottom line: if the Mumbai attacks can be attributed to the ISI, a branch of the CIA, and the same �al-Qaeda� terror groups tied to US military intelligence groups working (either knowingly or guided) by the Bush administration�s intelligence agencies, what purpose did it serve US interests?

How does the US benefit from a destabilization of India?

A breakout of war between Pakistan and India favors US geostrategy in a number of ways. The possibilities will undoubtedly be analyzed, in coming weeks and months.

Broadly, the collapse of the Indio-Pak peace process opens the political doors for new US military interventions on the Eurasian subcontinent, and a restrengthening of the US presence on the Eurasian corridor, (which has, in recent months, been weakened by perceived failure of the Bush administration�s Iraq operation).

The other geopolitical �games� that benefit from violence in India include the setup towards any military action in Iran, revived operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the continuing superpower chess games with China and Russia. The overriding long-term imperative for all nations, of course, is energy.

As Ruppert notes in Crossing the Rubicon:

�If energy demand in China, India and Indonesia is allowed to grow as much as analysts say it will, then these three countries may well crowd the rest of the world out of the energy market . . . It is plain that growing energy demands will bring China, India and Indonesia into conflict with the developed world. The United States in particular, as the top world consumer of oil, will likely either have to curb consumption to make room for other countries or will have to find some way to curb demands of the emerging energy consumers. Moreover, competition for diminishing oil resources could threaten the US dollar hegemony over world oil transactions.�

According to Ruppert, the US attitude on India and energy is mixed. �Being so energy-poor, India may have no choice but to take what they can get," from Pakistan (which, prior to recent violence, was on course to provide India with access to a proposed Central Asian gas pipeline). At the same time, �it is foreseeable that India . . . may be left to starve, with much of the third world. Or it is possible that a nuclear exchange and/or a bloody war could be spurred on between India and Pakistan strictly for the purpose of population reduction. Such designs are despicable, but not out of the range of possibilities for starving nations.�

Finally, there is also the perennial propaganda imperative on the part of the Bush administration, and its many �allies in the war on terrorism." All perceived dips in mass public perception of the �war on terrorism� have triggered real as well as manufactured-for-media terror events. The Indian government, not surprisingly, is �vowing to battle terrorism," and issuing statements that repeat time-honored anti-terrorist rhetoric. And another shell-shocked populace is �reeling."

A final sickening reality is that Anglo-American-Israeli �war on terror� aggression has (by design as well as unintentionally) fomented and unleashed real terrorism and �blowback� that can no longer be controlled.