US DESTINY Hits India as Mumbai is Attacked Once again. War against Terrorism and Strategic Re alliance Opens the Doors of US Intervention as well as

US DESTINY Hits India as Mumbai is Attacked Once again. War against Terrorism and Strategic Re alliance Opens the Doors of US Intervention as well as DISINTEGRATION Soviet Style. The ENCOUNTER Wipes out Malegaon Investigation ATS Team.

Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 112

Palash Biswas


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WELT ONLINE
Militants who attacked Mumbai came from Pakistan: army official
AFP - 28 minutes ago
MUMBAI (AFP) - Militants who staged multiple attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai, killing at least 125 people and injuring hundreds more, came from Pakistan, a senior military official said Thursday.
Yossi Melman / Is al-Qaida behind the Mumbai terror attacks? Ha'aretz
Former UN Ambassador Bolton on Terror Attacks in India FOXNews
International Herald Tribune - Bloomberg - Channel News Asia - Wall Street Journal
all 334 news articles »





BBC News
Terrorist gunmen holed up in Mumbai hotels
guardian.co.uk - 24 minutes ago
About 10 to 12 gunmen remain holed up inside two Mumbai hotels and a Jewish centre, a top Indian general said today. Major General RK Huda told New Delhi Television that the rest of the gunmen appeared to have been killed or captured.
Terrified Americans, Europeans describe Mumbai chaos CNN
Indian troops raid hotels to free hostages The Associated Press
AFP - BBC News - Voice of America - Times Online
all 5,190 news articles »



Sydney Morning Herald
Britain: India attack had some al-Qaida hallmarks
The Associated Press - 1 hour ago
LONDON (AP) - Spy agencies around the world had little warning of the terrorist attack in Mumbai, which bore some al-Qaida hallmarks but appears unlikely to be linked to the group's core leadership, global intelligence officials said Thursday.
World recoils in horror at Mumbai attacks AFP
Bombay flights continue despite travel ban Times Online
Telegraph.co.uk - TIME - Ynetnews - Wall Street Journal
all 379 news articles »




Calgary Herald
Mumbai Attacks Draw Worldwide Condemnation
Voice of America - 1 hour ago
By Tom Rivers People around the world are expressing shock and revulsion at the deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai. With world reaction, Tom Rivers in London has this report for VOA.
Reaction to Mumbai attacks BBC News
Bush offers condolences, assistance in call to Indian PM AFP
Xinhua - Bloomberg - Reuters India - Hindu
all 384 news articles »




Mumbai attacks: Who are the terrorists?
Telegraph.co.uk - all 341 news articles »
Telegraph.co.uk - 2 hours ago
The identity of the terrorists behind the Mumbai (formerly Bombay) atrocities in India remain unconfirmed officially. But experts have agreed that they appeared to combine local grievances and international inspiration.
Sophisticated attacks, but Qaeda link disputed International Herald Tribune
Yossi Melman / Is al-Qaida behind the Mumbai terror attacks? Ha'aretz
Channel News Asia - Reuters UK - Bloomberg - Radio Netherlands
all 341 news articles »


TVNZ
India's security forces lack ability to stop terror attacks, say ...
Channel News Asia - 53 minutes ago
By Channel NewsAsia's Smita Prakash | Posted: 28 November 2008 0054 hrs NEW DELHI: The latest attack in Mumbai is the worst to hit India since 2006 when several bombs ripped through rush hour trains in the city.
Experts, western media blame Indian Mujahideen Sify
India Attacks Indicate Al-Qaeda Link, Experts Say (Update1) Bloomberg
Hindu Business Line - Economist - Atlantic Online - Times of India
all 341 news articles »
Terrorist gunmen holed up in Mumbai hotels
guardian.co.uk - 22 minutes ago
About 10 to 12 gunmen remain holed up inside two Mumbai hotels and a Jewish centre, a top Indian general said today. Major General RK Huda told New Delhi Television that the rest of the gunmen appeared to have been killed or captured.
Commandos battle Islamist gunmen in Mumbai, over 125 dead AFP
Indian special forces battle terrorists in bid to rescue Bombay ... Times Online
Economist - BBC News - Telegraph.co.uk - The Associated Press
all 5,763 news articles »



Is coastline the new route for terrorist?
Economic Times - 2 hours ago - NEW DELHI: The Mumbai mayhem is arguably the nation's first brush with ma-rine jihadis. With the Centre confirming ...
Press Trust of India - Sify - Times of India
all 105 news articles » ?????? ??? »


Family in Israel prays for relatives held hostage at Nariman House
Times of India - 6 hours ago - 27 Nov 2008, 1622 hrs IST, PTI JERUSALEM: Anxiously waiting to hear about the well-being of their dear ones taken ...
Jerusalem Post - BBC News - International Herald Tribune
all 343 news articles »

Mumbai Under Seige: How the events unfolded

CNN-IBN
The attacks begin at about 9.30 pm with firing at Cafe Leopold, a popular restaurant in the Colaba area of South Mumbai. This is a place frequented by foreigners.



Shortly after, at least two men armed with AK-47s open fire in the passenger hall of CST railway station. They also lob grenades. At least 30 people are injured. Commandos are rushed to the station.



Meanwhile, at least four to five people are killed at Cama hospital, situated close to CST. Some patients are taken hostage.



A major gun battle also breaks out near the Metro cinema, just down the road. Terrorists hijack a police van and fire indiscriminately, injuring several people.



Several hotels also come under attack. Armed men enter the Taj Mahal Hotel and take hostages. A series of loud explosions is heard. Three Members of Parliament and at least 100 tourists are stranded inside. The Anti Terrorism Squad enters the hotel to flush out terrorists. Eventually, the hotel goes up in flames.



Blasts at the Oberoi hotel (now called the Trident) at Nariman point. Several people are taken hostage, and some parts of the hotel catch fire. The army is called in to flush out the militants.



Maharasthra ATS Chief Hemant Karkare is shot dead during the encounter outside the Taj Hotel. IPS officer Ashok Kamte is killed in the gunbattle at Metro Cinema. Encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar is also gunned down.



Reports also of an attack at the Marriott hotel in Juhu.



A blast is also reported in a taxi under a flyover in suburban Vile Parle. Another bomb goes off in a taxi in Mazegaon dockyard road.



Two terrorists are gunned down by police in Girgaum while they were on the run in a Skoda vehicle.



A little known outfit the 'Deccan Mujahideen' has claimed responsibility for the attacks.



All schools and colleges in the city are to be shut on Thursday.


Published on Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 18:14 in Nation section
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/mumbai-under-seige-how-the-events-unfolded/79196-3.html

Globalization ( barry.mov ) The War On Terror
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The Globalization
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Hidden Face of Globalization
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Globalization: What Does It Really Mean?
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What Is Globalization? - Noam Chomsky
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Noam Chomsky - America is not a Democracy
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=LmJv_wf91W8


Noam Chomsky On Corporate Propaganda
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=a4K2uBI61z4




The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News

http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=KYlyb1Bx9Ic


9/11: BUSH STUMBLES OVER HIS 9/11 LIES AT A PRESS CONFERENCE
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=b_SDGb-TJcU


Bush Accidentally Admits Real Iraq War Plan
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=Soc7S-pQZ6M


Inside the Oberoi
(01:44) From the Scene
Nov 26 - British lawyer Mark Abell, who is locked in his room at the Oberoi hotel in Mumbai, speaks to Reuters.


Mumbai hotels under siege
(01:27) Report
Nov 27 - Gunfire rang out Thursday as Indian commandos and police laid siege to gunmen holding foreigners in two luxury hotels, after attacks in Mumbai left scores dead.


Dan Sloan reports.


Huge flames at Mumbai hotel
(00:50) Rough Cut
Nov 27 - Huge flames are seen from an upper floor of Mumbai's Trident-Oberoi Hotel as commandos battle militants.

These pictures were broadcast live on Indian tv on Thursday evening local time (Nov 27, 2008) as there appeared to be a fresh bout of fighting between Indian commandos and Islamist militants at the Trident-Oberoi Hotel, where scores of people have been trapped and some taken hostage.

Commandos earlier freed hostages from the Taj Hotel and have also gathered outside a Jewish centre where militants are thought to be holding a rabbi.

More than 100 people have been killed in a series of assaults in India's financial capital which began on Wednesday.



On-scene report from Mumbai
(01:36) Report
Nov 26 - Reuters' Greg Beitchman reports from the scene in Mumbai after at least 80 people were killed and hundreds of others wounded in near-simultaneous attacks that apparently targeted tourists.

Shootings and explosions occurred at around eight places in southern Mumbai, including two hotels where television


Shivraj Patil reacts on attacks
(02:09) Report
Nov. 27 - Home Minister Shivraj Patil reacts to news of multiple attacks in Mumbai that killed scores of people.

An ANI Report.


Mumbai attacked, tourists targeted
(01:11) Report
Nov 26 - Shootings and explosions that apparently targeted tourists occurred in at least eight spots in southern Mumbai, killing at least 80 people and wounding hundreds.

In an email to news organizations, a little-known group called the Deccan Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Katharine Jackson reports.


Commandos battle militants in Mumbai
(01:00) Report
Nov.27 - Commandos exchanged fresh fire with suspected Islamist militants inside Mumbai's Taj Hotel and at the nearby Trident-Oberoi, where scores of people were trapped and some taken hostage.


Paul Chapman, Reuters


Militant complains of army abuses in Kashmir 6:04pm IST
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A militant holed up in a Jewish centre in Mumbai phoned an television channel on Thursday to offer talks with the government for the release of hostages, but also to complain about abuses in Kashmir

Mumbai attacks "will not deter British business" 8:42pm IST
LONDON, Nov 27 (Reuters) - The wave of attacks on India's financial capital Mumbai has knocked confidence among British investors but businesses will not be deterred long-term, the head of the body promoting bilateral trade said on Thursday.


Home Minister should bear full responsibility: Left
27 Nov 2008, 1654 hrs IST, ET Bureau

NEW DELHI: The Left, which has been quite vocal against "Hindu terror", on Thursday pulled its punches over the Mumbai attack and restricted
it-self into demanding an "assurance from the government" that it was making efforts to tackle terror. The Left's muted response is not unexpected as its friends in the liberal side have already started humming the "resilient Mumbai theme" af-ter the jehadis outraged Mumbai.

The Batla House regulars and cop bashers in the Left have also came upfront to play homage to valiant officers who laid down their lives. "Given the recurring and widespread pattern of terrorist attacks oc-curring in the country, the Central Government has to assure the people that concerted efforts are being made to tackle the problem," the CPM politbureau said in a statement here.

It said the killing of ATS chief Hemant Karkare was particularly grievous. The CPM, which had been critical of the government and intelligence agencies during earlier terror attacks, said the attacks targeting a rail-way station, hotels and other places by groups of heavily armed men accompanied by explosions bore the "hallmark" of a carefully planned terrorist strike.

"The immediate need is for the people to face this grim situation with fortitude and foil any sectarian attempts to exploit the situation. The entire country expresses its solidarity with the people of Mumbai in this difficult situation," it said. The CPM has been facing "soft on terror" charges in its own back-yards.

The Congress-led UDF has been saying that the government led by the CPM did not do anything to prevent the "export" of terrorists from Kerala. Two towns in Kerala -- Vagamon and Beenanipuram -- hosted two training camps of local jehadi outfit Simi. The investiga-tions by central and state agencies have found that the Simi cadre trained in these camps were behind the attacks in Delhi and Gujarat.

The CPM has been enthusiastically participating in "victimhood" meetings in Kerala. Its education minister MA Baby has recently par-ticipated in a meeting to facilitate People's Democratic Party (PDP) leader Abdul Naseer Madani. The LDF has been denying reports of widespread extremist activities in the state.

State police intelligence had recently made a breakthrough into alleged links of Keralites with Kashmiri militants. Meanwhile, the CPI said it was intriguing that such a well-planned attack in Mumbai escaped our intelligence agencies. "The home minis-ter should bear full responsibility for it," CPI's Gurudas Dasgupta said
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Home_Minister_should_bear_full_responsibility_Left/articleshow/3765672.cms

Political will required to fight terror: Modi writes to PM


27 Nov 2008, 1631 hrs IST, PTI
AHMEDABAD: Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi today wrote a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying political will and national resolve
were required to root out terrorism, a day after Mumbai was rocked by terror attacks that have left around 100 dead.

"There is a need to exhibit political will and national resolve to fight against terrorists who have put the internal security of the country in jeopardy," he said in the letter.
"The time is ripe to chalk out a coordinated strategy to maintain internal security by cooperation between all Central and state agencies," he said.

"I request the Prime Minister to call a meeting of all the Chief Ministers to firm up a coordinated strategy to root out terrorism from the country," he further said. Referring to the Mumbai strikes, Modi said this is for the first time that sea route has been used by terrorists.

"The terrorists are targeting our economic establishments which is a proxy war unleashed by our enemies." Modi requested the Prime Minister to also call a separate meeting of western coastal states, especially those near Pakistan, with Indian Navy and Coast Guard to devise a strategy to counter terror coming from the sea.

The Gujarat CM, in the letter, has described the Mumbai strikes as "an attack on the faith of people of India".
PTI

India's Manmohan Singh vows to track down those behind the Mumbai attacks that have left at least 101 dead, as operations continue to free remaining hostages! Blaming elements outside the country for the terror strikes in Mumbai, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday warned that India will not tolerate the use of territories of its neighbours for attacks !Mumbai terror attacks have cast a shadow over the composite INDO PAK dialogue process. And in spite of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's tough message, the UPA government is expected to face criticism for its Pakistan policy and failure to push Islamabad on the issue of terrorism. The joint anti-terror mechanism is yet to show any results and there has been no followup on any of the evidence that was shared with Pakistan on a series of serial blasts. In the last meeting of the joint anti terror mechanism, the two sides had discussed the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul where India suspects the role of the ISI. But Islamabad has continued to deny a Pakistan link and, sources said, the only concession so far is a promise to follow up on any evidence that India cares to share with Pakistan.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his address to the nation had said that India would take ``We will take up strongly with our neighbours that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if suitable measures are not taken by them.,'' he said.


Foreign tourists in Mumbai head home
(01:57) Report
Nov.27 - Foreign tourists return home after militant attacks in Mumbai killed at least 101 people.

The international community on Thursdayexpressed outrage over the terror strikes in Mumbai, with world leaders, joined by US President-elect Barack Obama, rallying behind India and offering support to fight the scourge and "root out" the terrorist networks.

The U.S., U.K., Russia, Pakistan, France and Japan described terrorism as a "grave and urgent threat" and underlined the need for a collective action to "root out and destroy terrorist networks."

U.S. President George W Bush called up Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to offer condolences and "support and assistance" to India as it works to investigate "these despicable acts" and provide relief to the victims.

Condemning the deadly attacks, Bush said the US will continue to stand with the people of India.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice also telephoned External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee to offer America's help in the investigations and other aspects.

Obama, who will assume the charge of U.S. President in January, said the attacks in Mumbai demonstrated "the grave and urgent threat" of terrorism and emphasised that the U.S. "must continue to strengthen our partnerships with India and nations around the world to root out and destroy terrorist networks."

I had been watching Live Telecast and Updates on Mumbai Attacks.India's worst terror attack in Mumbai began Wednesday night when militants attacked high profile landmarks, including the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, Oberoi Trident Hotel, Metro Theatre and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) railway station. At least 101 people, including a foreign tourist and four top police officers, were killed and over 250 injured. The crisis continued Thursday with terrorists holding people hostage in the two five-star hotels.

Nine foreigners have been killed and eleven others injured in multiple terror attacks here, hospital sources said on Thursday.

The dead included one Australian, one British and one Japanese who have been identified for their nationality while four persons' names have been identified without nationality, they said.

However, three others were yet to be identified, sources said.

I was seeing every update from BBC which contacted with the Foreign citizens stranded into Taz and Oberoy Hotels. Meanwile,In the wake of terror attacks in Mumbai, the US, Britain and Australia have advised its citizens to defer travel to India's commercial capital till further notice.


I also watched the Bangla news channels where an army Expert commented how the Entire ATS Team involved in Malegaon blast Investigation is dragged into the encounter and almost Wiped out including the head Hemant Karkare!The ATS believed it had cracked the September 29 Malegaon bomb blast case, and about a month ago arrested Hindu extremists in a breakthrough that shocked the nation and added a new twist to the entire discourse on terror and religion. But as the probe unravelled the alleged plot and the role of some Hindu leaders, the case got caught in the politics of terror and the ATS was at the centre of charges that it was being used as a tool to target the Sangh Parivar amid allegations of illegal detention and torture by some of the 11 arrested for the blast. The BJP, RSS and VHP leaders, among others from the Hindu nationalist brigade, accused the ATS of being on a witch-hunt, with some even demanding that ATS officers be subjected to a narco-analysis to establish their motives.

Thanks to INDIA TV, we could hear from two Terrorists involved in the Attack as they claimed to be! I and my Countrymen with bleeding Heart heard from Imran Babar, who identified himself as one of the terrorists involved in the terror strikes in Mumbai, called up India TV news channel Thursday and said they wanted to have talks with the government for exchange of the hostages. He spoke on drectly the Ideology of ZIHAD and was mentioning the Strategic Zionist alliance. The CLUE of the attack could be traced in his passionate exposure.

"We want to negotiate with the government. Only then will we let go the hostages," said Babar, who claimed to be from the Deccan Mujaheedin, a previously unknown group that has claimed responsibility.

Claiming to have worked as a medical representative in a multinational company, Babar said these attacks were to avenge the "torture and injustice" faced by Muslims in India.

"Do you know how many Muslims are killed in Kashmir by your armed forces? Give them their freedom, why are you creating such a mess there?" Babar, who said he was 25 years of age, told the news channel India TV.

"How much of injustice can we tolerate? How much can we sacrifice?" he said.

He, however, skirted the query as to which place he hails from.

Earlier in the day, another man calling himself a terrorist and identifying himself as Shahadullah, telephoned the news channel from Oberoi-Trident Hotel claiming that he was from the Indian city of Hyderabad. He spoke in Hindustani with what appeared to be a Pakistani accent. He told the channel that the attack had been carried out to avenge the 1992 razing of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya and the "persecution" of Muslims in India. He demanded the release of jailed Indian Mujahideen militants in exchange for tourists taken hostage at the Taj and Oberoi Trident hotels as well as Nariman House in the heart of the city. The man ended the telephonic conversation saying "Allah Hafiz".


As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh accused India's neighbours for the terror attack, Pakistan warned against jumping to conclusions and ``making insinuations against each other''. Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who is in the middle of a four-day visit to India, condemned the Mumbai shootings but warned against jumping to quick conclusions. ``Today you are victims. We are victims of terrorism on a daily basis. We must cooperate at this time instead of making insinuations against each other," Mr Qureshi was quoted as saying. "It's a very sad incident but lets not jump to conclusions and cut a sorry figure. Let's show maturity. We will cooperate, I can assure you," he added. The Zardari government has continued to say that it is also a victim of terrorism. Mr Qureishi, who offered to establish a hotline between the intelligence chiefs of the two countries for information sharing, referred to the Samjhauta blast. "The Samjhauta incident very clearly indicates that we have to be cautious. Our expressions and our insinuations have to be measured. Pakistan wants to cooperate. We have to face the common enemy in terrorism and it is a global challenge," he was quoted as saying.

Former prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh is No More. Raja of Manda is best known for playing the OBC Reservation Card. Coincidentally Fascist Hindutva Forces used the Age Old KAMANDAL against MANDAL. Which eventually demolished Babri Mosque. The Hindus left in Bangladesh faced the most violent reaection in this subcontinent as Taslima Nasreen described in her controversial novel LAJJA. Hindutva wave established a NDA Rule led and commanded by RSS just after Congress Government led by Narsimha Rao introduced Neo Liberalism and the Pandora`s Box of Liberation, Privatisation and globalisation was opened. Narsimha Rao was elected as PM as Congress could not do well in North India even after the sad demise of Rajiv Gandhi in a LITTE Bomb Blast.Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who cobbled a coalition of the Left and BJP to dethrone Rajiv Gandhi in the 1989 elections, played the reservation card a year later that irreversibly changed the course of Indian politics, bringing to the fore the power of backwards and Dalits in electoral politics. BJP withdrew support as Lalkrishna adwani, the much Hyped NDA Prime Minister in waiting was stopped and arrested by Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar. Charan Singh formed a minority government supported by rajiv Gandhi and his party. ultimately the support was withdrawn with a lame excuse of alleged spying of rajiv himself. The Myawati Phenomenon is solidly based on VP tenure as Prime Minister of India. he was the man who established the OBC people in Indian Polity and Society. In reaction, RSS played all out the Hindutva card. The Indigenous rising and emerging equation of ST, SC, OBC and Minrities pushed Indian Ruling Class to be part and parcel of the Post Modern galaxy MANUSMRITI APARTHEID Order led by United States of America.

Fall of VP Singh coincided with not only the introduction of Neoleberalism but it placed India firmly into the lap of Global Zionist White Hegemony led by USA. It was the Departure point when India dissassociated itself from the legacy of Nehru Gandhi pro Soviet Anti American Policy. Washington was proactive enough to plant Dr Manmohan singh as the Finance Minister of India who has eventually proved himself as the supreme slave of US War and weapon Economy.The initial investor reaction to the Mumbai attacks suggests they expect India's traditionally resilient markets to take a bigger hit from this turmoil than from previous episodes in the city's violent history.
With financial and commodity markets shut after gunmen killed 101 people, the only inkling of damage to sentiment came from a rise in India's risk premium on international credit markets and a drop in offshore Indian stock and rupee futures.


The central bank said it would continue auctions to keep cash flowing through interbank lending markets, which seized up after the global financial crisis destroyed Wall Street banks in September.


Al Quaeda already declared India a party in its Zihad as India allied with United states Of america in its War against Terrorism! Since then India is bleeding! Mumabi attack is only a solid EVIDENCE how well planned and coordinated may be the Terror strikes! United States of America is too eager to help India dealing Insurgency and terror. We must be aware of the Result. History teaches us the lesson very well wherever the West has interfered , Disintegration and Partition become quite MANDATORY. We have already suffered a HOLOCAUST sixty years back while India was divided. Then in 1971, Pakistan also disintegrated and at the time it was the strongest ally of united States of America. USA sent Seventh fleet to save Pakistan but bangladesh was liberated. Thus, there is no garrantee that alliance with USA may save a country.

The Ruling Hegemony in India did everything to plant the War Zone right into our Heart. It helps the US Weapon Industry and its Kickback agents with Swiss Bank Accounts. The Ruling Class made us an ally of United states of Ameriac and that is why we msut share the Destiny of USA. It has been proved in Global Meltdown. Now, it is the ULTIMATE TRUTH about our internal Security. That is why we are predestined to BLEED!


Close to 24 hours after the audacious terror attacks, security forces were on Thursday engaged in a grim battle to flush out terrorists holed up in two luxury hotels and a Jewish residential complex in Mumbai where more than 200 people including foreigners were trapped as hostages or used as human shields. The operations against terrorists is in its final stage and will be over soon, said Maharashtra DGP A N Roy.

Mumbai is no stranger to political violence and markets have usually regarded previous bombings and other attacks with a degree of nonchalance. Wednesday's attacks though will put an additional strain on nerves frayed by global financial turmoil and a tide of cash pouring out of Indian assets.

Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath said on Thursday the attacks on high profile targets in the country's commercial capital would not slow investment into an ecomomy already under strain!

"This does not have an economic component. It's an unfortunate event. These type of things have happened in New York and other major cities," Nath said.

The global downturn has already rattled Indian financial markets and a credit squeeze has prompted the government and central bank to take a series of measures to lift sagging growth.

The Reserve Bank expects the economy to expand by 7.5-8 per cent in the 2008-09 fiscal year, slowing from 9 per cent posted in the last three years.

India's capital market regulator said the country's two major stock exchanges would remain closed on Thursday.


Elite commandoes of the topline security forces from army, navy, NSG and Rapid Action Force were involved in the raging encounter with unspecified number of heavily-armed terrorists in Taj and Trident (Oberoi) hotels where throughout the day grenade explosions have set various floors on fire.

As dusk fell, there was expectation that the forces would intensify their assault to overwhelm the terrorists.

About 20 to 25 of them were believed to have come in three small inflatable boats, whose mother ship has been traced by Indian naval ships patrolling the Arabian Sea.

Defence Minister to hold talks with military top brass
With terrorists striking in Mumbai, Defence Minister A K Antony has convened a high-level meeting of the armed forces today to review the situation.

The meeting is likely to be attended by Chiefs of Staff Committee chairman Admiral Sureesh Mehta and Air Force chief Fali Homi Major, apart from top intelligence officers of the services, Defence Ministry sources told PTI here.

The top honchos of the Defence Ministry are likely to chalk out an anti-terror plan during the meeting, which would also review the operations being carried out by Army and Marine commandos in Mumbai.

Contingents of armed forces' strike troops have joined the National Security Guards (NSG) in the operations at the Oberoi and Taj hotels to flush the militants holed up there since last night.

Antony would also review the coastal security and intelligence gathering mechanism in the wake of reports that the attackers had sneaked in to Mumbai through the sea route, the sources said.

Taj Hotels GM's wife, children killed in terrorist attack
The wife and the two children of General Manager of Taj Hotels Karambir Kang were killed in the terrorist attack on the hotel. Confirming the news, a company spokesperson said while Kang is safe his wife and children were killed at the Taj Hotel, where the security forces were trying to release hostages held by terrorists since late Wednesday. It is learnt that they were killed in the fire that broke out in the hotel after the attack and their bodies were charred beyond recognition, according to hotel sources.

Mumbai attacks had some al-Qaeda hallmarks: Britain

Britain's spy agencies had little warning of the terrorist attack in Mumbai, which bore some al-Qaeda hallmarks but appears unlikely to be linked to the group's core leadership, officials said on Thursday.

Westerners in India's financial centre were targeted in the spectacular attack comprised of multiple, simultaneous assaults — a signature of past al-Qaeda actions including the Sept. 11 attacks. But the Indian attack was carried out by gunmen and not the suicide bombers frequently employed by al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

The group who claimed responsibility — Deccan Mujahideen — was unknown to security officials, a British security official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity surrounding the work. He said terror threats in India had been increasing but the scale of the attack on Wednesday was a surprise and there were no indications attacks would target Westerners.

"We have been actively monitoring plots in Britain and abroad and there was nothing to indicate something like this was about to happen," the official told the AP.

Britain is the former colonial power in India and Pakistan and closely monitors terrorist suspects in those countries. The majority of the nearly 2 million British Muslims are of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. More than 2,000 terror suspects are being monitored in the U.K. alone, with dozens more being watched in other countries, Britain's security services have said.

"It's too early to say definitively at this stage, but based on what we've seen so far this doesn't look like a core al-Qaeda attack," another British security official told the AP on condition of anonymity. "It certainly looks to have been inspired by Islamic extremist ideology."

Western security officials believe attacks organized, directed and funded specifically by al-Qaeda's core leadership along the Afghan/Pakistan border are not frequent. More common are incidents in which terrorists have either some limited contact with al-Qaeda leaders, or are inspired to carry out attacks by the ideology of Islamic extremism.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed "external forces" and the Indian navy said its forces were boarding a cargo vessel suspected of ties to the attacks.

Navy spokesman Capt. Manohar Nambiar said Thursday that the ship, the MV Alpha, had recently come to Mumbai from Karachi, Pakistan.

Pakistani officials in Britain said they were unaware of the plot. In September, a massive suicide truck bomb devastated the Marriott Hotel in the capital, Islamabad, killing at least 54 people, including three Americans and the Czech ambassador.

"This type of terrorism is spreading, through Pakistan and now India, but we were all surprised by such a large-scale attack like this," said Wajid Hassan, Pakistan's High Commissioner in London. "This is no coincidence that this type of attack happened so soon after the bombing of the Marriott Hotel. People from all countries are being paid to fight this al-Qaeda war. This is a war that goes beyond any nationality."

Few terrorism experts have heard of the Deccan Mujahadeen.


"Initially we saw violence in India imported from outside — with allegations of Pakistani government support — but now we are seeing new, homegrown groups," said Nigel Inkster, director of Transnational Threats at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"There is a possible link to al-Qaeda," he said. "Logically it would be easier for al-Qaeda to get things done in India than in the U.S. and Europe. Everyone's been expecting some type of pre-U.S. election or post-U.S. election spectacular, and there is some speculation that this is it."

Bush calls Singh to offer support
WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush called Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Thursday to express condolences and offer support after attacks in
Mumbai left more than 100 people dead, a White House spokeswoman said.

"President Bush spoke this morning by telephone with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to express condolences to the victims of the terror attacks in Mumbai, India, and solidarity with the people of India," White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in a statement.

"The president offered support and assistance to the government of India as it works to restore order, provide safety to its people and comfort to the victims and their families, and investigate these despicable acts," she said.


Mumbai:Nine foreign nationals killed in terror attacks in Mumbai! Kashmir solution must for peace in Afghanistan, says France! Militants armed with automatic weapons and grenades attacked luxury hotels, hospitals and a famous tourist cafe in India's commercial capital Mumbai late on Wednesday, killing at least 101 people.Witnesses say the attackers were young South Asian men speaking Hindi or Urdu, suggesting they are probably members of an Indian militant group rather than foreigners.

One German national has been confirmed killed and several injured in the coordinated attacks against luxury hotels and other targets in Mumbai, the foreign ministry said on Thursday.


No timeframe for Mumbai operation: Indian Army
MUMBAI: As terrorists continued to hold civilians hostage in Mumbai for the second day Thursday, the Indian Army said it had put its best men on the job to flush out the militants but refused to give a timeframe on when the operation would be over.



The attacks were claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen in an e-mail to news organisations. Deccan is an area of southern India. Analysts say that while it is not clear whether the claim is genuine, the attacks were most likely carried out by a group called the Indian Mujahideen. The name used in the claim of responsibility suggests the attackers could be members of a south Indian offshoot or cell of the Indian Mujahideen.

Nearly 16 hours after the first gunbattle broke out between security forces and terrorists in south Mumbai, Maharashtra Director General of Police A.N. Roy on Thursday said there were no hostages in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, and there were no talks with militants.

Till now five terrorists have been killed and nine suspected people have been arrested. The situation at the Taj hotel is under control. There is no hostage-like situation there," Roy told reporters.

"As of now there is no demand from militants. There are no talks with them. Either they will be arrested or killed," he added.

French nuclear physicist M George Vendryes and his wife, who were staying in Taj hotel in Mumbai, have been brought out safely from the terror-hit building, official sources said on Thursday. The 88-year-old scientist was in Mumbai to receive the Indian Nuclear Society's (INS) Eminent Scientist Award and was staying at the five-star hotel in south Mumbai, Department of Atomic Energy sources said.

The remainder of England's one-day cricket series against India was scrapped on Thursday following the terror attacks in Mumbai which also prompted the organisers of the USD six-million Champions League to postpone the high-profile Twenty20 event!



In all, 101 people including nine foreigners and about policemen have lost their lives while about 300 people were injured in the worst terror attacks seen in the country in which desperate men fired indiscriminately at people.

Targeting foreigners, particularly Americans and Britishers, the terrorists said to be five to seven in both the hotels held residents hostages.

While all the hostages in Taj hotel have been rescued, there are some people trapped in the rooms who are being used as human shields.

In Trident alone, about 200 people have been trapped -- 100 on the Trident side and 100 on the Oberoi side. While there were no official figures available about the number of people trapped or rescued, DGP A N Roy said all the hostages in Taj have been rescued but there could be people in their rooms.

Roy talked tough saying they would either kill or capture the terrorists alive.

There was also another scene of action in the Jewish complex Nariman House where four-five Israelis have been believed to have been held hostage by an equal number of terrorists.


Terrorists who have caused mayhem in the metropolis are not run-of-the-mill militants as believed earlier, but are "highly-trained and highly-motivated professionals".
This was the observation of the elite Marcos Naval Commandos which had the first confrontation with the terrorists at the city's landmark Taj Hotel.

"The terrorists are highly trained, motivated with where with all to mount a prolonged campaign," Vice-Admiral J S Bedi, Flag Officer Commanding, Western Naval Command said in Mumbai.

He said these observations were conveyed to him by his Marcos commandos.

In the operations, Marcos seized stun grenades, hand grenades and other sophisticated ammunitions and ATM cards, plus US dollars from the terrorists.

The terrorists were also found to be carrying huge loads of almonds, which can be used as food in long siege.


I belong to UTTARAKHAND. I have seen New delhi and Entire North India sleeping in peace in seventies while Bengal was troubled with Naxal Movement. I used to return home late in dark nights without any company, alone. The People in North India were habitual to sleep out side or on the roofs, in the fields in Summer. In the Indian capital, New delhi, Common People used to sleep under open sky on their Desi COT with Women and Children enmasses. Opration Blue Star changed the scenerio. We were never that safe. Indiscriminate firing was the ultimate terror. We came to know RDX. Whatever may be the political reason, the source of arms and ammunition had been the TALIBANS digging in Afganistan and fighting against USSR. The Talibans led by OSAM BIN LADEN was supported and funded by UNITED States of America. At that time every Indian Politician would quote CIA role behind every incident. CIA Agent was the most popular term used to abuse a politician at that time. Since neo Liberalism introduced, since Dr Manmohan Singh entered the Politics, no one ever names CIA. Indira gandhi had been more than adament to maintain Peace in indian Ocean. She alwaqys warned against Disintegration and Destablising forces. But, ironically, post modern Indian Rulers no matter what color orideology they boast of, embrace all those forces full heartedly.

Thus, any Terror Strike is not going to be a single Tragedy. It is a reality Serial full of terror and Blood of our own countrymen, sceduled to continue and feed the Money machine!

Mumbai attacks: A test for Indian markets

Reuters reports:

Mumbai The initial investor reaction to the Mumbai attacks suggests they expect India's traditionally resilient markets to take a bigger hit from this turmoil than from previous episodes in the city's violent history.
With financial and commodity markets shut after gunmen killed 101 people, the only inkling of damage to sentiment came from a rise in India's risk premium on international credit markets and a drop in offshore Indian stock and rupee futures.

The central bank said it would continue auctions to keep cash flowing through interbank lending markets, which seized up after the global financial crisis destroyed Wall Street banks in September.

Mumbai is no stranger to political violence and markets have usually regarded previous bombings and other attacks with a degree of nonchalance. Wednesday's attacks though will put an additional strain on nerves frayed by global financial turmoil and a tide of cash pouring out of Indian assets.

"Everyone is just hoping that it will be one of the short-lived episodes," said ING chief Asian economist Tim Condon.

"People have seen this before although this is on an order of magnitude worse than what we have seen. That makes the usual comfortable assumption less comfortable, this Pakistanisation of Indian financial markets," he said.

The capital markets regulator said the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange will be closed on Thursday as security forces battled militants who held hostages in two luxury Mumbai hotels.

Coming at a time when foreigners have been heavy sellers of Indian assets, the attacks raised fears of a steeper fall in the rupee and a further blow to market confidence.

"Clearly, it will be negative for the sentiment towards India at this point of time, the time when the world is already looking to be highly uncertain in term of its growth prospects," said Joseph Tan, chief Asian economist at Credit Suisse in Singapore.

"When the equity market actually opens, it could probably be opening down as opposed to the rest of Asia."

As traffic ground to a halt in south Mumbai, where the central bank and several financial institutions are located, it appeared the earliest indications of how deep those concerns run would be known only on Friday.

Trading in offshore rupee forwards was thin but suggested the rupee could drop 1.6 per cent within a month, more bearish than Wednesday's pricing of a 0.7 per cent depreciation.

The risk premium for top Indian lender State Bank of India rose. The state-owned bank is a proxy in the debt market for the government, which has no sovereign bonds outstanding.

Credit default swaps, which are insurance-like contracts, on the bank's five year bonds widened 20 basis points to 440 basis points after the attacks.

Indian stock index futures fell 4 per cent in Singapore trade at their weakest, pointing to a likely steep fall in domestic shares. On Wednesday, the 50-share NSE index gained 3.7 per cent. India's main 30-share BSE index ended up 3.8 per cent. The rupee ended trading at 49.48 per dollar.

"As the situation calms down, these attacks might be viewed as an isolated event," said Mumbai-based Amit Khurana, head of equities at the Indian unit of British broker Collins Stewart.

UNFORTUNATE TIMING

When suburban train bombings killed 180 people in Mumbai in 2006, the rupee barely blipped while the Bombay stock index fell 1.8 per cent but then rallied.

There have been four bombings prior to Wednesday's attack this year.

The stock index is already down 55 per cent this year -- Asia's fourth worst performer -- after having seen $13.5 billion of portfolio outflows from a market with a capitalisation of $266 billion.

The rupee figures among the weakest currencies in Asia this year alongside the Indonesian rupiah and Korean won, having dropped 20 per cent against the dollar owing to capital outflows and a withdrawal of foreign credit lines from riskier markets.

"This means that capital outflows will have a greater impact than they did in the past, though history suggests that any reaction to terrorist attacks in Mumbai will only be temporary," Nikhilesh Bhattacharya, an economist with Moody's Economy, said in a note.

Mark Matthews, chief Asian strategist at Merrill Lynch, said this was also the time analysts were downgrading their forecasts for Indian corporate earnings rather dramatically.

"That will continue to be a drag on the market because Indian analysts are behind the curve on earnings relative to the rest of Asia," Matthews said.

Slowing growth and uncertainty about upcoming general elections in 2009 would also weigh down the market, at least until March, he reckons. Merrill predicts the index price-earnings ratio will drop to 9.1 in 2009 from 10.1 now.

Currency analysts expect the rupee will weaken sharply when it opens for trading on Friday, but they also suspect any weakness will be knee-jerk and fleeting and that the central bank will jump to its defence as it always has in volatile spells.

"Such terrorist attacks do not have a lasting impact on the market -- I don't think it will have a lasting impact on India," said Credit Suisse's Tan.

Gunmen killed at least 101 people in a series of attacks in India's financial capital Mumbai and troops began moving into two five-star hotels on Thursday where Western hostages were being held, local television said. Gunfire and explosions were heard at the landmark Taj Mahal hotel and thick plumes of smoke rose from the building, witnesses said. There were also explosions at the Oberoi hotel and firing at a hospital where gunmen were surrounded.

"The terrorists are throwing grenades at us from the rooftop of the Taj and trying to stop us from moving in," Ashok Patil, a police inspector said.

Police said more than 250 people were wounded in the attacks which also targeted a railway station and the Cafe Leopold, perhaps the most famous restaurant and hang-out for tourists in the city.

An organisation calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen said it was behind attacks, television channels said. The previously little known group sent an email to news organisations claiming responsibility.

"I guess they were after foreigners, because they were asking for British or American passports," said Rakesh Patel, a British witness who lives in Hong Kong and was staying at the Taj Mahal hotel on business. "They had bombs."

"They came from the restaurant and took us up the stairs," he told a TV news channel, smoke stains all over his face. "Young boys, maybe 20 years old, 25 years old. They had two guns."

India has suffered a wave of bomb attacks in recent years.

The latest attack, apparently aimed at least partly at prosperous Western tourists, is bound to spook investors in one of Asia's largest and fastest-growing economies.

Hemant Karkare, the chief of the police anti-terrorist squad in Mumbai, was killed during the attacks, police said.

"We have shot dead four terrorists and managed to arrest nine suspected terrorists," PD Ghadge, a police officer at Mumbai's central control room, said.

Japan's Foreign Ministry said one of its nationals was killed in the Mumbai attacks and one injured.

TRAPPED HOTEL GUESTS

Mark Abell, a British lawyer, said he had locked himself inside his Oberoi hotel room after hearing two explosions.

Several hundred people had been evacuated from the Taj hotel, one witness said, but many more remained inside, some calling for help from the fifth floor. Firefighters broke windows to reach trapped guests.

"We came down the fire exit, but I think they took some more people, they are trying to get to the roof," one foreigner told local television. "I think about 15 people (have been taken hostage), about half of them are foreigners."

In Washington, the White House and US President-elect Barack Obama condemned the attacks, as did France, current President of the European Union, and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

A European official was among the wounded.

"My hotel is surrounded by police and there are gunmen inside," European lawmaker Ignasi Guardans told Spanish radio from the Taj. "We are in contact with some deputies inside the hotel, with one in a room and another hidden in the kitchen. There's another official hurt and in hospital."

Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil said there were around four or five attackers in each of the two hotels.

"They have attacked hotels, they have attacked the hospitals, they have attacked the railway station," he said.

KOREANS, EUROPEANS CAUGHT UP IN ATTACKS

A driver told Reuters at least 50 Koreans were stuck inside the Taj with their drivers waiting outside.

"We were just getting ready to pick them up, when we heard the first blast, police did not let us get past and they (the Koreans) are not answering the phones," Deepak Aswar, the driver said. Europeans were also caught up in the attacks.

"I was in the restaurant inside Oberoi and I saw this series of gunshots and death which I don't want to see again," a Spaniard who declined to give his name told Reuters.

"I crawled out into the kitchen and waited there, until I sensed it was all quiet and seemed over."

Maharashtra state police chief A.N. Roy said attackers had fired automatic weapons indiscriminately, and used grenades, adding that they were still holed up in some buildings.

Sourav Mishra, a Reuters reporter, was with friends at the Cafe Leopold when gunmen opened fire around 9:30 p.m. He was injured and is in St George's Hospital.

"I heard some gunshots around 9:30. I was with my friends. Something hit me. I ran away and fell on the road. Then somebody picked me up. I have injuries below my shoulder," Mishra said from a hospital bed he was sharing with three other people.

Another Reuters reporter saw a hospital ward full of injured people with bullet and shrapnel wounds. Many people were crying as the injured were brought in on trolleys.



Former PM V P Singh passes away

Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who cobbled a coalition of the Left and BJP to dethrone Rajiv Gandhi in the 1989 elections, played the reservation card a year later that irreversibly changed the course of Indian politics, bringing to the fore the power of backwards and Dalits in electoral politics.
The 77-year-old 'Raja of Manda', a sobriquet he earned because of his origins in the principality of Manda in Uttar Pradesh's Fathepur, entered politics in Allahabad during the Nehru era and soon made a name for his rectitude.

He earned the title of 'Mr Clean' despite occupying positions of power, including the Chief Ministership of Uttar Pradesh which he had resigned in the early 80s when his brother was killed by dacoits, and as Minister at the Centre.

Singh resigned as Defence Minister after he was shifted from Finance in 1987 at the height of his campaign against leading industrialists on the issue of tax evasion and later took on the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by quitting Congress on the issue of Bofors scandal.

Forming Jan Morcha, an amalgam of disgruntled Congressmen, he later became the pivot around which the opposition came together to dethrone Congress to give the first non-Congress coalition at the Centre, supported by the Left parties and the BJP from outside.

Singh, once considered very close to Rajiv Gandhi, quit his government in 1987 on the issue of corruption in public life.

After being expelled from Congress, he launched 'Jan Morcha', was elected to Lok Sabha from Allahabad and then became a rallying point for the National Front comprising Janata Dal, Telugu Desam, Asom Gana Parishad, DMK and Congress(S). The Jan Morcha was merged with the Janata Dal before the 1989 general elections.

In May 1996, after the defeat of Congress in the Lok Sabha elections, Singh was the guiding spirit behind the formation of the United Front and was the first choice for Prime Ministership.

But he declined the offer. After the government of H D Deve Gowda fell in April 1997, he again played an important role from his hospital bed along with the late Left veteran Harkishan Singh Surjeet in maintaining the UF unity and making Inder Kumar Gujral the Prime Minister.

Away from politics, Singh had always taken a keen interest in poetry and painting and had also held exhibitions of his artwork.

He has penned a number of poems and his first anthology of poems 'Ek Tukda Dharti, Ek Tukda Asman' was published some time back. Perhaps the greatest rallying point for 'anti- Congressism' in the country after Jaiprakash Narayan, Singh, however, took positions nearer to that of Congress in late years, particularly after BJP came to power at the Centre in 1998.

Born in Allahabad on June 25, 1931, Singh studied science with aspirations of becoming a nuclear scientist and came out with flying colours in the B.Sc. examinations in Ferguson College, Pune.

But he finally gave pursuing M.Sc. from Allahabad University and was lured into politics. He made his debut as a Congress legislator in 1969 winning the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections and remained a member of the House till 1971, before being elected for the first time to Lok Sabha.

Singh was inducted into Indira Gandhi's Council of Ministers as a Deputy Minister of Commerce. After that, there was no looking back for him.

In 1980 when Indira Gandhi returned to power, Singh was made Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. His two-year stint at the helm of India's largest state ended dramatically when he quit in the wake of the anti-dacoit operations launched by his government.

But soon he was made Commerce Minister in Gandhi's cabinet. As Finance Minister in Rajiv Gandhi's government, Singh gained popularity for ordering searches and raids against industrial houses, hiring an American detective agency Fairfax for investigating accounts of Non Resident Indians and for taking up the Bofors pay-offs case.

Chandrababu condoles V P Singh's death

TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu condoled the death of former prime minister V P Singh and described him as a pioneer in ensuring due share to people from backward communities in political and administration fields.

Expressing grief over Singh's death, the former Andhra Pradesh chief minister said his demise was a "great loss for the nation and an extreme personal loss for him".

Recalling his association with the former Prime Minister, Naidu said on several occasions Singh gave meaningful and constructive advice during the formation of non-Congress governments at the Centre.

"I express my heart felt condolences to Singh's family members and he was a pioneer in ensuring due share to backward classes in the fields of politics and administration," Naidu.

Terrorists left before I reached terror sites: Patil

New delhi: "Before I could reach there, the terrorists who had attacked one of the hospitals, the Cama Hospital, had left and those who attacked the railway station had also left," Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil said.
Patil, who briefed the Cabinet on the situation in Mumbai, was giving details to media about his visit to the city after terrorists struck there.

He said after the terrorists, who attacked Cama Hospital, ‘left’ the police chased them and killed one of them and injured another.

Patil, who condemned the attack as an act of cowardice, said the country would remain strong even as the terrorists attempt to weaken and create difficulty for the citizens.

The Home Minister had condoled the loss of lives, including top ranking police officers, in the attack and said their sacrifice would inspire the rest of the force to do their duty more resolutely.


Ind-Eng ODI series scrapped, Tests hang in balance

The remainder of England's one-day cricket series against India was scrapped on Thursday following the terror attacks in Mumbai which also prompted the organisers of the USD six-million Champions League to postpone the high-profile Twenty20 event.
While England will return home without playing the last two matches of the seven-ODI series, a final decision on the fate of the Test series will be taken later with the ECB making it clear that it would abide by the security advice by various sources.

After a prolonged meeting with top ECB officials and the England team management, BCCI secretary N Srinivasan told a press conference in Bhubaneswar that the Guwahati and New Delhi one-dayers have been called off in view of the security apprehensions expressed by the visiting team.

"BCCI has accepted ECB's request to postpone the Guwahati and Delhi one-dayers, said Srinivasan who held a lengthy discussion with ECB Managing Director Hugh Morris, visiting skipper Kevin Pietersen, coach Peter Moores and team manager Reg Dickason.

Regarding the fate of the two-match Test series scheduled to start in Ahmedabad from December 11, the BCCI secretary said, "We hope they will come to play the Test matches."

The ghastly terror strikes in Mumbai led to a spate of postponements with the Champions League, scheduled to be held in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai from December 3 to 10, being deferred while the rebel Indian cricket League also called off the World Series event in Ahmedabad. A few other domestic tournaments and scheduled press conferences were also put off.

Morris said they would be holding discussions with Indian Cricket Board officials on the Test series which is still hanging fire.

Apart from Ahmedabad, Mumbai, where terrorist attacks left over 100 people dead since last night, is one of the venues for the two-match Test series.

"This morning I held initial discussions with the BCCI Secretary N Srinivasan, as well as representatives from the Indian team management at the team hotel in Bhubaneswar. I have also briefed the England players and management on the situation as well as liaising closely with the ECB Chairman and chief executive and the players' representatives," said Morris in a statement.

He later addressed a press conference and said the Test series would depend on the nature of security advice the team gets from various sources.

"We are looking at several options and we will go by the security advisors. If they advise us to play in India, we will play the Test series. However, the players are desperate and disturbed over the incidents in Mumbai," he said.

"The events of last night were deeply distressing and the situation is still unfolding. We are urgently seeking information from expert sources regarding last night's attacks and will continue to hold further discussions with our colleagues from the BCCI over the next 24 hours," Morris said.

Morris said the safety and security of the team could not be compromised at any stage. "The safety and security of the England team is of the utmost importance to ECB. We have reviewed all our security arrangements in the light of these attacks and will be taking all necessary steps to ensure the safety and security of the team.

"On behalf of the Board and the England team, we would like to express our condolences to the families and friends of those people who were killed or injured in last night's attacks," Morris said.

England will stay put in Bhubaneswar for a day before returning home after losing all the five matches they played against India in the seven-match series.

A top BCCI source said that India agreed to call off the one-day tour but wanted England to visit the country a few weeks later for the two-match Test series.

The England team management has conveyed the BCCI proposal to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) top brass who will discuss the proposal and get back to the Indian Board.

On a day of hectic developments, the organisers of the Champions League postponed the event after many participating teams expressed reservations of travelling to India.


The decision was taken by the Governing Council of the Champions League 2020 after consultations among the three founding Board members of the tournament - BCCI, Cricket Australia and Cricket South Africa -- in the best interests of all the parties concerned, a media statement said.

"We held consultations among all the stakeholders, including the founding members, the participating teams and members of the Governing Council after the unfortunate terrorist attacks in Mumbai," said Lalit Modi, Chairman of the Champions League 2020.

"It was agreed that in the best interests of all concerned, the inaugural edition of the Champions League 2020 should be postponed," he said.

Terrorists came from Karachi via sea to Mumbai
The terrorists who attacked Mumbai came via sea routes from Karachi in Pakistan, according to an intelligence report.
The reports had warned that there could be a possible entry of terrorists into Mumbai through the sea route, a top police official claimed.

"This intelligence was available six months ago and subsequently a barge was found by the locals on Shrivardhan coast in Raigad district four months back," the official, who did not wish to be identified, said.

Locals feared that the barge might have contained explosives but nothing was found when customs and naval personnel inspected it.

The terrorists, who created havoc in Mumbai overnight, came by boats, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh has said.

Militants armed with automatic weapons and grenades attacked Taj and Oberoi hotels, hospitals and a famous tourist cafe in Mumbai late on Wednesday, killing more than 100 people.

* WHO IS BEHIND THE ATTACKS?

Witnesses say the attackers were young South Asian men speaking Hindi or Urdu, suggesting that they are probably members of an Indian militant group rather than foreigners.

The attacks were claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen in an e-mail to news organisations. Deccan is an area of southern India.

Analysts say that while it is not clear whether the claim is genuine, the attacks were most likely carried out by a group called the Indian Mujahideen. The name used in the claim of responsibility suggests the attackers could be members of a south Indian offshoot or cell of the Indian Mujahideen.

* WHO ARE THE INDIAN MUJAHIDEEN?

Indian police say the Indian Mujahideen is an offshoot of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), but that local Muslims appear to have been given training and backing from militant groups in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

SIMI has been blamed by police for almost every major bomb attack in India, including explosions on commuter trains in Mumbai two years ago that killed 187 people.

Police said the Indian Mujahideen may also include former members of the Bangladeshi militant group Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami.

* WHY ARE THEY SUSPECTED OF BEING BEHIND THE MUMBAI ATTACKS?

The Indian Mujahideen have made credible claims of responsibility for most of the recent major attacks on civilian targets in India over the past two years.

The Mumbai attacks appear to have been carefully co-ordinated, well-planned and involved a large number of attackers. A high level of sophistication has also been a hallmark of previous attacks by the Indian Mujahideen.

The Mumbai attacks also focused clearly on tourist targets, including two luxury hotels and a famous cafe.

In May, the Indian Mujahideen made a specific threat to attack tourist sites in India unless the government stopped supporting the United States in the international arena.

The threat was made in an e-mail claiming responsibility for bomb attacks that killed 63 people in the tourist city of Jaipur. The e-mail, signed by "Guru Al-Hindi", declared "open war against India" and included the serial number of one of the bicycles on which the bombs were left.

Witnesses in Mumbai say the attackers in Mumbai singled out Americans and Britons in their attacks.

* WHAT OTHER ATTACKS HAVE INDIAN MUJAHIDEEN CARRIED OUT?

The group first emerged during a wave of bombings in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in November 2007, sending an e-mail to media outlets just before some of the bombs exploded.

Their next attacks were the Jaipur blasts.

On July 25, eight small bomb attacks in the IT city of Bangalore on July 25 that killed at least one person and wounded 15. There was no known claim of responsibility.

But a day later, at least 16 bombs exploded in Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat, killing 45 and wounding 161. Shortly before the blasts, an e-mail in the name of the Indian Mujahideen was sent to local media warning that people would soon "feel the terror of death" in the name of Allah.

It said the attacks were revenge for the Gujarat riots of 2002, when around 2,500 people, most of them Muslims, were killed by Hindu mobs. A later e-mail accused several state governments of harassing, imprisoning and torturing Muslims and threatened consequences if they did not stop.

In September, at least five bombs exploded in crowded markets and streets in New Delhi, killing at least 18 people.

The Indian Mujahideen sent out an e-mail moments after the first blast in New Delhi, saying the explosions were to prove its capability to strike in the most secure of Indian cities.

* WHAT WAS DIFFERENT ABOUT THE MUMBAI ATTACKS?

All previous incidents in which the Indian Mujahideen are suspected of involvement involved co-ordinated serial bombs.

The Mumbai attacks also show clear signs of coordination but were carried out by gunmen, some carrying grenades.

The tactics -- a military-style assault on soft targets, singling out foreigners, and taking hostages -- is rare and does not fit the usual methods of militant attacks on civilian areas.

However, similar attacks have been carried out before, notably the May 2004 attacks in the eastern Saudi city of Khobar.

Gunmen attacked two oil industry installations and a foreign workers' housing complex in the city, taking more than 50 hostages and killing 22 of them. The attackers asked hostages whether they were Christian or Muslim before deciding whom to kill.

Terrible situation in Mumbai: Amitabh Bachchan
The Indian film industry today expressed a deep shock over the nightmare that unfolded on Wednesday night as terrorists targeted various important locations in the Bollywood capital of Mumbai.
The industry people also appealed for sanity and called for unity after one of the biggest terrorist strikes rattled the country's financial and dream city.

"Terrible! terrible situation!," a shaken Amitabh Bachchan wrote in his blog.

"Mumbai under terrorist attack!! Several locations bombed and terrorist firing all over the city. Major hotels under siege. Taj hotel battle going on inside the hotel," says Bachachan, whose post reads like a doomsday account.

In one of the most audacious terror attacks in Indian history, at least 100 people have been killed and nearly 300 injured.

Two five star hotels, hospitals and the city's CST Railway station were among the key targets of the terrorists, who entered the city through boats at Gateway of India, just opposite the heritage Taj hotel.

"I am scared! shocked! I don't have words to describe my feelings. It seems unreal to me almost like a film. I don't know who are they and why they have resorted to such ruthlessness," film director Anurag Kashyap, who is in Goa to attend the IFFI told reporters over phone.

"They just enter the city like that and hold it hostage. It is unbelievable. Obviously Mumbai will bounce back but it has been hurt badly and it will take time to heal,"

says Kashyap, who has directed films like 'Black Friday' based on the 1993 terror strike and the ensuing riots.

Mumbai terror attacks hit film, television shootings



The terror attacks in the metropolis have cast shadow on the film and television industry where several shootings have been cancelled. Megastar Amitabh Bachchan, who was shooting for 'Teen Patti' till November 24 in Ballard Estate, Capital cinema, Horniman Circle and Kitab Mahal areas, which are in the vicinity of Mumbai CST station, one of the key sites of the attack, described the situation as "terrible".
"Mumbai under terrorist attack!! Several locations bombed and terrorists firing all over the city. Major hotels under siege. Multiple action on. Army called on. It's a terrible situation," he wrote on his blog echoing the sentiments of Mumbaikars.

Ajay Devgan and wife Kajol were to shoot for their animation film 'Toonpur Ka Superhero' in suburban Chembur today but the programme has been called off, Devgan's spokesman said.

Shooting of several television serials have also been put on hold in view of the grim situation prevailing in the megapolis in view of the attacks that have left at least 100 dead till now, industry sources said.

However, producer Mukesh Bhatt said the shooting for his film was in progress in the city.

Abhay Deol, whose 'Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye' is releasing tomorrow, said he was finding it difficult to concentrate on promotion of his film.

With a holiday declared in Mumbai today, heads of television channels have asked employees to stay indoors.

"Television shootings are going slow. Many of them are not happening today," they added.

Hotels world over a soft target for terrorists

Attacks on two luxury hotels -The Taj and Trident- in the country's financial capital Mumbai have drawn attention again to the fact that hotels are a soft target for terrorists who want to capture world attention to their causes.
The Mumbai incident follows previous attempts on hotels elsewhere in the world, one such incident in the recent past in Islamabad where a deadly blast targeted the Marriott hotel near Pakistan's Parliament, killing at least 40 people and wounded another 200.

In 2005 in Jordan, Al Qaeda conducted a series of coordinated bombing on three hotels in the capital city Amman on November 9. The blasts at at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, the Radisson SAS Hotel, and the Days Inn killed 60 people and injured 115 others. Oen of the hotels was hosting a wedding with hundreds of guests.

In October 2004, bombings at three sites on the east coast of the Sinai peninsula killed 34 people. The Egyptian government said the mastermind was Palestinian and the targets appeared to be Israeli tourists.

On August 5, 2003, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the lobby of the JW Marriott Hotel in Indonesian capital Jakarta killing 12 people, including one Danish, one Dutch and two Chinese and injuring 150. The hotel was viewed as a symbol of Western power and thus been the prime focus of terrorists.

Another reason why hotels are being targeted is because of the kind of clientele, experts say.

Mumbai being the financial capital of the country at the centre of economic decision making there are numerous important delegates checking into one of the seven or five star hotels in the city.

Australian actress hid inside cupboard to escape gunfire

An Australian TV actress, who was trapped inside Mumbai's Taj Hotel when terrorists went on a shooting spree, hid herself in a two-by-three metre cupboard for an hour to escape death.
Brooke Satchwell, former star of soap opera 'Neighbours', told a radio portal that she was inside the ground-floor toilets when the attack happened and "everyone just froze".

"As I stepped into the bathroom you could hear machine-gun fire start up in the lobby," she told the radio portal. "People started locking themselves into the toilet cubicles, which clearly wasn't a very good idea. But we were trying to find somewhere to hide," she said.

Satchwell, along with her boyfriend and about eight other foreigners, has now been moved to another hotel in south Mumbai, whose location was not disclosed for security reasons.

"I can't even get my leg dressed, we can't go to the airport, that's been bombed, we can't go to the police centres, they've been bombed," Satchwell's boyfriend told a newspaper from the hotel.

Recalling her ordeal at the Taj Hotel, the actress told the portal that hotel staff directed the group into the service cupboard, where she waited for up to an hour, hearing bursts of gunfire.

"Some of the hotel security came and ushered us very quickly down the corridor and across the lobby, clearly no one had a very good idea of what happened ... or where we were meant to be heading at that stage," she said.

At least 20 Australians were in the nearby Oberoi hotel, which also came under attack, all of them members of a New South Wales delegation organised by the Department of State and Regional Development.

Industry demands tougher laws against terrorists

Expressing shock over the terrorist attack in Mumbai claiming about 100 lives, Indian industry on Thursday demanded tougher laws along with "stronger and firmer" leadership to tackle terrorism.
The industry leaders, including heads of the apex chambers, said the country needs to be on a high alert since its institutions are becoming vulnerable to the terrorists' attacks.

Condemning the killer attacks in India's financial capital, HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh said, "Blasts are bad for investor confidence."

Demanding stringent laws to deal with terrorists, FICCI President Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, "It is time we all join this debate on terrorism and demand stronger and firmer leadership and approach to this threat of terrorism, including better laws."

He said the Indian business has so far been "mute and very detached from this debate on terrorism and tougher approach to terrorism and terrorists, including anti-terror laws".

CII President and ICICI Bank CEO and Managing Director K V Kamath said the attacks "clearly show that our institutions could be vulnerable whether institutions of commerce like hotels or any institutions doing any sort of business".

He said, "Everyone needs to be on high alert at this point of time."

However, while the city has a track record of bouncing back, "this is new type of attack and I am sure the city has to adjust to this attack," Kamath said.

Mumbai terror attack: Live timeline

Terrorists launched a massive attack on India's financial capital on Wednesday, and put major hotels under seige. A timeline of events since then:

8.00 pm: 4 more terrorists killed at the Taj. Another mammoth explosion in the Oberoi, starts huge fire.

7.30 pm: Major fire breaks out in Trident hotel.

6.45 pm: Large contingent of the RAF comes out of the New Taj building, two explosions heard in the Oberoi.

6.00 pm: Fourteen more people evacuated from the Oberoi, 50 more commandoes enter the Taj.

5:45: pm: Four injured foreign nationals have been moved out of the Trident hotel.

5.40: pm:An special NSG team specialised in managing hostage crisis, moves to Nariman house armed with rocket launchers and bazookas. Their aim is to flush out terrorists still holed inside and to free trapped Israeli hostages.

5.20 pm: The NSG arrests one militant at the Trident. The arrested terrorist has been identified as Abu Ismail from Faridkot in Pakistan.

4.56 pm: According to recent reports, five persons are being held as hostages at Nariman House.

4.55 pm: The Indian Navy spokesman Capt Manohar Nambiar says the Navy has "located the ship (MV Alpha) and now we are in the process of boarding it and searching it."

4.55 pm: Firing intensifies at Taj hotel and Trident hotel.

4.40 pm: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh confirms that the attacks are being carried out by a group based out of the country. He further promises to set up a Federal Investigation Authority to fight terror in a co-ordinated manner.

4.40 pm: 30 hostages have been freed from Trident hotel. However, reports claim that 35 people are still trapped inside the hotel.

4.40 pm: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condoles the deaths, describes the attacks as pre-planned. He further vows to take the strongest possible action in an address to the nation.

4.37 pm: Firing rages on at Trident Hotel.

4.37 pm: Grenade blast heard from Nariman House in south Mumbai.

4.25 pm: A terrorist has been reportedly killed in Taj hotel. Reports say that commandos have started barging into the rooms of the hotel.

4.24 pm: Terrorists holed up in Room No 473 of Taj Hotel.

4.23 pm: A major explosion heard from Taj Hotel.

4.18 pm: Major R K Hooda, General Officer Commanding of Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat, confirms that 4-5 militants holed up at Nariman House.

4.18 pm: Three Turks were holed up in their rooms in one of the luxury hotels in Mumbai attacked by Islamist militants, the Anatolia news agency reported quoting the Turkish Ambassador to India.

4.13 pm: Jewish priest Gabriel among hostages held at Nariman House, police say.

3.48 pm : Trawler or merchant vessel may have dropped speed boats allegedly used by terrorists, say Navy sources.

3.41 pm : Navy's INS Kunjali and Vindhyagiri are chasing the suspected terrorist vessel off Mumbai.

3.40 pm : Navy and Coast Guard on hot pursuit of a merchant vessel suspected to have dropped the terrorists off the Mumbai coast.

3.35 pm : President Pratibha Patil phones the PM.

3.30 pm: Another loud explosion at the Trident Oberoi. In total six blasts have been heard from the hotel in the last 30 minutes.

3.27 pm : "Before I could reach there, the terrorists who had attacked one of the hospitals, the Cama Hospital, had left and those who attacked the railway station had also left," Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil said.

3.20 pm: Army along with NSG commandos prepares for final assault at Nariman House

3.12 pm : An Italian national was among nine foreigners killed in the attacks on hotels and other targets in Mumbai, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

3.11 pm : A section of Taj hotel catches fire again.

3.11 pm : Maharashtra DGP A N Roy reaches Trident hotel.

3.10 pm : The Coast Guard launched a major search for a ship 'M V Alpha' by which the terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks are suspected to have reached the shores of the metropolis.

3.03 pm : Investigators have picked up certain clues in connection with the terror attacks in Mumbai, Home Minister Shivraj Patil said, refusing to share details.

3.00 pm : Explosions heard inside Taj hotel.

2.50 pm: Terrorists holed up in Trident hotel throw five grenades outside the building. Meanwhile, two heavy explosions were heard from the hotel.

2.50 pm: European nations plan to send a plane to India to fly their citizens out of Mumbai, Spain's consul in the city said.

2.43 pm: Grenade blast heard from Nariman House in south Mumbai, where six terrorists are holed up.

2.43 pm: Another blast rocks Taj hotel.

2.40 pm: Firing resumes in Taj hotel, marking the beginning of another round of operation. Earlier, the Maharshtra DGP A N Roy had claimed that all the hostages have been rescued from Taj. But the firing has again resumed in the hotel, indicating the presence of threat in the luxurious establishment. Another report had claimed that four storeys of the six-storeyed Taj Hotel have been reportedly sanitised.

2.40 pm: More NSG commandos have reached the Taj hotel.

2.27 pm: British counter-terrorism experts say the terror attacks at prominent landmarks in Mumbai have "all the hallmarks" of being an al Qaeda operation.

2.08 pm: Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said that the people involved in the deadly overnight terrorist attack came from outside with hand grenades and weapons.

1.50 pm: 200 more NSG commandos are being rushed to Mumbai, an National Security Guard spokesman said.

1.48 pm: Maharashtra Director General of Police A N Roy said nine suspected terrorists, who were held this morning, are being questioned.

1.48 pm: Maharashtra DGP A N Roy confirmed that all the hostages inside Taj have been rescued. However, hostage-like situation at Trident hotel continues, he added.

1.27 pm: Intelligence reports had warned that there could be a possible entry of terrorists into Mumbai through the sea route, a top police official claimed.

1.27 pm: The Gujarat Police said the Mumbai terror strike was similar to the Akshardham Temple attack of 2002, and they are carrying out checks and searches as a precautionary measure.

1.27 pm: Handgrenades lobbed from Oberoi Hotel in south Mumbai where terrorists are holed up.




1.27 pm: Expressing serious concern over the Mumbai terror attack, the AICC General Secretary Rahul Gandhi said it was an attack on the country and not only on the commercial capital, Mumbai.

1.22 pm: President Pratibha Patil speaks to Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh to enquire about the situation in the metropolis.

1.19 pm: One more body was brought out of the Taj Mahal hotel, taking the total number of bodies removed from there to three.

1.15 pm: Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi termed the attacks as “barbaric” and extended support to the Indian government. Notably, today’s meeting of Qureshi and Union Minister for External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee at Chandigarh has been cancelled in the wake of the attacks.

1.10 pm: US Ambassador to India David Mulford offers condolences to the families of the victims of Mumbai terror attacks and said Washington was ready to provide all possible assistance to the Indian government.

1.04 pm: Another explosion at Trident.

1.02 pm: Loud explosion heard from Trident hotel.

1.01 pm: "We have total clue about the attacks," says Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister R R Patil. However, he has refused to give details.

12.55 pm: A day after the terror attack on the historic Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus which left over hundred killed, services on the Central Railways were restored to normal today, officials said.

12.42 pm: Security forces and holed up terrorists exchange fire in Nariman House in south Mumbai.

12.39 pm: One terrorist holed up inside Nariman House in south Mumbai killed, says police. Six more ultras suspected to be inside the building.

12.39 pm: Dubbing the terrorists as enemies of the country, Congress president Sonia Gandhi said that terror attacks in Mumbai posed a challenge to the entire nation and would be met resolutely.

12.34 pm: Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi convened an emergency meeting to review the "internal security" in the state in wake of yesterday's terror attacks in neighbouring Mumbai.

12.34 pm: Seven bodies brought out of Taj Hotel.

12.32 pm: Intelligence Bureau chief and Defence Secretary to attend the meeting called by Home Secretary.

12.18 pm: Rs 5 lakh compensation to be given to the kin of those killed in the terror attacks, says Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister R R Patil. Rs 50,000 will be paid to the seriously injured.

12:16 pm: Two IL-76 aircrafts and four AN-32 aircrafts are ready to take off from Palam Airport in Delhi to assist operations going on in Mumbai.

12.14 pm: Defence Minister A K Antony calls a high-level meeting of the armed forces in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks.

12.14 pm : Airforce Brigade arrives in Mumbai.

12.13 pm : Commandos from Pune also rushing to Mumbai.

12.10 pm: Two bodies brought out of terror-struck Taj Hotel in Mumbai and taken away in an ambulance.

12.05 pm: Ten terrorists involved in the attacks are Pakistanis, sources tell Zee News.

12.04 pm: Seven British citizens have been injured in the terror attacks in Mumbai, British High Commissioner in India, Sir Richard Stag, said.

12.01 pm: At least four terrorists were holed up in the Taj Hotel where 40 to 50 guests were still trapped, says Major R K Hooda, General Officer Commanding of Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat.

11.52 am: Nine suspects have been arrested and interrogated, R R Patil said.

11.51 am: Five terrorists killed and one captured in Mumbai, says Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister R R Patil outside Oberoi Hotel.

11.40 am: R R Patil refutes reports of any ransom demands being made by the terrorists holed up in the hotel. He is unsure of the exact number of hostages in the hotel. Earlier, a terrorist, identified as Sahadullah, holed up inside Mumbai's Oberoi Hotel told a news channel that he seeks release of all “Mujahideens held in India” in exchange of the freedom of hostages inside the hotel.

11.23 am: The number of injured policemen rises to 25.

11.21 am: Two top US intelligence officials are believed to be among dead in the firing at Taj hotel.

11.20 am: Army’s General Officer Commanding reaches the Oberoi on instructions from Prime Minister.

11.20 am: Commandos begin firing at Nariman House. Four terrorists thought to be holed up inside.

11.17 am: L K Advani to accompany Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during visit to terror-hit Mumbai.

11.16 am : Shots heard from the Mumbai headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Jewish outreach group Chabad Lubavitch that was seized by the gunmen overnight.

11.15 am: A child of foreign nationality and an Indian maid seen coming out of Nariman House in South Mumbai.

11.10 am: Bush, Obama condemn Mumbai attacks; offer assistance

11.05 am: LK Advani terms the Mumbai attacks as the biggest in India. Calls for unity at the hour of crisis.

11.01 am: Shivraj Patil holds emergency meeting

10.45 am: Indian Navy’s Vice Admiral Bedi said that around 4-5 terrorists are still holed up inside the hotel, along with 40 hostages.

At around 7.30 am, NSG commandoes entered Taj to evacuate people.

Commandoes had also raided Trident Oberoi Hotel in South Mumbai to flush out terrorists holed up there. Terrorists have, reportedly, positioned themselves on the 19th floor of the Oberoi hotel.

Earlier, a bomb was also diffused this morning near Taj.

http://www.zeenews.com/nation/2008-11-27/486894news.html

Karkare’s response to a death threat: A 'smiley'
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Y P Rajesh
Posted: Nov 27, 2008 at 1637 hrs IST

Mumbai The last days of Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare were probably some of the busiest in his 26-year career in the Indian Police Service (IPS), and apparently tormented as well.
The ATS believed it had cracked the September 29 Malegaon bomb blast case, and about a month ago arrested Hindu extremists in a breakthrough that shocked the nation and added a new twist to the entire discourse on terror and religion.

But as the probe unravelled the alleged plot and the role of some Hindu leaders, the case got caught in the politics of terror and the ATS was at the centre of charges that it was being used as a tool to target the Sangh Parivar amid allegations of illegal detention and torture by some of the 11 arrested for the blast.

The BJP, RSS and VHP leaders, among others from the Hindu nationalist brigade, accused the ATS of being on a witch-hunt, with some even demanding that ATS officers be subjected to a narco-analysis to establish their motives.

No less a leader than the BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate, L K Advani, had demanded a change in the ATS team and a judicial inquiry into the torture allegations made by Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, a key suspect in the Malegaon case.

The Shiv Sena too had come out in support of the suspects and on Wednesday had threatened in its mouthpiece Saamna that it would publish the names of some ATS officers and shame them as it said they had tortured the Malegaon suspects.

That Karkare was affected by this was apparent when we met at his office on Tuesday to get an update on the probe, less than 36 hours before he was killed. The Indian Express has decided to break the confidence of what was an off-the-record conversation in an attempt to highlight the anguish of the investigators over the currents in which the Malegaon probe was getting caught as well as the larger debate over the politics of terror.

"I don't know why this case has become so political," was one of Karkare's first comments. "The pressure is tremendous and I am wondering how to extricate it from all the politics."

Was the pressure telling on the investigation, what with someone who could be the next prime minister of the country questioning the credibility of the ATS?

"Of course," was the answer. "We are being very very careful. In fact, when we want to question a suspect and if he or she has any Hindutvawadi connections, we make sure once, twice, thrice, that we have enough reason and evidence to even question. Normally it is not like that. We are able to freely question anyone we suspect."

"In fact, immediately after the blast I had visited Malegaon along with the Deputy Chief Minister and other officials and witnessed the anger of the locals who shouted some slogans," Karkare said. "After that I told my men that we have to pursue this case very objectively and not start with assumptions that people of this community or that community could be responsible."

Originally from Madhya Pradesh, Karkare studied mechanical engineering in Nagpur and worked at the National Productivity Council and Hindustan Lever before making it to the IPS in 1982. Known to be an upright officer who served in the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) as well as the Indian mission in Vienna, Austria, as a counselor, Karkare did not hide his love for Mumbai or his discomfort with the predominantly political-bureaucratic culture of Delhi where he was posted.

During a stint in the Chandrapur forests near Nagpur in 1991 to fight Naxalites, he took an interest in driftwood, discovered artistic shapes in them and converted them into wooden sculptures, making about 150 of them over a two-year period. Talking to the media about sensitive cases such as Malegaon could prove to be a double-edged sword, he had said as we parted, adding that he would like us to meet informally once a month so that he could learn the ways of the media.

His last visuals as seen on TV showed him working with his men near the VT station, the target of one of the attacks, although it is perplexing at this point in time why such a senior officer ended up getting exposed to a brazen terrorist attack. Initially, he was shown wearing a shoddy helmet normally seen used by constables during riots. A little later, a policeman lowers a flimsy bulletproof vest over his shoulders, one that was obviously of little protection when those fatal shots were fired at him.

The previous evening, hours after our meeting, TV channels had ‘breaking news’ that he had received a fresh death threat from some unidentified caller, apparently in connection with the Malegaon probe. An Indian Express reporter SMSed him asking him if this was true or if he had anything to say. His reply: just a smiley.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Karkares-response-to-a-death-threat-A-smiley/391325/

'We could hear desperate shouts, bachao, bachao'
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Kavitha Iyer
Posted: Nov 27, 2008 at 1619 hrs IST

Mumbai Ten pm is a reasonable pack-up time, even for the city that doesn't sleep. It is the time to check what late night shows one can catch at the mall-multiplex next door, consider splurging on a gourmet meal to stave off midweek blues.
"A guy shooting madly at diners at Leo's," said the first caller. I hollered for the night reporter, Aditya, our youngest in office, and rushed him off. Some loose cannon with a gun, I told myself minutes later, despatching what I thought was the last report of the day.

At 10.10 pm, senior correspondent Prashant Rangnekar and I heard a long rat-tat-tat outside — it could have been dismissed as a long firecracker, but this is The Express Towers, located in the heart of the financial capital's business district, Nariman Point.

Wondering what sort of wedding party would burst firecrackers outside here, I walked towards the window from where I could see The Hilton, right opposite.

Prashant came with the next inputs: people running helter skelter outside, the taxi-drivers waiting for their regular long-distance drops had fled, there was firing inside The Hilton. "Some fled without their taxis," he said of the city's most dependable cabbies.

With dozens of others still in the building, many management professionals and bankers working late, security guards, journalists, labourers on the night-shift, I walked down the stairs. There was chaos outside the plush hotel, groups of people huddled around on the pavement opposite, our security guards trying to seal the building entrance, followed by the wail of police vans and ambulances.

"Soon after I saw one body being taken out in a car. Three more bodies were then taken away in a police van," Prashant reported. We saw frightened hotel staffers crying as they described the scene inside to lathi-wielding policemen — among the dead were the security staffers of the hotel.

The street was almost deserted for the next few minutes. But even as Prashant walked on the pavement trying to find eye-witnesses, anybody who could make sense of what television had already put out as a gang war, the Goenka Marg filled with onlookers once again. While policemen and guards tried to warn people off, I climbed three floors to the Express lawn, a vantage point to see what was happening at The Hilton.

Glass windows in the upper floors of the Trident were being shattered. "Bachao Bachao," we could hear desperate shouts, nearly 400 metres away.

That's when the calls of other attacks — at VT, at Cama Hospital, at Metro cinema junction, began to come in. Even as phones were ringing off the hook as informants, well-wishers, parents, friends, readers called in, colleagues warned us off the lawn.

As I turned, an explosion rocked the building, followed minutes later by another. We could see smoke going up in the distance, hear more panicked wails. More firemen were running in, an ambulance was backing up to the farther gate, more sirens as, finally, the last few onlookers moved out of the way.

It was quiet for a few minutes. Till news from other parts of the city began to come in.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/We-could-hear-desperate-shouts-bachao-bachao/391422/



Hotel residents talk of chaos, panic and blood all over


27 Nov 2008, 1823 hrs IST, IANS

NEW YORK: Manuela Testonili, ex-wife of American pop singer Prince, was among those who along with 200 others were stuck in the dark ballroom of
the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel for several hours, when terror struck Mumbai late Wednesday night.

"We left everything behind, including purses and phones. There was a lot of panic," she said.

New York-based filmmaker Smriti Mundhra and her parents, who were staying in an apartment near Oberoi hotel, when the attack happened, told CNN that they were all safe. They were given instructions by the police to stay at home with the doors locked and away from windows.

"Just as we were getting ready for bed last night, I heard a little bit of commotion on the street and some police sirens and didn't really think much of it, then my parents came in and told me something was going on in the neighbourhood. So we watched the news and realized essentially there's a terrorist attack happening just outside our door," Mundhra said.

Held up in his room at the Taj Mahal hotel, British lawmaker Mark Abell told media that when he came back from dinner Wednesday night the security fences weren't operating. "The hotel shook with an immense blast. Three or four minutes later, there was another large blast, the whole building shaking."

As he looked outside, Abell saw the crowd running. "It was chaos, gunshots, it looked all very, very nasty," Abell said.

Yasmin Wong, a CNN employee who was staying in the Taj, told the news network that she hid under her bed for several hours after she was awoken by gunfire. Wong said she received a phone call from the hotel telling her to turn her light off, put a wet towel by the door and stay in her room until she was told otherwise, CNN reported.

Peter Keep, a Mumbai-based entrepreneur told Wall Street Journal as he saw fire engulfing the Taj hotel. "It's familiar, it's iconic and even if it represents nothing more than a beautiful old building to see it ablaze like that is just shocking," he said.

Farhang Jehani, owner of the Café Leopold was lucky to have survived the shootout inside his restaurant Wednesday night as terrorists killed people.

Between 9:30 and 9:45 p.m. Wednesday night, two gunmen who appeared to be in their mid 20s pull out machine guns and opened fire on the restaurant full of evening dinners. The crowd scattered but more than 10 people were shot, he said.

"There is blood all over and not one table is standing. They are all upside down," he told The Wall Street Journal.

Noriyuki Kanda, sushi chef at the Wasabi restaurant in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, was holed up in the hotel for more than 12 hours. He told the Journal over phone from Mumbai he was working when he heard a lot of noise.

"I had only heard gunfire on television before so we weren't sure what it was. Then we heard rapid fire like a machine gun and people rushed in from the bar downstairs and said that four men were shooting people in the lobby," he said.

Kanda and his staff led the customers through the kitchen and the back hallways for employees, some of which were filled with smoke.

MPs recall night of horror in Mumbai's Taj hotel
New Delhi (PTI/IANS): It was a night without end for Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) MP N.N. Krishnadas who was having dinner at the Taj hotel in Mumbai when masked militants barged in.

The Lok Sabha MP from Kerala, who was rescued by commandoes on Thursday morning, lived to tell his tale of horror following Mumbai's worst terror attack.

Bhupendrasinh Solanki, BJP MP from Godhra in Gujarat, N N Krishnadas of CPI(M) from Palghat in Kerala, Mani Tripathi, a BSP parliamentarian from Uttar Pradesh and one more MP from Maharashtra were visiting the metropolis as members of the Parliamentary Committee on Subordinate Legislation.

"I was having dinner with some of my colleagues when two masked militants barged into the restaurant. They fired indiscriminately, I saw three people being shot. The terrorists left the room soon after that," Krishnadas told IANS over the phone from Mumbai.

Recalling the nightmare at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, one of Mumbai's most identifiable landmarks and one of the seven places attacked by terrorists Wednesday night, he said: "The hotel staff rushed us into another room after the terroists moved out of the restaurant."

"We stayed there through the night. In the morning, commandos rescued us," he said.

Solanki, who also witnessed the 2001 Parliament attack, said he had checked into the hotel at around 6 pm along with 15 officials and the MPs and came down to the ground floor from the room three hours later to have dinner.

"We were in the dining hall at Taj hotel. All of a sudden some terrorists came in and started firing. I heard the loud sound of blasts and bullets," Solanki told PTI.

He said the firing was rapid and they mistook it for crackers.

"The waiters told us that it seemed to be a terrorist attack. The senior staff then took all of us to the back of the hotel. We were in the swimming pool area and were asked to lie on the ground".

Solanki said all the MPs and Parliamentary officials were holed up on the floor for some 60 to 80 minutes before being taken to safety through a rear door of the hotel.

"I left the hotel at around 11 pm. Then I was taken to nearby police station and spent the whole night there. I was present when the terrorists attacked Parliament on December 13, 2001 but I think it is the biggest terror attack in the country," he said.

US convenes counter-terrorism meeting after Mumbai attacks
Washington (PTI): Top US intelligence and counter-terrorism officials held a meeting at the White House as Washington conveyed to New Delhi that it stood ready to help in the wake of "horrific" terror attacks in Mumbai.

"A meeting was held at the White House of National Security Council and officials from counter-terrorism and intelligence agencies as well as the State and Defence departments," the White House said in a statement.

"The US government continues to monitor the situation closely," a White House spokesman said.

"This includes the safety and security of our citizens, and we stand ready to assist and support the Indian government," the statement said.
Gunmen were like young 'boys', say eyewitnesses
Mumbai (PTI): With Indian intelligence and security agencies still groping to identify the terrorists who have struck at the country's financial capital, three Australian victims have now come out describing them as "young boys."

The description came from two young Australian tourists, David Coker (23) and his partner Katie Anstee (24), who were among the first to come face-to-face with the terrorists in metropolis' famous bar 'afe Leopold' in Colaba.

"They looked just like boys and they were on a rampage -- It's a full-on."

David and Katie have arrived in the city to celebrate their graduation and they went to eat at Leopold, when terrorists struck.

"We have just sat down for dinner ordering food when it seemed fire crackers were blowing up all around us and people were screaming," the duo told the Sydney's Courier-Mail newspaper telephonically.

Katie was shot in the leg with the bullet breaking her femur while David was grazed by bullet and both had to flee.

David said, he had to virtually carry her girlfriend as she couldn't move.

"We got into a taxi which took us to Bombay hospital. We were, I think, the first people at hospital, which is where we are now," they said.

Another Australian TV actress Brooke Satchwell also had a harrowing ordeal to tell of her confrontation with another group of terrorist boys in the city's landmark Taj hotel.

Satchwell hid herself in a two-by-three metre cupboard for an hour to escape death.

Industrialist Gautam Adani in Taj during terror attack
Ahmedabad (PTI): Adani group Chairman Gautam Adani, who was in a restaurant at Taj Hotel in south Mumbai when the armed terrorists attacked the hotel, described it as the "most horrible experience of his life."

"We were having dinner at the Chambers' Wednesday evening which is a restaurant on the first floor of Taj," Adani told PTI.

There were around 150 people in the restaurant at the time of attack and all were holed up for more than two hours, he said.

"After two hours, we were rescued and taken out by the army commandos," he said, adding that all the people who were at the Chambers' were taken out safely by the army.
Australian killed in Mumbai terror attacks
Mumbai (PTI): An Australian is among those killed in the Mumbai terror attacks, hospital sources said on Thursday.

Forty-nine-year-old Braid Gilbert Taylor was brought to St George's Hospital in South Mumbai late Wednesday night. He was declared brought dead on arrival, they said.

They, however, did not have information as to from where the foreigner was brought to the hospital. Taylor's body has been sent for a post-mortem.

Key developments in the Mumbai terror attack


Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits JJ Hospital to enquire about the condition of those injured in the terror attacks (At 9.30 pm)
Another explosion in the first floor of the old building of Taj hotel and several rounds of gunshot heard. Military personnel taking position around the hotel.
Another grenade blast in Trident (Oberoi) hotel (At 9 pm)
Taj Hotels GM's wife, children killed in terrorist attack
Terrorist attacks happened due to intelligence failure, says Leader of Opposition L K Advani.
UK sending anti-terrorism experts to Mumbai: Brown
Home Minister Shivraj Patil must go: Bardhan
Fire at Trident (Oberoi) hotel (At 8 pm)
Mumbai attacks had some al-Qaeda hallmarks: Britain
Indian naval official will not rule out Somali pirates' role
At least 7 hostages rescued from Oberoi hotel. (At 7 pm)
Seven terrorists killed in Mumbai, says Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh.
Railway ADGP K. P. Raghuvanshi given temporary charge of ATS. (At 6 pm)
The groups behind attacks in Mumbai are based outside the country, says Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Multiple explosions heard at old building of Taj Hotel.
Thirty five people held as hostages inside Oberoi Hotel. (At 5.30 pm)
Indian Navy locates the ship M V Alpha used by the terrorists
Third grenade blast heard from Trident Hotel
Jewish priest Gabriel among hostages held at Nariman House, police say. (At 5 pm)
Explosions heard inside Taj hotel also.
Grenade blast heard from Nariman House, where 6 terrorists are holed up.
9 foreigners among 101 killed in Mumbai terror attacks
All people trapped in Taj Hotel rescued, says DGP A.N.Roy.
200 more NSG commandos being sent to Mumbai: NSG spokesperson.
Hand-grenades lobbed from Oberoi Hotel.
Security forces and holed up terrorists exchange fire in Nariman House. One terrorist killed, 6 more ultras suspected to be inside the building, says police.
Maharashtra government annonces Rs 5 lakh compensation to the kin of those killed in the terror attacks. Rs 50,000 will be paid to the seriously injured.
Defence Minister A K Antony calls a high-level meeting of the armed forces in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks.
Two bodies brought out of terror-struck Taj Hotel in Mumbai and taken away in an ambulance.
Five terrorists killed and one captured in Mumbai, says Maharashtra Dy CM R.R. Patil.
Four to five terrorists are suspected to be holed up inside Nariman House, says Police.
Advani to accompany Manmohan Singh during visit to terror-hit Mumbai.
Mumbai police did not have prior inputs about terror attacks, says R.R. Patil.
NSG commandos reach Trident Hotel to flush out terrorists.
Maharashtra Cabinet to meet at 2 pm in backdrop of terror attacks on Mumbai; all-party meet at 3 pm.
NSG commandos launch operation at Nariman House.
Major General R K Hooda, General Officer Commanding of Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat, reaches Trident Hotel.
Death toll in Mumbai terror attacks reaches around 100.
Firing at Nariman House in South Mumbai intensifies; window panes on third and fifth floor shattered.
Two terrorists shot dead at Taj Mahal Hotel. Two continue to be holed up, police says.
Schools and colleges in Mumbai to remain closed today.
Firing heard near Nariman House in Colaba; police cordon off area amid reports that terrorists are holed up in the building.
Fresh rounds of gunfire heard from in

BJP decides not to name Karkare in official statement
New Delhi (PTI): Having attacked Mumbai ATS' probe into Malegaon blast, the BJP on Thursday decided not to mention the name of investigating agency chief Hemant Karkare or any other police personnel who were killed in terror attacks in Mumbai late Wednesday.

At an hour-long meeting in Mumbai on Thursday, the party top brass is understood to have deliberated on the issue of whether to name Karkare in the party's official statement containing its stand on the terror attacks and decided in favour of not naming any of policemen killed in the attacks.

The meeting came after a statement issued by L K Advani from his residence early in the morning had mentioned all three senior officers of Mumbai police Karkare, Ashok Kamte and Vijay Salaskar, who were killed, along with Delhi Police inspector M C Sharma who died in an encounter with suspected terrorists in Delhi.

The BJP has accused Mumbai ATS of being unprofessional, politically motivated and acting on government orders to frame sadhvi Pragnya Singh Thakur and Lt Col Purohit in Malegaon blast case.

As per sources, the top brass meeting had "several views against the mention of specific names and was finally decided to drop the names from the official release."

Ratan Tata calls for national unity
New Delhi (PTI): Strongly condemning the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, business conglomerate Tata Group's head Ratan Tata on Thursday urged the nation to remain united to beat the divisive forces.

"We must show that we cannot be disabled or destroyed, but that such henious acts will only make us stronger. It is important that we do not allow divisive forces to weaken us. We need to overcome these forces as one strong unified nation," Tata said in a statement.

Condoling the loss of life in separate terror attacks, including on the Taj Hotel, owned by the Tata Group, he said, "We cannot replace the lives that have been lost and we will never forget the terrifying events of last night. But we must stand together shoulder-to-shoulder as citizens of India and rebuild what has been destroyed."

He also said the "terrible wanton" attacks on innocent people and destruction of prominent landmarks in India deserve to be condemned.

"My sympathy and condolences go out to all those who have suffered, being injured and those who have lost their loved ones in this terrible act of hatred and destruction," Tata said.

The Taj Hotel in Mumbai was one of the targets of terror attacks in which over 100 people were killed and as many were taken as hostages.

Terror in Mumbai

India under attack
Nov 27th 2008 | MUMBAI
From The Economist print edition

A terrorist onslaught of stunning scope and horror

Reuters
THE sheer scale and audacity of the assault were staggering. Gangs of well-armed youths attacked two luxury hotels, a restaurant, a railway station and at least one hospital. Gunfire and explosions rang through Mumbai overnight on November 26th-27th and through the next morning. As The Economist went to press, more than 100 people were reported to have been killed, and the toll seemed likely to rise. Several foreigners, including some from America, Japan and Britain, were among the dead. So were over a dozen policemen, including Mumbai’s chief counter-terrorism officer. Up to 100 hostages, including selected American and British guests, were alleged to be held hostage inside a hotel.

Even in a city—and country—with a grim record of terrorist violence, these were extraordinary scenes. The attacks started at around 10.30pm on November 27th, when gunmen started shooting and throwing grenades at Mumbai’s main Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station. Television footage showed two men shooting at random as they drove through nearby streets in a stolen police jeep.

Around the same time, a bomb was reported to have exploded in a taxi parked near the city’s main airport. More or less simultaneously, gunmen speaking Hindi and Urdu, the language of many north-Indian Muslims and of neighbouring Pakistan, stormed two hotels—the Taj Mahal and the Trident Oberoi—and Café Leopold, a restaurant popular with tourists. Police outside the Taj Mahal, India’s most famous hotel, lapped by the Arabian Sea, said gunmen arrived there by inflatable dinghy. In the early hours, a gunfight erupted on Marine Drive, the scenic coastal road seen in so many Bollywood films, in which another Mumbai police chief was killed.

As dawn broke, flames were rising from the domed roof of the Taj Mahal. Navy and army commandos, who had retaken the hotel’s lower floors and killed two terrorists, reported bodies in many rooms and perhaps half a dozen terrorists still living. A trickle of terrified employees and guests, some with gunshot wounds, continued to flee the building. One fugitive, Amit, a hotel-restaurant manager, said his chef had been hit by three bullets and many colleagues remained inside. A few badly injured survivors were wheeled from the hotel on brass luggage-trolleys. By midday on November 28th most of the hostages were reported to have been released from the hotel, although there were reports of further shooting.

Meanwhile at the nearby Trident Oberoi, as many as 100 hostages were reported still to be held. Gunfire and explosions were reported from the upper storeys of the building.

There seemed little doubt that the attackers were Muslim militants of some description, but their exact provenance was unclear. Responsibility was claimed by a previously little-known group called the Deccan Mujahideen. Speaking to Indian television by telephone, a gunman holding hostages in the Trident Oberoi demanded that Muslim prisoners, including those captured in Kashmir, should be released from Indian jails. “Release all the mujahideens, and Muslims living in India should not be troubled,” he said.

In the past five months India has suffered from a spate of Islamist militancy, with bomb-blasts in half a dozen cities, including Delhi, Bangalore and Jaipur. A home-grown Muslim terrorist group, the Indian Mujahideen, has been blamed for the spree, in which over 150 people were killed. In a chilling, 14-page admission of responsibility for the Delhi bombings in September, the Indian Mujahideen castigated the counter-terrorism efforts of Mumbai’s police, and promised Mumbaikars future “deadly attacks”.

As India’s first indigenous Muslim terrorist group—so they have often been described—the Indian Mujahideen are a worrying sign. They seem to have evolved from a decade-long campaign by Pakistan-based militants, including many fighting an insurgency in Kashmir, to incite India’s 150m Muslims to revolt. These groups have been held primarily responsible for half a dozen major terrorist attacks in Mumbai in recent years. In 1993 local Muslim gangsters backed by Pakistan-based militants set off 13 near-simultaneous bomb-blasts in the city, killing more than 250 people. In 2006 another co-ordinated bombing spree on Mumbai’s railway killed over 180 commuters. A Pakistan-based group, Lashkar-e-Toiba, was blamed at the time.

This week’s attacks in Mumbai seemed different, however. Attacks by bands of gunmen on numerous targets, instead of the mere laying of bombs, and the seizure of so many hostages, led to speculation, unsupported by evidence, that local militants in India could not have mounted the attacks without considerable foreign help. And the targets chosen—world-famous hotels and Western tourists—were a new phenomenon for India, despite being a pattern familiar from attacks directed or inspired by al-Qaeda elsewhere in the world.

Al-Qaeda has often threatened to launch strikes in India. In 2006 Arab terrorists belonging to the organisation were foiled in an attempt to set off bombs in Goa, India’s main destination for foreign tourists. Among the targets of the latest attacks was a Jewish religious centre in southern Mumbai which was reported to have been fired on by the gunmen. Police said that an Israeli rabbi and his family were among a group being held as hostages in a nearby apartment block.

Despite these worrying signs, Indian officials have so far resisted suggestions that Indian Muslims are being radicalised and joining a global jihad. Many refer approvingly to the observation of George Bush that Muslims from India have not in general turned up to fight the infidels on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. But security analysts have meanwhile despaired at the unpreparedness of India’s security agencies to counter a domestic Islamist threat. Whether or not al-Qaeda was behind the latest attack, that happy complacency must now have ended.
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12708194

Terrorism expert says India must revise counter-terrorism policy
By Augustine Anthuvan, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 27 November 2008 2342 hrs

SINGAPORE: International terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna said the multiple assaults on Mumbai late Wednesday are "watershed attacks".

Professor Gunaratna, who heads the Singapore-based International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said that unless the Indian government takes this threat seriously and takes decisive action, the threat of terrorism will definitely grow in India.

Gunmen from the little-known Deccan Mujahedeen group had claimed responsibility for the attacks, which have killed at least 100 people.

Professor Gunaratna said 'Deccan Mujahideen' is simply a front name that the Indian Mujahideen uses. Indian Mujahideen originates from a group called SIMI – Student Islamic Movement of India – and its members are Indian nationals who have been inspired and influenced by the Al-Qaeda.

He said: "The quality of this attack showed that the Indian Mujahideen is a very capable organisation. Certainly, it has planned this attack very carefully and attacks of this scale will mount in the future.

"The only way to prevent that, the only way to reduce the threat is to develop high-quality, high-grade intelligence on these groups, on the individuals, and to detect and disrupt those organisations – either to incarcerate or kill those individual leaders.

"Unless that is done, the threat of terrorism will grow in India. So India must rethink, must totally revise its counter terrorism policy and strategy as a result of this attack."

On the group's mode of operation, Professor Gunaratna said: "The terrorist attack was exceptionally well planned. They would have studied their targets very carefully. And in fact, what we are seeing is that the terrorists have invested very significant amount of time planning and preparing the attack.

"It is an Al-Qaeda style attack... the timing was perfect. And in many ways, the group is being inspired by Al-Qaeda, in terms of methodology and also in terms of target selection because they selected high-profile, symbolic and strategic targets."

The professor said the terrorists are out to instil fear within the Indian government and the Indian society. By selecting a range of targets from hospital to luxury hotels, they showed that they could attack multiple targets at any given time.

Reports have said that the Deccan or Indian Mujahideen wanted to end the persecution of Indian Muslims whom they think are being ill treated, and in extreme cases killed by the Indian government and by the Hindus.

The professor said there is no truth in that as the Indian people have treated their minorities reasonably well. He added that the Indian Mujahideen members have been driven by a misperception – a deviant and heretical doctrine.

Professor Gunaratna also believes that the Indian forces are capable enough to handle the situation and the international community should allow the country to resolve the crisis on its own.


- CNA/so
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/southasia/view/392731/1/.html

Obama says India's democracy will win over terrorism
27 Nov 2008, 2041 hrs IST, Chidanand Rajghatta, TNN

WASHINGTON: India’s democracy "will prove far more resilient than the hateful ideology that led to these attacks" in Mumbai, U.S President-elect
Barack Obama said on Wednesday as the world reached out to India in sympathy and support over what American analysts described as "India’s 9/11."

Both the incumbent Bush administration and Obama and his transition team sent out strong messages of condemnation of the attacks and their backing for India even as they coordinated their response in the transition phase in the United States.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice briefed Obama -- working out of Chicago -- over the phone as the White House assembled its national security and intelligence chiefs for discussion and analysis and offered India any help it required.

From Chicago, Obama also spoke to India’s ambassador Ronen Sen, to convey that his thoughts and prayers with those affected by "this tragic situation" and brief him about his conversations with Rice.

"These coordinated attacks on innocent civilians demonstrate the grave and urgent threat of terrorism. The U.S must continue to strengthen our partnerships with India and nations around the world to root out and destroy terrorist networks," Obama said in a statement issued through his national security spokesperson, Brooke Anderson.

In comments that extolled India’s institutional strength and was directed against the fundamentalist mindset in the neighborhood, Obama also predicted the triumph of democracy over the sickening ideology of extremism even as terrorists/mujaheddin earned universal disgust over the attack of Indian civilians and foreign nationals.

Audiences in the U.S remained glued to coverage of the Mumbai massacre more than 24 hours after the carnage began as it got wall-to-wall TV time on a long Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

For administration and security officials, that long weekend had already been disrupted by a mid-week security alert that spoke of possible terrorist attacks on New York’s Penn Station and other mass transit systems in the region; but the bloodbath occurred 10,000 miles away in Mumbai’s most famous landmarks.

The involvement of westerners, including Americans, Britons and Israelis as victims and hostages in the ordeal also ensured greater and more sustained coverage than usual, with U.S experts trying to connect the dots and link the attack to Kashmir and Al Qaeda, and its possible repercussions on United States.

In fact, there was little or no surprise over the attacks given both the alert in New York and the prediction by foreign policy experts, including vice-president elect Joe Biden, that Obama could be tested by terrorist attacks early in his presidency or during the transition phase.

U.S analysts mulled over the larger implications of the attack that seemed to also target westerners while suggesting that this was not a localized attack arising from home-grown militancy in India.

"The apparent focus on killing or capturing foreign businesspeople, specifically US and UK nationals, has never occurred before, suggesting a wider global anti-Western agenda. This stands in contrast to the national issues that appeared to motivate Indian Mujahideen," Jane’s Intelligence, said in a brief update on the crisis.

In Washington, the US State Department put out a hotline number (1-888-407-4747) to enable U.S. citizens concerned about the well-being of friends and family in India to get information and updates. A travel advisory cautioning against travel to India was expected later in the day.

However, the Indian government did itself little credit with long periods of silence during a chaotic situation. There were no Indian spokespersons available out of New Delhi or Mumbai for the world media is get a coherent account of what was happening even 24 hours after the crisis erupted.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/USA/Obama_says_Indias_democracy_will_win_over_terrorism/articleshow/3762125.cms

Attacks to Set Back Mumbai's Financial Ambitions
Wall Street Journal - 52 minutes ago
By GEETA ANAND and JACKIE RANGE Mumbai boasted some of the most expensive real estate in the world last year and the giant Indian city had ambitions to become an international financial capital to rival Hong Kong and Singapore.
Analysis - Mumbai attacks may hasten India rate cuts Reuters India
‘Attacks not to impact banking operations’ Hindu Business Line

IFFI: Terror attack in Mumbai mars proceedings on Day 5
Zee News - 3 hours ago
Panaji, Nov 27: The unprecedented terror attacks in Mumbai today cast its shadow on the ongoing International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 2008 in Panaji as security was enhanced in theatres and hotels and the incidents replaced films as the topic in ...
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Zardari speaks to Sonia, wants joint fight against terror
Hindu - 1 hour ago
Islamabad (PTI): Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari today told Congress President Sonia Gandhi that countries needed to work together to eliminate militancy and extremism in all forms and manifestations.
Pakistan offers support to India in probing Mumbai terror attacks Newspost Online
Pakistan Foreign minister condemns Mumbai terror attack PunjabNewsline.com
Economic Times - Times of India - Deccan Herald - The Associated Press
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Ottawa, November 16, 2001
2001-105

Globalization, Terrorism and the World Economy
Speech by the Honourable Paul Martin, Minister of Finance for Canada, at a luncheon organized by the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee and The Conference Board of Canada
Ottawa, Ontario
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Allow me to begin these remarks by saying how pleased I am to join you here today, and how grateful I am to The Conference Board of Canada and the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee for co-sponsoring today’s luncheon. The work of Reinventing Bretton Woods – the search for strengthened international mechanisms to foster growth and prosperity – has become even more critical in the wake of the tragic events of September 11th.

Indeed, it is in the long shadow of those terrible acts that Canada will, later today and through the weekend, play host to the G-20 as well as the meetings of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Development Committee of the IMF and the World Bank. These are tables which bridge the divide between east and west, north and south, rich and poor.

Let me say, therefore, how proud I am that Canada was able, in such difficult circumstances and at such short notice, to ensure that all of these meetings could take place. I am indebted to the city of Ottawa and its mayor for ensuring that they can proceed safely and effectively. Mayor Chiarelli is here with us today, and I would ask you to join me in recognizing him.

The finance ministers and central bankers at this weekend’s meetings come together at a difficult and challenging time. What do we hope to accomplish in the next two days of meetings? We have three objectives.

First, to deal with the economic impact of September 11th, especially in light of the global nature of the slowdown that preceded the terrible attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Second, to agree upon a global action plan to combat terrorist financing.

And third, to ignite the process of making globalization work for all – and for the poorest of the poor in particular.

Clearly, September 11th was an act of brutality that left the world first in shock, then in anger – an act of sudden violence that without warning stole a parent from 10,000 children and that shattered the illusion that we in North America are somehow insulated from external attack.

In response, we have borne witness to an uncompromising resolve that more than matches the initial shock. The world has come together in an uncommon and irrevocable commitment to eliminate the threat of terrorism. The physical assault levelled against us is being met by an international coalition of nations, faiths and force that will not fail.

For each of us September 11th was, above all, a tragedy in human terms. For the terrorists, however, the aim of their criminal act was not only the destruction of life – they were seeking to destroy our way of life. The terrorists did not choose their targets randomly. New York’s World Trade Center stood at the heart of the international financial district. It was a symbol of accomplishment and confidence. It was targeted for that reason. The terrorists sought to cripple economic activity, to paralyze financial relations, to create new barriers between economies, countries and people.

Our goal in response must be even more direct and even more purposeful. It must be to deny those who traffic in terrorism and hate advantage in any measure and in any theatre, be it military or economic.

For the major industrial nations, the slowdown we are experiencing is a matter of real concern. For developing and emerging economies, however, the consequences could well be devastating. Jobs might not just be lost temporarily, they could disappear forever. Incomes might not just fall, they could vanish for good.

Let us be clear, it is the poor primarily who bear the long-term consequences of terrorism. For this reason, all of us must dedicate ourselves to the cause of economic security, just as surely as we have dedicated ourselves to the cause of physical security. In that context, there are considerable grounds for optimism.

First, strong fiscal and economic policies have left most industrial nations better positioned to withstand economic turbulence than they have been in many years, even many decades.
Second, central banks have moved rapidly to maintain liquidity in markets and to bring interest rates down.

And third, the IMF, the World Bank and other international institutions stand ready to provide resources to help those most in need.

That being said, however, if we are to translate all of this into widespread economic recovery, a greater effort than that generated so far will be required, one that gathers countries in common cause and coordinated approach. Now is not the time for defeatism, but neither is it a time for rose-coloured glasses. The campaign for economic security must involve a swift and steady response to new realities.

Part of the terrorist agenda is to see governments turn borders into barriers – to erect walls behind which people live in fear and economies stagnate. To retreat from today’s integrated world economy would be a terrible mistake. It would be to concede victory to criminals. And we cannot allow this to happen. For decades nations – large and small, rich and poor – have laboured to promote a freer and more orderly flow of goods and services throughout the world. Why? Because doing so is crucial to the development of their economies and the well-being of their people. The fact is, we are all sovereign nations, but our relations are intertwined, our fortunes are linked, and our economies are interdependent.

The Canada-U.S. border is a perfect case in point. Every single day roughly $2 billion worth of trade takes place between us. And millions of families in both countries depend on that trade for their livelihood. The notion, therefore, that by slowing our borders to commerce we might somehow close our countries to risk is mistaken – it is a non-choice.

For this reason, the governments of Canada and the United States, through the use of new technologies and as importantly, innovative approaches, must work to make our border both more secure and more open. It is not simply a question of getting back to normal. It is recognizing that in the era of "just in time" inventory, what was normal between our two countries is no longer good enough. And for the world as a whole, the solution begins with the warning that while security of people must be our priority, we must not allow security of borders to become the new non-tariff barrier.

The second objective of this weekend’s meetings is the very specific task of shutting down terrorist financing. There exists today an overwhelming consensus on the need to wrest from the grip of terrorists the funding they rely upon to finance their violence. Without money they cannot buy weapons. Without cash they cannot fuel their cause.

It stands, therefore, that part of the coordinated war against terrorism is an equally comprehensive assault on its finances. This must include the formal networks terrorists rely upon directly, and just as importantly, the informal networks they rely upon less visibly. By definition, this implies a high degree of coordination between sovereign governments. There must be a commonality to our approach and a symmetry to our means. Governments must act on a national level, as Canada has with the introduction of its comprehensive anti-terrorism legislation. But so too, governments must tailor their measures to international practices. Otherwise, blood money will simply shop jurisdictions until it finds an accommodating home.

Therefore, at the heart of the G-20’s agenda this weekend will be an action plan to present a common front and a coordinated effort against terrorist financing.

First, we will be asking member countries to implement all relevant UN resolutions and conventions quickly so that they can freeze terrorist assets immediately and track attempts to move them internationally.

Second, we will ask all G-20 nations to ensure rapid compliance with international standards to combat terrorist financing and step up efforts to share information.

Third, we will ask that all G-20 members reach out to others in their regions to ensure that the fight against those who would finance terror is extended to every country, without exception.

And fourth, we will ask those G-20 members in a position to do so to provide financial assistance and training to countries lacking the resources or expertise necessary to implement effective measures against terrorist financing.

At the heart of this last point is the recognition that tracking networks of terrorist funding is a challenge for the most powerful countries on earth. Imagine, therefore, how overwhelmed small or impoverished states will find the task without financial and technical assistance. Canada has helped in this respect in the past. Just last week CARTAC – the Caribbean Regional Technical Assistance Centre – was inaugurated with the help of $8 million that Canada committed earlier this year. As further needs emerge, we will do more.

This, then, brings me to the third objective of our meetings: making globalization work – that is to say, coming to grips with the manner in which we organize ourselves as a world economy and bringing a sense of urgency to the task of reforming the world’s economic architecture.

Globalization is not the source of the world’s inequities. Nor, however, does globalization without development represent a panacea, automatically enriching the lives of those who fling their borders open to international trade and capital.

Economic growth is an essential precondition to the alleviation of poverty, and globalization can be a tremendous force for good. But in the end Canada’s argument has been that globalization is what we make of it. The choice is all of ours. Fundamentally, the answer lies in how we choose to govern ourselves as an international community. While there has been no disagreement on the ultimate goal – making globalization work and finding global solutions to both global and national challenges – there has been an ongoing debate about the best way of getting there.

Some have argued that we should continue to operate on a case-by-case basis, taking on each challenge only as it emerges. We have argued that such an approach is just not good enough for the 21st century. In this respect, Canada has advocated the development of new structures and sinews that would permit the world’s economy to better serve the interests of the world’s people – all the world’s people. We have argued that what is needed is a better-coordinated framework of laws and approaches – equally effective in bilateral, regional and multilateral fora.

And the fact is, progress is being made. For instance, at the centre of the 1997 Asian crisis was the failure of regulatory and oversight mechanisms in some countries to keep pace with the modern reality of international capital flows. In the absence of transparent reporting and regulation, uncertainty became volatility and volatility quickly became panic, transforming massive inflows into massive outflows – leaving the economic livelihood of millions devastated in its wake.

In the face of that crisis, Canada and others became even more passionate advocates for a new set of rules to make markets work. This has led to coordinated financial measures, nationally and internationally, focused on increased transparency, stronger oversight, shared standards and common practices. It has forced the establishment of new rules and new architecture such as the Financial Stability Forum, the reformed IMFC and the G-20.

Clearly, progress has been made. However, much more needs to be realized. For example, the current slowdown has underscored the need for a better framework to address challenges such as the rescheduling of sovereign debt. We need new rules of the game that would allow the international community to find solutions for debt problems in a timely way and with a minimum of social disruption. Three years ago Canada suggested that internationally sanctioned suspensions of debt payments – or standstills – could be a key part of a better framework. After some initial resistance the balance of opinion is shifting our way.

But now the time has come to move beyond theoretical agreement. Let us accept that mandated standstills can play the same role internationally that Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act or the U.S.’s Chapter 11 plays domestically; and let us now work on the mechanisms needed to make them real. The obstacle that we have to overcome in all of this is that the current set of rules and the existing structures we have built to manage the international economy quite simply have failed to keep pace with evolving reality.

Well, muddling through might have worked before September 11th, but not after. The battle against terrorism is unlike any other we have previously seen. It will be fought on many fronts. It will be waged not just with military means, but with banking controls, police actions and intelligence operations. Above all else, it will be waged in partnership, requiring a degree of global cooperation that exceeds anything that we have witnessed so far.

The fact is that on September 12th we woke up to a world more vulnerable than we had ever contemplated – one in which the voices of the few became the chorus of the many, saying now more than ever we, as a community of nations, must act in concert because no country acting alone can ensure the safety of its families to the extent that it can acting collectively.

The point is, if this is true in fighting terrorism, it is also true in setting up the structures to make international markets work effectively so that crises do not destroy livelihoods. And to take that logic one crucial step further, if September 11th leads to a rules-based approach to making international markets work better, such as we have domestically, it should also lead to an understanding of the need to round off the international markets’ hard edges, such as we have domestically.

Making globalization work requires more than the management of financial crises. Just ask the finance ministers from the developing economies. They recognize the importance of strengthening the international financial system. They know it will provide them with long-term economic opportunity. But at the same time, they are fighting every day to overcome challenges that are even more immediate and even more basic – such as disease, lack of housing, hospitals and schools, proper drinking water and sewage systems. Their point to the industrialized countries is: help us to meet these challenges so that we can help you manage those associated with making markets work.

The fact is, no country can develop its economic potential without meeting the basic needs of its people. This perspective has been embraced in the Montreal Consensus – the product of last year’s meeting of the G-20. The question now is whether September 11th will act as catalyst or counterweight to this cause. For Canada’s part, the answer is clear: now more than ever the challenge of globalization must be met. For billions of people, the greatest danger has not been that globalization will succeed – but rather that it will fail. Now more than ever we must redouble our commitment to strengthening the world economy, but also to strengthening the ties that bind us together as a community of nations.

Our task will not be a simple one. There will be a natural instinct on the part of many to retreat unto themselves – to achieve greater security through isolation; to reach out less vigorously and less widely than they otherwise might.

Well, nothing could be more self-defeating. Our interests are simply too shared to suddenly sever. Any sense of security that was grounded in a world less open and less interdependent would be illusory. It would not be a triumph over terrorism. It would mean surrendering to the forces that would divide us. Yes, we must protect our interests. But we must do so by raising standards, not by raising walls.

What might this mean?

Well, it certainly means putting an end to terrorism and bringing those who practise it to justice.

As well, however, it should mean lifting the crushing burden of debt from the shoulders of the poorest of the poor.

It should mean helping the next generation of African children to gain access to proper health care and a decent education.

It should mean that massive agricultural subsidies by those with the deepest pockets, that distort markets, that shut the door on imports, are incompatible with a world of rules and fairness.

It should mean ensuring that the new round of multilateral trade negotiations just launched lives up to its billing as the "Doha Development Agenda."

In terms of this weekend’s meetings, our message must be unequivocal: economies cannot withdraw their links; we must make them stronger still. International and multilateral tools cannot be laid aside; we must take them up as never before.


By going ahead with our meetings this weekend we are sending a clear and unambiguous message to the terrorists – a message that is as simple as it is straightforward: we will neither be silenced nor sidelined. As a world, we will continue to work together, large countries and small, to make the global community a more secure and more prosperous place for all.

In the aftermath of September 11th there exists a developing consensus and I believe a newly formed political will. Our objective now should be to put that will to work without pause. The time has come to take great strides in the place of small steps.

Such ambition is bold, but not without precedent. We saw it in the aftermath of the trauma that was the Second World War, when an entire generation decided it was time to change the world. They did so with a decisive victory, with post-war reconstruction and with the creation of the Bretton Woods Institutions.

Well, the time has come once again to follow their example – to let the greatest generation inspire us once more, to challenge conventional wisdom and inertia, to vanquish despair and to replace it with real and lasting hope.
http://www.fin.gc.ca/news01/01-105e.html

CNN correspondent relates globalization to terrorism
Robert Hanson
Issue date: 9/17/03 Section: News
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Media Credit: Amanda Selvidio
CNN terrorism correspondent Peter Bergen shares his experiences of interviewing Osama bin Laden back in 1997 Tuesday night in the Barry Marks Auditorium in Chafee.


09/17/03 - CNN terrorism correspondent Peter Bergen said that globalization is one of the key factors in shaping terrorist organization today. Bergen spoke to a standing-room only audience at the University of Rhode Island Tuesday night.

Bergen was the second speaker in the university's sixteen-part 2003 Honors Colloquium on globalization. While Bergen did not focus on globalization, he did say that without it, terrorism as it exists today would not be possible.

"The globalized world enables terrorist groups," Bergen said, noting that while they are all good advances, products of globalization like the Internet, cheaper airfares, 24-hour news networks and open borders all aide terrorist groups.

"The kinds of people who are in these jihadist groups tend to be quite sophisticated. In the globalized world, terrorist groups kind of take advantage of globalized tech."

Bergen, who interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997, said terrorism had evolved over the past 10 years. He said that after the attack on a Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo religious sect, which killed 12 and sent thousands to the hospital, terrorists had gone from trying to minimize causalities and maximizing coverage to trying to maximize both for "prestige." Because of this, Bergen said he believed that there would probably be an attack by terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction.

"The previous reigns on using these weapons have seemed to disappear," he said.

The correspondent also said that he believed that both the Clinton and Bush Administrations deserved criticism for their handling of terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Neither administration gets glowing marks," he said. "We can generously spread the blame around."

He did offer praise, however, for the Bush administration's handling of the war in Afghanistan, which destroyed many al-Qaida training camps and removed the Taliban regime which to that point had helped to hide bin Laden from the U.S.

Bergen pointed out that since the Sept. 11 attacks there had been no attacks in the U.S. and attacks on a much smaller scale abroad.

While he did not criticize the war on Iraq, Bergen said that the war had offered a new front for al-Qaida.

"Iraq is the future of al-Qaida, the future of jihadist groups," he said. "Unfortunately, I think Iraq will become the battlefield for al-Qaida in the future."

With regards to capturing leaders such as bin Laden and Mullah Omar of Afghanistan, Bergen said he believes that while it will help to disrupt terrorist networks, it will not bring them down.

"Al-Qaida has morphed from being an organization to an ideology," he said.

Bergen said he believes it is important for the American public to educate themselves about terrorism.

"This [recent terrorist attacks] is the beginning of a very professional terrorist campaign," he said. "It's in our principle national security issue right now. We should try to understand the enemies."

http://media.www.ramcigar.com/media/storage/paper366/news/2003/09/17/News/Cnn-Correspondent.Relates.Globalization.To.Terrorism-467443.shtml


Globalization and Terrorism
Arundhati Roy


Available Formats
CD: ROYA003aC $16.00
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Transcript: ROYA003aD $7.00

Where recorded: Santa Fe, NM
Date recorded: 18 Sep 2002


Since 9/11 most of the media have studiously avoided talking about the origins of terrorism. It just happens like the well-known four-letter word. The corporate networks and their overpaid talking heads mimic the Bush line: "They, the evildoers hate us." Why? "Because of our values and freedom." This simple formula is repeated ad nauseam even while most of the world's media point to ample evidence that terrorism has deep roots. Since U.S.-led corporate Globalization accelerated in the 1990s the poor have gotten poorer and the rich richer. Disparities among and inside of countries have grown sharply. The train of the New World Order has left many passengers behind at the station. From Argentina and Brazil to Nigeria and India, the servant's are stirring. They are unhappy with the master's rules. Perhaps the definition of terrorism should include the economic variety.

Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is an author, lecturer and activist. Her book, "The God of Small Things" won the prestigious Booker Prize. The New York Times calls her, "India's most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence." She is the winner of the Lannan Award for Cultural Freedom. Her latest books are "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire" and "The Checkbook & the Cruise Missile," with David Barsamian.

http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/ROYA003.shtml

How Globalization Spurs Terrorism

The Lopsided Benefits of "One World" and Why That Fuels Violence


Fathali M. Moghaddam
Book Code: C34480
ISBN: 0-313-34480-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-34480-0
DOI: 10.1336/0313344809
208 pages, figure
Praeger Security International General Interest-Cloth

Publication Date: 8/30/2008
List Price: $44.95 (UK Sterling Price: £25.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Also Available: Ebook
Subjects:
Psychology » Psychology (General)
Military Studies » Military Psychology
Endorsement From Paul R. Ehrlich,
Bing Professor of Population Studies and professor of biological sciences at Stanford University,
member of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the Crafoord Prize, an explicit substitute for the Nobel Prize in fields of science in which the latter is not given.:
Moghaddam has given us the Big Picture for better understanding radicalization and terrorism in the 21st century. His psychological analysis shows the deep wounds being inflicted by 'lop-sided' globalization, and the irrational reactions that can arise from people experiencing threatened identities and what they see as possible extinction for their way of life. This book also points to the vital role of women in developing a better future in the Islamic world, and to the importance of resolving the New Global American Dilemma-a dilemma associated with the rhetorical American support for freedom and democracy around the world, while at the same time propping up 'friendly' dictatorships.
Endorsement From Richard Wagner, Editor
Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology:
Fathali Moghaddam provides us with a welcome long-term, global view of the processes underlying terrorism. Readers will find this a novel approach to promoting the peaceful resolution of conflict in the context of "fractured globalization", where an emerging global community is countered by a retreat to ethnocentrism and fundamentalism as socio-cultural and religious groups struggle to protect their social identities.
Description:
This book explores modern Islamic terrorism in the context of globalization and cultural evolution. 21st century terrorism is different and new, first because it relies heavily on electronic communication systems and other aspects of modern technologies, and second, because it is in large part a product of fractured globalization, with its associated threats to the collective identity of Muslims. Part one of this work contrasts globalization as an ideal with globalization as it is actually taking place, with its enormous contradictions and threats. Moghaddam, a longtime and highly respected terrorism and conflict researcher, argues that globalization is resulting in serious threats to the basic psychological needs of some, particularly in connection with collective identity. Part two explores how globalization has brought sudden contact between different groups with no previous history of large-scale contact, resulting in a rapid decline in diversity. Terrorism is one of the dysfunctional defense mechanisms of people in such conditions, facing external threats. Part three describes long-term solutions, focusing particularly on the role of women and the nature of the family in traditional Islamic societies.

Moghaddam shows us why globalization is resulting in what he calls "catastrophic evolution," the rapid decline and disappearance of minority cultures and languages, and why that brings a clash of ideologies and the rise of extremism. There are also other dangerous trends, and those call for inspired solutions, springing from an understanding that traditional conflict-resolution, evolved in the shadow of the Cold War, is no longer effective and needs to change.

Table of Contents:
Preface
Chapter 1. A dangerous new world
Chapter 2. The psychological citizen and globalization
Chapter 3. Universal needs and the psychological roots of radicalization and terrorism
Chapter 4. One world: Globalization as ideal
Chapter 5. Fractured globalization: Globalization in practice
Chapter 6. Intergroup contact and catastrophic evolution
Chapter 7. Threatened identities, change and globalization
Chapter 8. Universal rights and duties as explosive threats
Chapter 9. The American Dilemma becomes global
Afterward. The veiled solitude: Women as the solution
References
Notes
LC Card Number: 2008016466
LCC Class: BP190
Dewey Class: 363

http://www.greenwood.com/psi/book_detail.aspx?sku=C34480

General Theory of Globalization & Modern Terrorism (2001)
April 8, 2007 — drsubrotoroy
A General Theory of Globalization & Modern Terrorism (2001)

Subroto Roy

This was a keynote address to the Council of Asian Liberals & Democrats meeting on November 16 2001, Manila, Philippines, and was published in Singapore in 2002, Alan Smith, James Gomez & Uwe Johannen (Eds.) September 11 & Political Freedom: Asian Perspectives. It was republished in the West on January 26 2004 on the University of Buckingham website, when the author was Wincott Visiting Professor of Economics there. It came to be followed a few months later by a public lecture at the University, titled “Science, Religion, Art and the Necessity of Freedom: Reason’s Response to Islamism” which has also been published here.

1. Globalization Through a Wide-Angle Lens
2. Suicide, Terrorism & Political Protest
3. Science, Religion, Art, and the Necessity of Freedom
4. Asia’s Modern Dilemmas: Named Social Life or Anonymous Markets
5. September 11: the Collapse of the Global Conversation
6. Envoi

Synopsis: The world after September 11 2001 has seemed a very bewildering place – as if all liberal notions of universal reason, freedom, tolerance and the rule of law since the Enlightenment have been proven a lie overnight, deserving only to be flushed away in the face of a resurgence of ancient savageries. One aim of this essay is to show this would be too hasty an assessment; another is to provide a general theory of “globalization”, a notion which often has seemed lost for meaning.

1. Globalization Through a Wide-Angle Lens

The perpetrators of September 11 subjectively acted in the name of Islam. It would have surprised them to know of the great respect with which the religious experience of Prophet Muhammad (572-632 AD) had been treated in the English language by Carlyle in 1842: “The great Mystery of Existence… glared in upon (Muhammad), with its terrors, with its splendours; no hearsays could hide that unspeakable fact, ‘Here am I!’. Such sincerity… has in very truth something of divine. The word of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature’s own Heart. Men do and must listen to that as nothing else; all else is wind in comparison.” 1

Carlyle told the story of Muhammad once not abiding by his own severe faith when he wept for an early disciple saying “You see a friend weeping over his friend”; and of how, when the young beautiful Ayesha tried to make him compare her favourably to his deceased wife and first disciple the widow Khadija, Muhammad had denied her: “She believed in me when none else would believe. In the whole world I had but one friend and she was that!”

Carlyle suggested the simple humanity and humility of Muhammad’s life and example, and even an intersection between Islamic belief and modern science (”a Voice direct from Nature’s own Heart”). He quoted Goethe: “If this be Islam, do we not all live in Islam?”, suggesting there might be something of universal import in Muhammad’s message well beyond specifically Muslim ontological beliefs.

In general, the life or words of a spiritual leader of mankind like Muhammad, Christ, or Buddha, as indeed of discoverers of the physical world like Darwin or Einstein, or explorers of secular human nature like Aristotle, Adam Smith or Karl Marx, may be laid claim to by all of us whether we are explicit adherents, disciples or admirers or not. No private property rights may be attached upon their legacies, but rather these remain open to be discussed freely and reasonably by everyone.

A second example is more proximate. It is of MK Gandhi the Indian sitting in South Africa reflecting on the Christian ideas of Thoreau the American and Tolstoy the Russian, synthesizing these with Hindu-Jain notions of “ahimsa” or “non-hatred” into a technique of political action to be applied eventually to end British rule in India; then transferred a decade after Gandhi’s assassination to the US Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr, and later, after King’s assassination, back to Nelson Mandela languishing in prison, who ends apartheid and brings in its place a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in South Africa.2

Construing globalization to mean merely Westernization of the East has been a commonplace error, leading to a narrow cramped perspective and reflecting ignorance of both East and West. There are countless examples of the Easternization of the West including the exportation of Judaism and Christianity, and of Indian and Arab mathematics and astronomy in the Middle Ages.

There have been and will be countless cross-fertilizations between East and West, let aside the subtle influences of Africa and other cultures and continents on art, music, dance, sports and beliefs around the world.

In general, whenever an idea, practice, institution or artifact transmits itself from its origin elsewhere, we have a little piece of globalization taking place. The speed and volume of such transmissions may have vastly increased in recent decades thanks to the growth of modern transport and communications but that is not to say some of the most important transmissions have not already taken place or may not yet take place. Ours like every generation may be biased in favour of its own importance.


2. Suicide, Terrorism & Political Protest

Global transmissions can be as soft and salubrious as Americans learning to enjoy football which is not American football. But they can be grim and desperate too – like the transfer of “suicide bombing” techniques from Sri Lanka’s civil war to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; or the idea of schoolboys firing automatic weapons germinating from A Clockwork Orange to actuality thirty years later in an American or a German school.

In fact the Thoreau-Tolstoy-Gandhi techniques of civil disobedience or a hunger-strike inflicting pain or sacrifice on oneself to show an adversary his folly, slide naturally to a limit of suicide as political protest — as when the Buddhist Superior Thich Quang Duc, protesting religious persecution by Diem’s regime in South Vietnam, immolated himself on June 2 1963, soon to be followed by other Buddhist monks and nuns, leading to the end of the Diem regime and start of the American war in Vietnam. Six years and half a world away, Jan Palach, on January 19 1969, immolated himself in Wenceslas Square protesting the apathy of his countrymen to the Soviet invasion that had ended the Prague Spring.

Suicide as political protest still abides by the Socratic injunction that it would be better to suffer wrong than to wrong others.3 Terrorism by suicide killing crosses that line — over into a world of utilitarian calculation on the part of the perpetrator that his or her suicide as political protest would be inadequate, and must be accompanied by causing death among the perceived adversary as well.

Gandhi, King and Mandela each had conservative, accommodative currents on one side, as well as radical dissident or parallel terrorist offshoots on the other, and we will return to ask why no non-violent political movement seems identifiable of which September 11 was the violent terrorist offshoot.

Where political protest is absent from the motivation, and killing the adversary becomes the aim with suicide merely the means, as with Japan’s kamikaze pilots, we have passed into a realm of international war between organized authorities in contrast with mere terrorism against some organized authority. A suicide-killer may of course subjectively believe himself/herself to be making a political protest though his/her principals may see him/her as an instrument of war.

Also, if it is correct to distinguish between kamikaze pilots and the perpetrators of September 11 by absence and presence of political protest in their motivation, terrorism typically arises as rebellion against some organized authority, and is to be contrasted precisely with war between organized authorities.

“State terrorism” can then only refer to an organized authority being repressive to the point of using its power to cause terror, physical or mental, upon a people or individuals under its control. “State-sponsored” terrorism would be something else again, where an organized authority assists a terroristic rebellion against some other organized authority, amounting effectively to an undeclared international war.4

3. Science, Religion, Art, and the Necessity of Freedom

The question arises whether anything in human nature or society may be identified to help analyse, explain or predict the myriad transmissions of globalization taking place, whether salubrious or not. If such a theory claims to be “general”, it will need to be wide enough to try to explain the motivation for modern terrorism and September 11 2001 in particular.

We could start with the observable fact there is and has been only one human species, no matter how infinitely variegated its specimens across space and time. All have a capacity to reason as well as a capacity to feel a range of emotions in their experience of the world, something we share to an extent with other forms of life as well. And every human society, in trying to ascertain what is good for itself, finds need to reason together about how its members may be best able to survive, grow, reproduce and flourish. This process of common reasoning and reflection vitally requires freedom of inquiry and expression of different points of view. The lone voice in dissent needs to be heard or at least not suppressed just in case it is the right voice counselling against a course which might lead to catastrophe for all. To reason together implies a true or right answer exists to be found, and the enterprise of truth-seeking thus requires freedom as a logical necessity. It takes guts to be a lone dissenter, and all societies have typically praised and encouraged the virtues of courage and integrity, and poured shame on cowardice, treachery or sycophancy. Similarly, since society is a going concern, justice and fairplay in the working of its institutions is praised and sought after while corruption, fraud or other venality is condemned and punished.

A flourishing society may be viewed as one advancing in its scientific knowledge, its artistic achievements, and its religious or philosophical consciousness. Each of these dimensions needs to be in appropriate balance in relation to the others during the process of social and economic growth, and each has a necessity for its own aspect of freedom.

Science is our public knowledge regardless of culture or nationality gained of ourselves as members of the world and the Universe, and has been the most important common adversary of all religions. Who or what is homo sapiens relative to other living species? What is the difference between plants and animals? What constitutes a living organism? What is the structure of a benzene ring or a carbon atom or any atom or subatomic particle? What is light, sound, gravity? What can we say about black holes or white dwarfs? When did life begin on Earth and when is it likely to end? Are we alone in the Universe in being the only form of self-conscious life? Such questions have been asked and attempted to be answered in their own way by all peoples of the world, whether they are primitive tribes in hidden forests or sophisticated rocket scientists in hidden laboratories. Our best common understanding of them constitutes the state of scientific knowledge at a given time.

At the bar of reason, all religions lose to science wherever they try to compete on science’s home grounds, namely, the natural or physical world. If a religious belief happens to imply a material object can be in two places at the same time, that something can be made out of nothing, that the Sun and planets go around the Earth, that if you offer a sacrifice the rains will be on time, then it is destined to be falsified by experience. Science has done a lot of its work in the last few centuries, while the religions pre-date this expansion so their physical premises may have remained those of the science understood in their time. In all questions where religions try to take on the laws of scientific understanding head on, they do and must lose, and numerous factual claims made by all religions will disappear in the fierce and unforgiving heat of the crucible of scientific reasoning and evidence.

With the enormous growth of science, some scientists have gone to the limit of declaring no religious belief can possibly survive — that we are after all made up of dust and atoms alone, that there is no real difference between a mechanical talking doll and a gurgling baby who has just discovered her hands and feet. Yet reasonable religious belief, action and experience does exist and may need to make its presence felt. Religion may not battle science and expect to win on science’s home ground but can and does win where science has nothing and can have nothing to say. It has been reasonable everywhere for men or women faced with death or personal tragedy to turn to religion for strength, courage or comfort. Such would be a point where religion offers something to life on which science has nothing of interest to say. These include the ultimate questions of life or death or the “Mystery of Existence” itself, in Carlyle’s term.

In fact the ultra-scientific prejudice fails ultimately to be reasonable enough, and is open to a joint and decisive counter-attack by both the religious believer and the artist. Modern science has well established that our small planet orbits an unexceptional member of an unexceptional galaxy. Copernicus by this started the era of modern science and began the end of the grip on Western culture of astrology, which was based on a geocentric Ptolomaic worldview (many Asian cultures like India and perhaps China still remain in that grip).

Yet the pre-modern geocentrism contained a subtle truth which has formed the foundation of both art and religion: to the best of scientific knowledge to this day, Earth is the centre of the Universe inasmuch as it is only here that reason and intelligence and consciousness have come to exist, that there is such a thing as the power to think and the power to love.5

We are, as far as anyone knows, quite alone in having the ability to understand ourselves and to be conscious of our own existence. The great galaxies, black holes and white dwarfs are all very impressive, but none of them is aware of its own existence or capable of the thought or love of any human baby or for that matter the commonest street dog.

What responsibility arises for human beings because of the existence of this consciousness? That is the common and reasonable question addressed by both religion and art, on which science is and must remain silent. We may come to know through science that life has existed for x million years and is likely to be extinguished in y million more years, but we do not know why it arose at all, or what responsibility devolves on those beings, namely ourselves, who have consciousness and reason to comprehend their own existence in the Universe.

DH Lawrence meant to raise this when he said the novel was a greater invention than Galileo’s telescope. Great painters, composers, or other artists can be imagined saying something similar. Art is the expression of life, and human cultures, like plants, may be fresh and vigourous with life or decadent and doomed to death. The society which both recognizes and comprehends its own artistic traditions through reasonable evaluation while encouraging new shoots of artistic creativity, will be one with a vibrant cultural life; the society incapable of evaluating its own art self- critically enough will be likely also to kill new creativity from within itself, and become vulnerable to a merger or takeover.

Science, religion and art each vitally requires freedom in order to thrive. In art, the function of reason arises in critical evaluation of literature, paintings, cinema, drama, music, dance, architecture and other aspects of aesthetics. Swimming against a full tide of majority opinion here often may be the right thing to do. The critic FR Leavis spoke of the importance of there being an educated public to maintain serious cultural standards; he meant that the freedom to be vigorously critical, often against shallow entrenched coterie opinions, may be the only safeguard preventing artistic or cultural standards from collapse.



In science, the activity of reasoning whether in public with one another or privately within oneself, dispels scientific illusions (like astrology) and so enlarges the area occupied by a common empirical understanding. Freedom is logically necessary here to keep potential avenues towards the truth open; it extends also to protecting through tolerance those factual beliefs which may be manifestly false –it may be a crime to steal or commit murder but it is not a crime to hold erroneous factual beliefs about the world as such (e.g. astrology is wrong because Copernicus is right, but it would be illiberal to jail people for believing in astrology.) Such a need for freedom of belief and experience, as well as the tolerance of dissent, becomes most obvious in religion, where the stupendous task facing all human beings is of attempting to unravel the “Mystery of Existence”. The scope of these ontological questions, unanswered and unanswerable by science, is so vast it would be only wise to allow the widest search for answers to take place, across all possible sources and religious faiths, wherever the possibility of an insight into any of these subtle truths may arise. Perhaps that is why some solitary thinkers have sought to experience all the great religions in their own lifetimes, sometimes by deliberate conversion from one faith to the next.

A flourishing society, then, would be one which grows along the three planes of science, religion and art under conditions of freedom. And such a notion may be measured at different scales of social life. It starts with the family as the author of Anna Karenina knew in its famous opening sentence: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. It could then move to flourishing tribes, neighborhoods or local communities, to flourishing towns, provinces, or whole nations. At any of these levels, the flourishing society is one which inhales deeply the fresh air of natural science, and so sees its knowledge of the material world grow by leaps and bounds; it encourages religious and philosophical discussions and tolerance so does not fail to comprehend its own purpose of being; and it lives creatively and self-critically in trying to improve the expressiveness of its artistic achievements. Such a society would be self-confident enough to thrive in a world of global transmissions of ideas, practices, institutions and artifacts. Even if it was small in economic size or power relative to others, it would not be fearful of its own capacity to absorb what is valuable or to reject what is worthless from the rest of the world. To absorb what is valuable from outside is to supercede what may be less valuable at home; to reject what is worthless from outside is to appreciate what may be worthwhile at home. Both require faculties of critical and self-critical judgement, and the flourishing society will be one which possesses these qualities and exercises them with confidence.

4. Asia’s Modern Dilemmas: Named Social Life or Anonymous Markets

Actual societies, whether small like families or large like nations, in East or West, now or in the past, typically display these qualities in relative balance, excess, or shortage.6 Broadly speaking, throughout the vast span of Asia, there has been unstinting admiration over the last two hundred years for the contribution of the modern West to art, architecture and the growth of scientific knowledge. Where it has come to be known and applied, there has been admiration for liberal Western political thought; while ancient Asian nations which hastily imported ideologies like fascism and communism have lived to regret it. Western political morality at its finest derives from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that rational beings recognise one another’s autonomy and treat one another as ends in themselves, not as means towards each other’s ends. 7

We see this in action today in for example the cordial relations between the USA and Canada, or between North America and Europe, or in recent attempts at European integration.

Asian nationalists in the 20th Century struggled to try to establish individual autonomous national identities, as the West had done in the 18th and 19th centuries. Asian nationalism represented an unwillingness to be treated as mere means towards the ends of Western nations, something we still see today when country B is used to counter A, then C used to counter B, then D used to counter C, etc in the old imperial manner of divide and rule This remains a serious problem of international relations but is something Asia can resolve independently by seeking to create for herself free societies which flourish in science, religion and the arts which would then be robust, self-confident and autonomous enough to decline to be used as means towards others’ ends.

Furthermore, Asian societies in some respects all resemble one another and pre-modern Western societies more than they do the contemporary West. These pre-modern societies were ones in which a person was identified by rights and obligations flowing from the place he or she came to occupy through inheritance or brave achievement, and centred around the loyalty of friendship and kinship, as well as fidelity of the household. The relationships between the sexes, between generations, between friends, all these across Asia today may still perhaps resemble one another and the pre-modern West more than they do some trends in the contemporary West. History and identity continue to predominate our cultures in Asia: everyone is someone’s son or daughter, someone’s brother or sister or friend or relative, everyone is from some place and is of some age; and every deed has a history to it which everyone knows about or wants to talk about.

In contrast, the modern Western financial economics which the present author teaches his students, describes a world of anonymous “efficient markets” with no memory; where anyone can thrive as long as he or she brings something of value to trade; where all information needed to determine prices tomorrow is contained in today’s prices and events; where nothing from yesterday is necessary to determine anything in the future; where the actual direction of price-change is random and cannot be consistently foretold, so we cannot in general make any prediction which will lead to profit without risk. We are to imagine a large number of players in such a market, each with only a tiny bit of market-power itself, and none able to move the terms of trade on its own. Each of these players then, according to the textbooks, seizes every chance to improve his or her own position regardless of all else, he or she will “buy low” and “sell high” whatever and whenever possible, until price differences between identical assets vanish and no extra profit remains to be squeezed out from anything. Such briefly is the pure theory of the efficient market economy which one teaches as an economist. One tells one’s students it is a good thing, and it is to be found, if anywhere in the best international financial markets, and that what globalization refers to is the whole world becoming like one big efficient marketplace.8

Yet, privately, Asia may have watched with dismay the near-collapse of family and social life which has sometimes accompanied the modern prosperity and technological advancement. The war in Vietnam brought obvious physical destruction to parts of Asia but may also have had more subtle corrosive long-term effects on the social fabric of the West.

If there has been something liberal and humane about Western politics while Asian politics have been cruel and oppressive, there may also be something stable and chaste about traditional Asian family life while modern Western societies have sometimes seemed vapid and dissolute. Specifically, if it is fair to say there has been too little autonomy experienced by women and children in many Asian societies, it may be fair as well to observe a surfeit of choices may have arisen in some Western societies, greater than many women and children there may privately wish for. How does a society find its right balance on the question of the autonomy, modesty and protection of family life and other social relationships? The divorce courts of the ultra-modern world are places of deep misery for everyone except the lawyers involved in the trade, and as some Asian leaders have observed, something the globalization of Asia could well seek to avoid.

Thus the dilemma faced by many Asians today may be how to absorb the efficiency of markets and sound governance of liberal political institutions, without the kind of private social collapse that seems to have occurred in many ultramodern societies, nor the kind of loss of political sovereignty against which Asian nationalists had struggled during the age of imperialism. We may now see how far this brief but general theory of globalization may be applied in explaining the bewildering events of September 11 2001.

5. September 11 : the Collapse of the Global Conversation

Words are also deeds while deeds may also convey meaning.9 The words and deeds of the perpetrators of September 11 2001, and of the nation-states organized against them since that date, are both components of a complex and subtle global conversation taking place as to the direction of our common future.

In earlier times, Gandhi, King and Mandela each led successful non-violent political protests of “non-white” peoples against “white” organized authorities. Their protests assumed a level of tolerance arising out of mutual respect between rebel and authority. None was a totalitarian revolutionary out to destroy his adversary in toto but rather each intended to preserve and nurture many aspects of the existing order. Each had first become the master of the (Christian?) political idiom of his adversary and was willing and able to employ this idiom to demonstrate the selfcontradiction of his opponent, who was typically faced with a charge of hypocrisy, of maintaining both x and its contrary ~x and so becoming devoid of meaning. Such political conversations of words and deeds required time and patience, and the movements of Gandhi, King and Mandela each took decades to fructify during the 20th Century. They had more conservative accommodative currents on one side, and more impatient radical terroristic offshoots on the other.

All such aspects seem absent from September 11 and its aftermath, which seems at first sight sui generis. No patient non-violent political protest movement can be identified of which September 11 was a violent terroristic offshoot or parallel. Tolerance has not merely vanished but been replaced by panic, mutual fear and hatred. Violence appears as the first and not last recourse of political discussion. The high speed of the modern world almost demands a winner to be declared instantly in conflicts with subtle and unobvious roots, and the only way to seem to win at speed is by perpetrating the largest or most dramatic amount of violence or cruelty. The world after September 11 2001 has seemed a very bewildering place — as if all liberal notions of universal reason, freedom, tolerance and the rule of law since the Enlightenment have been proven a lie overnight, deserving only to be flushed away in face of a resurgence of ancient savageries.

But this would be too hasty an assessment. The global conversation clearly collapsed very badly from the time of e.g. Carlyle’s effort in 1842 to understand Islam’s legacy to the point of September 11 2001 being carried out against the United States or Western civilisation in general in Islam’s name. Even so, the universal liberal virtues of patience, tolerance and common reasoning can still find use here — in identifying possible deep, long-term historical factors which may have accumulated or congregated together to cause such a crime to take place.

One such historical factor has been technological and economic: the invention and immense use of the internal combustion engine throughout the 20th Century, coupled with discovery of petroleum beneath the sands of Arabia — all of which has made the material prosperity of the modern West depend, in the current state of technology, on this link not becoming ruptured. A second and independent factor has been the history of Christian Europe’s alternating persecution and emancipation of the Jewish people, which leads in due course to the Balfour declaration of 1919 and, following the Nazi Holocaust, to the creation of modern Israel among the Arabic- speaking peoples. The history between Christianity and Judaism is one in which the Arabic-speaking peoples were largely passive bystanders. Indeed, they may have been almost passive bystanders in creation of their own nation-states as well — for a third historical factor must be the lack of robust development of modern political and economic institutions among them, with mechanisms of political expression and accountability often having remained backward perhaps more so than in many other parts of Asia.

The end of World War I saw not only Balfour’s declaration but also Kitchener, Allenby and TE Lawrence literally designing or inventing new nationstates from areas on a desert-map: “Our aim was an Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into terms of peace. We had to … carry that ninety percent of the population who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State must rest…. In ten words, (Allenby) gave his approval to my having impertinently imposed Arab Governments… upon the chaos of victory…”

“(The secret Arab societies) were pro-Arab only, willing to fight for nothing but Arab independence; and they could see no advantage in supporting the Allies rather than the Turks, since they did not believe our assurances that we would leave them free. Indeed, many of them preferred an Arabia united by Turkey in miserable subjection, to an Arabia divided up and slothful under the easier control of several European powers in spheres of influence.” 10

Beginning with the Allied-induced Arab revolt against the Turks, the classic imperial doctrine of “balance of powers” or “divide and rule” has seemed to continue to be applied in rather more subtle diplomatic form up until the present: with post-Mossadeq Iran against any incipient Arab nationalism, then with Iraq against post-Revolutionary Iran, then against Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991. It is only during and after the Gulf War that Osama Bin Laden, as a totalitarian revolutionary, arose as an adversary of the West.

Throughout these decades, little or no spontaneous cosmopolitan political conversation seems to have occurred from which a mature, sustained indigenous Arab or other Muslim nationalism may have arisen as the basis for nation-states, as had done e.g. with Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian or Vietnamese nationalism.11

From 1919 to 1945, the global conversation became preoccupied with other matters, and from 1945 to the end of the Cold War, with yet other matters again. While the three long-term factors unfolded themselves through these turbulent decades, the natural vibrant free conversation vitally necessary for the political life of any people continued for the Arabic-speaking peoples to remain mostly stifled, dormant, inchoate or abortive. Expectedly enough, whatever little current it had turned inward to the insular austere roots of a faith of the desert:

“The Beduin of the desert…found himself indubitably free…. In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness. There was no human effort, no fecundity in Nature: just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he became near God…. The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great…. This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being…. This faith of the desert was impossible in the towns…” 12

But this attempt to return inevitably became something reactionary in the late 20th Century. Finding the Beduin and the original deserts of Arabia transformed over the intervening decades, it could only try to recreate itself among the Pashtoon in the barrenness of Afghanistan, and led to the bizarre scenes of the Taliban attempting to destroy televisions and cassette-tapes in the name of Islam.

6. Envoi

The crimes of September 11 2001 were ones of perverse terroristic political protest, akin on a global scale to the adolescent youth in angry frustration who kills his schoolmates and his teachers with an automatic weapon. But they were not something inexplicable or sui generis. They represented a final collapse of the centuries-old cosmopolitan conversation with Islam, while at the same time it was an incoherent cry of a stifled people trying to return to the austere faith of the desert. Words are also deeds, and deeds may also be language. What September 11 has demonstrated is that even while the information we have about one another and ourselves has increased exponentially in recent years, our mutual comprehension of one another and ourselves may well have grossly deteriorated in quality.

Reversing such atrophy in our self-knowledge and mutual comprehension requires, in the opinion of the present author, the encouragement of all societies of all sizes to flourish in their scientific knowledge, their religious and philosophical consciousness and self-discovery, and their artistic expressiveness under conditions of freedom. Ultra-modern societies like some in North America or Europe may then perhaps become more reflective during their pursuit of material advancement and prosperity, while ancient societies like those in Asia or elsewhere may perhaps become less fearful of their capacity to engage in the transition between tradition and modernity, indeed, may even affect the direction or speed of change in a positive manner.

To use a metaphor of Otto Neurath, we are as if sailors on a ship, who, even while sailing on the water, have to change the old planks of the ship with new planks one by one. In due course of time, all the planks get changed one at a time, but at no time has there not been a ship existing in the process — at no time need we have lost our history or our identity.

© Subroto Roy, November 16 2001; January 26 2004

1 Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, London 1842.
2 In fact, “Gandhi’s correspondence with Tolstoy… only started after passive resistance had begun, and he only read Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience when he was in prison for that very offence”. Judith M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power,Indian Politics 1915-1922, Cambridge University Press 1972.
3 Cf. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Princeton, 1961, Gorgias 474b, 483a, b.Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Thinking, pp. 181-182, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971

4 Applying this to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the precise question would be how far the present Palestinian authority may be objectively considered the organized authority of a nation-state: if it is, then Palestinian suicide-killings are acts of war; if it is not, they are acts of terrorism. The rhetoric on each side
5 Finding water or even primitive life elsewhere will not change this.

6 For example, the relatively new nation-states created upon the ancient societies of the Indian subcontinent to which the present author belongs, apparently display a surfeit of religiosity combined with a shortage of rational scientific growth, including the sciences of governance and economics. Despite the examples of solitary thinkers from Kabir and Nanak to Gandhi, the political and economic benefits of social tolerance still seem badly understood in the subcontinent. Equally, the mechanism of holding those in power accountable for their actions or omissions in the public domain has often remained extremely backward. A mature grasp of the division between the private and public spheres may also have been absent in Asia; the distinction between private and public property is often fuzzy or opaque; the phenomena of corruption and pollution are then easily explained as mirror-images of one another: corruption is the transmutation of something valuable from the public domain into private property; pollution is the expulsion of private waste into the public domain. Each is likely to be found with the other.

7 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed. H. J. Paton, Oxford
8 The contrast between “named” and “anonymous” societies occurred to the
author on the basis of the theoretical work of Professor Frank Hahn of Cambridge University, Cf. Equilibrium and Macroeconomics, MIT 1984.

9 This was emphasized by the late Cambridge philosopher Renford Bambrough, “Thought, word and deed”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. LIV, 1980, pp. 105-117.

10 T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, A Triumph, 1926, Doubleday 1935, pp. 649, 659; pp. 46-47

11 The most may have been Attaturk’s Turkey, M. A. Jinnah’s creation of a
Pakistan separate from India, and Algeria’s independence from France — all distant from the fulcrum of Arabia. In case of Pakistan, it was Hitler’s invasion of Poland that led the British, in something of a panic, to begin on September 3 1939 to treat Jinnah’s Muslim League on par with Gandhi ’s Indian National Congress. The 1937 provincial election results had shown little support for Pakistan in the areas which today constitute that country. Cf. F. Robinson, “Origins” in Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, edited by William E. James & Subroto Roy, Hawaii MS 1989, Sage 1992, Karachi OUP 1993.

12 Seven Pillars of Wisdom, pp. 40-41

A General Theory of Globalization & Modern Terrorism with Special Reference to September 11

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Terrorism and Globalization: Is Terrorism a Part of Globaliz
Terrorism and Globalization: Is Terrorism a Part of Globalization?
In the world today, there is a growing trend in violence, both domestically and internationally, in the form of terrorism. It is present in our everyday lives and in every part of the world—some more than others. Terrorism takes on many forms and has had an impact on all our lives in one way or another. Whether it affected us directly with the loss of a loved one or an incident we were a part of, or indirectly by heightened security at the airports causing delays, sudden drop in a stock values we own, or emotionally by the countless reports and images displayed by the media, terrorism has affected us all and shows no signs of going away anytime soon.

The underlying question then, is what has caused the sudden trend in terrorism? Has it always been around but just not focused on by the media, or has something taken place on a global scale causing the sudden trend? There are many groups and a magnitude of theories on the sudden trend of terrorism. Political scientists worldwide are at the forefront of this investigation. Amongst this group are many differing opinions and theories. One popular theory used to explain the sudden trend in terrorism is g


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Are Terrorism and Globalization Linked?
Matthew Trotter
Dr. Ozminkowski, COM 108
February 24, 2006











Are Terrorism and Globalization LinAlthough a peripheral link between globalization and terrorism has been established, it does not answer a simpler question. Does globalization cause international terrorism? Haydar Bas is quoted by Kuru (2005) as saying, "'Globalization is a concept originating from the West which has became [sic] a façade to adamantly impose particular ideas on underdeveloped countries, such as the claim that the borders are removed and nations are cooperating by ignoring their economic, cultural, and civilizational differences.'" There are a few hypotheses in support of the idea. These hypotheses fall into four main categories: cultural differences, economic disparity, political frustration, and clashing market systems. There are also claims that globalization and international terrorism are not linked at all. Foreign Policy (2005) found "little correlation between a country's level of global integration and the number of significant international terrorist attacks on its soil." It even claims globalization may help countries combat terrorism. However, this study solely looks at numbers; the question to be answered here cannot rely solely on quantitative data.
Cultural differences introduced by globalization are thought of as the main cause of international terrorism. If the hypothesis is true that cultural differences cause international terrorism, then it can certainly be said that globalization indirectly causes terrorism. Cronin (2002) states, "Foreign intrusions and growing awareness of shrinking global space have created incentives to use the ideal asymmetrical weapon, terrorism, for more ambitious purposes." She also says indigenous peoples blame the perceived corruption of their customs, religions, and languages on an international system American behavior unconsciously molds. The CQ Researcher (2001) mentions cultural differences as a source of conflict many times. Conservative societies are offended by the media image of the United States.
There may not be enough solid evidence of cultural differences inciting terrorism though. Campbell (2001) writes, "Debates within [the Middle East] center only in the most trivial way on Western 'contamination,' such as by pop music and video games, of their cultures." Rojecki (2005) even says the Huntington hypothesis (culture as the major source of anti-globalization) "receives comparatively little support in [the media], perhaps because of the Bush administration's strenuous efforts to divide… al-Qaeda from Islam in general." It seems that cultural hypotheses for international terrorism lack solid support and are only popular because they take into account the most obvious differences between the West and Middle East.
Economic disparity is another source of hypotheses concerning globalization and international terrorism. The recent invasion of Iraq portrays an "image of the West as an enlightened but militarized and muscular liberator," and "recoups the reality of the global North as… a site of mass consumption in a world of horrifying need" (Barkawi, 2004). The CQ Researcher (2001) also explores economic disparity as a source of terrorism. "'With globalization, people tend to compare themselves with bigger and bigger groups, and if you're in a poor village in Egypt what you see in U.S. television sitcoms are people with a lot of money,'" David Byman is quoted.
However, economic disparity alone does not seem like it would inspire international terrorism, no matter how well-off Western nations are compared to the rest of the world. There are plenty of nations that are as bad as or worse-off than the Middle East that do not engage in international terrorist activity. That point alone discredits the economic disparity hypothesis.
The category of political frustration has two different theories concerning globalization and terrorism. The first theory, presented by Kuru (2005), claims, "Globalization challenges a specific type of state, one that aims to homogenize its citizens through sociocultural policies." This is true of the Middle East and untrue of Western nations. Western nations, being mainly democratic, do not attempt to lump their citizens together as one; rather, a great deal of diversity is present in them. In the Middle East, internal strife is intense, as one group of leaders tries to claim power and keep all people under its law. It does not seem that this challenge should concern leaders very much, considering they constantly struggle against internal opponents. It seems the leader could simply ban access to any international influence.
The other type of theory in this category is blaming the West for internal strife. Most of the time, this involves Western nations interfering and installing unfit leaders. As far as politics are concerned, Rojecki (2005), states, "Globalization is a cover for reinforcing American dominance with the UN as a fig leaf… the United States is said to support corrupt regimes that routinely violate human rights." Carmody (2005) agrees with this idea, saying, "Support for repressive governments… are likely to prove unstable as [it generates] 'blowback,' unintended negative consequences." History has seen Western installation of repressive regimes throughout the world, so this point has more bearing than the former.
Despite any Western nations' actions to install ineffective governments, it seems the affected nations are no better at helping themselves. The CQ Researcher (2001) points out, "The Muslim world never underwent a movement like the 18th-century Enlightenment in the West, which hastened the demise of religious influence in government." Considering the tendency of the region to reject secular government, it seems the best government to be installed, if secular, would be rejected. Western nations, wary of Islamic terror, cannot be blamed for avoiding the installation of Islamic governments.
The final type of hypothesis considers clashing markets, a concept that has not been considered enough. Mousseau (2002) pins the problem of international terrorism solely on this aspect of globalization, stating, "In this mixed economy, the clash of clientalist and market cultures can lead to illiberal and unstable democracy, military dictatorship, state failure, sectarian violence, or some combination thereof." It seems that this scenario could lead to the conditions Carmody (2005) claims are responsible for providing opportunity for transnational terrorism, "Islamic fundamentalism… 'failed states,' and the lack of effective territorial control." Clientalist societies and market societies are naturally clashing entities. To summarize, clientalist societies see cooperation as the exchange of gifts, base trust on life-long friendships within small, approved groups, and are very hierarchical. Middle Eastern nations are clientalist societies. Market societies place less emphasis on small, approved group loyalty and encourage cooperation with new groups and base loyalty on an agreed-upon sanctity of contracts. Western nations are market societies.
"From the clientalist perspective, however, those with market values are from out-groups and thus are untrustworthy. Moreover, by expressing self-interest, individuals with market values… appear to have no culture and are seemingly interested in little beyond the crude pursuit of material gain" (Mousseau, 2002). When this concept is paired with the fact that when people in developing countries see the breakdown of traditional relationships and the surfacing of zero-sum anarchy, they relate them to growing Westernization of their societies, it is not difficult to see that there is potential in this hypothesis. There are two more factors within clientalist societies that contribute to international terrorism. First, privileged persons often emerge as terrorist leaders because they have the most to lose from globalization. They exploit the hierarchical structure and gather many patrons from the economically lowest parts of society. To keep their patrons' loyalty, leaders must demonstrate strength. Second, in this society's perspective, individuals are responsible for the actions of the entire group. Therefore, terrorist attacks that kill innocent people are justified because leaders are showing strength by killing guilty people (Mousseau, 2002).
The hypothesis of clashing market systems is the best explanation for international terrorism. It does need to be further researched and tested to confirm its plausibility, but it definitely seems to be the most rational explanation for international terrorism. Mousseau (2002) sums up his hypothesis by saying, "The underlying cause of terror: the deeply embedded anti-market rage brought on by the forces of globalization."
Conclusion
Globalization is an economically-driven process of business which also makes ideas, cultural behaviors, technologies, and politics global concepts and lead to greater interaction among previously separated groups and/or nations. Recent terrorist attacks and attempted attacks have raised the question: Are globalization and international terrorism connected? There are aspects to globalization that have inadvertently facilitated the rise of international terrorism. International media, communications technologies, conveniences, and international finances have facilitated terrorism on a global scale. The more important question is: Does globalization cause terrorism? The answer to that is unclear. There are many hypotheses, considering cultural differences, economic disparity, political frustration, and clashing market systems. The concept of clashing market systems seems to best answer the question. The theory definitely finds globalization greatly contributes to international terrorism but is not itself the only cause. However, the theory should be further tested and researched to verify its worth.
References
Barkawi, T. (2004). Globalization, culture, and war: on the popular mediation of "small
Wars." Cultural Critique, 58, 115-147.
Campbell, K.M. (2001). Globalization's first war? The Washington Quarterly, 25:1,
7-14.
Carmody, P. (2005). Transforming globalization and security: Africa and America post-
9/11. Africa Today, 52:1, 97-120.
Center for Strategic and International Studies (2002). What is globalization? Retrieved
February 20, 2006 from http://www.globalization101.org/globalization/.
CQ Researcher (2002). Hating America. The CQ Researcher, 11:41, 969-992.
Cronin, A.K. (2002). Behind the curve: globalization and international terrorism.
International Security, 27:3, 30-58.
Foreign Policy (2005). The global top 20. Foreign Policy, 148, 52-60.
Gray, J. (2005). A violent episode in the virtual world. New Statesman, 134, 16-17.
Government of Canada (2005). Economic concepts: globalization. Retrieved February
20, 2006 from http://www.canadianeconomy.gc.ca/english/economy/
globalization.html.
International Labour Organization (1996). Globalization. Retrieved February 20, 2006
From http://www.itcilo.it/english/actrav/telearn/global/ilo/globe/new_page.htm.
International Monetary Fund (2000). Globalization: threat or opportunity? Retrieved
February 20, 2006 from http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ib/2000/041200.htm.
Kuru, A.T. (2005). Globalization and diversification of Islamic movements: three
Turkish cases. Political Science Quarterly, 120:2, 253-274.
Mousseau, M. (2002). Market civilization and its clash with terror. International Security,
27:3, 5-29.
Naím, M. (2002). Post-terror surprises. Foreign Policy, 132, 95-96.
O'Sullivan, J. (2004). The role of the media at a time of global crisis. International
Journal on World Peace, 21:4, 69-79.
Progressive Living (2001). Globalization defined. Retrieved February 20, 2006 from
http://www.progressiveliving.org/definition_of_globalization_defined.htm.
Rojecki, A. (2005). Media discourse on globalization and terror. Political
Communications, 22, 63-81.
Tetzlaff, R. (1998). World cultures under the pressure of globalization. Retrieved
February 20, 2006 from http://www.hamburger-bildungsserver.de/
Welcome.phtml?unten=global/allgemein/tetzlaff-121.html.
University of Colorado at Boulder (2002). Globalization and democracy: an NSF
Graduate training program. Retrieved February 20, 2006 from http://www.
colorado.edu/IBS/GAD/gad.html.
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Summary
The main lessons I learned about the search process are how to find more relevant sources and how to narrow a search. Before doing the research for this assignment, I did not fully understand how to obtain more related sources after finding a few of them. While doing the research, I was able to apply techniques I learned from the library's research workshop. I looked at source summaries and searched again using terms in the available source's or sources' subject lines to find more on the same topic. I also was not sure of how to significantly narrow a search before doing this assignment. I knew hot to use the Boolean operators, but I did not know that I could use certain parameters within databases to narrow the search as well. By using those techniques, I was able to narrow my search down to mostly full-text sources.
http://www.ozminkowski.com/globalizationpaper-sample2.doc

Globalization and the Future of Terrorism: Patterns and Predictions
Title: Globalization and the Future of Terrorism: Patterns and Predictions

Author: Lia Brynjar
ked?
Globalization Defined
While a precise definition of the term has yet to be established, many of the currently employed definitions use similar concepts. The University of Colorado at Boulder (2002) describes the global economy as one in which the main international players are corporations and lacking a structure tied to national boundaries. Refusing to assign a specific definition to the term, the World Bank (2000) describes it primarily as "the observation that in recent years a quickly rising share of economic activity in the world seems to be taking place between people who live in different countries," or, more simply, an increase in international economic activities. The Center for Strategic & International Studies (2002) attempts to precisely define globalization, calling it "a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology." The International Monetary Fund (2000) offers the broadest summary of globalization, referring to it as "the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through trade and financial flows," adding, "The term sometimes also refers to the movement of people (labor) and knowledge (technology) across international borders. There are also broader cultural, political and environmental dimensions of globalization." Globalization is "the increased mobility of goods, services, labour, technology and capital throughout the world," according to the Government of Canada (2005). Rainer Tetzlaff (1998) writes that globalization encompasses many aspects, including increasing international transactions, new communications technologies, an increasing complex division of labor and goods distribution, quick turnover of concepts and consumer patterns, and a significant increase in transnational institutions and political movements. Globalization is "a process of growing interdependence between all people of this planet," according to the International Labour Organization (1996) and mentions economical interdependence. Even the cynical Progressive Living organization (2001) talks about globalization from an economic standpoint, calling it "a process, well underway, which trends toward the undermining of national sovereignty, and therefore citizen's [sic] rights, in favor of the economic interests of gigantic transnational corporations."
All of these definitions of the term agree on the economic aspect of globalization. The process began as one of increasingly international business dealings. However, it is ignorant to not consider other aspects of globalization. A good definition for it is an economically-driven process of business which also makes ideas, cultural behaviors, technologies, and politics global concepts and lead to greater interaction among previously separated groups and/or nations. It seems that this is the most succinct and precise the definition of globalization can be without ignoring many important aspects of it as some of the previously mentioned definitions do.
Globalization and Terrorism
In recent years, the world has seen many terrorist attacks or attempted attacks in locations other than where the terrorist(s) originated from. Notably, the majority of these attacks involved Muslim extremist groups. A Madrid train was bombed, as was a London subway. United States embassies in African nations were attacked. Airplanes were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center in New York. Australia narrowly avoided a terrorist attack. In each of these cases, the terrorists did not come from the country that was targeted.
When the media covers the fight against terrorists, people often hear that a government is doing something to stop them without sending any military personnel somewhere in response. Instead, financial assets are frozen to slow terrorists. Terrorist websites may be taken offline. Group cells may be discovered within a targeted country and be shut down by local, state, and/or federal law enforcement officers.
Considering what is known about globalization and the current situation of international terrorist activity, one could draw a correlation between globalization and terrorism. It certainly seems that the two are connected. In a speech at the World Media Conference, John O'Sullivan (2004) identified four components of what he called the "world crisis:" globalization itself, the mass migration of people over frontiers and the consequent spread of ethnic diasporas, the increased power of religion over secular philosophies, and the extension of the powers and influence of transnational organizations. Are globalization and terrorism linked in any way(s)? If so, how are they linked? By answering these questions, it may be possible to see if globalization causes international terrorism, if international terrorism is simply an unfortunate side effect of globalization or some of its aspects, or if no link exists between the two.
Globalization Facilitating Terrorism
Some aspects of globalization facilitate terrorism. At its basest meaning, globalization means internationalization. Something is taken from a national setting and projected across the world. Certain nations adopt this, others reject it. When most nations do accept it and adopt it, globalization is taking place.
Cronin (2002) suggests that terrorism cemented itself as an international phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s, "evolving in part… in reaction to the dramatic explosion of international media influence." At this point in time, news media was truly becoming international in scope. Many broadcasting companies maintained correspondents or sister stations in other nations, sharing information back and forth. This would lead to the first visions of terrorism for many peoples who had never seen it. Presently, the media can be responsible for perpetuating the climate of international terror. "For example, there may no longer be… a globally organised terror network, but… the media have globalised our perception of terror" (Gray, 2005). Another aspect to this concept is that the media can be used by terrorists for their purposes. Campbell (2001) reminds his readers Osama bin Laden released his now-infamous recorded statements using instruments of globalization. Many have seen video of bin Laden on American media outlets even though it was originally released to regional network Al-Jazeera.
International media certainly is not the main byproduct that facilitates terror. Perhaps the main facilitator stemming from globalization is communications technologies. There are many devices taken for granted in Western society that changed the way terrorists operate, especially digital communications device. Clansmen fighting Americans in Somalia in the early 1990s used digital phones that could not be tapped (Carmody, 2005). The internet, mobile phones, and instant messaging have given many terrorist groups a truly global reach. Leading up to the September 11 attacks, al-Qaeda operatives used Yahoo e-mail, while the presumed leader made reservations online and other members researched topics such as using crop dusters to release chemical agents (Cronin, 2002). Perhaps even more troubling is that these technologies can be used to disperse terrorists to different locations yet stay connected. Cells can stay in touch through internet communications while websites spread ideologies (Cronin, 2002). It is estimated that al-Qaeda operates in over sixty countries now as a result of using technologies inspired by globalization (Campbell, 2001).
According to Campbell (2001), many things sophisticated Western societies have adopted to become more efficient are leaving them more vulnerable to attacks. This includes policies of free trade, relaxed immigration policies, and streamlined border crossing policies. Rojecki (2005) claims the "transportation infrastructures that had been credited by some… had been used by terrorists." This includes both national and international travel systems.
Even financial systems created to make international business simpler can be used for terror instead. Cronin (2002) points out that the fluid movement of financial resources can help terrorists, citing the United States' invasion as an example. While the allied forces closed in on the Taliban, money collected by small businessmen was moved across the border by operatives and transferred through an informal banking system to the United Arab Emirates. From there, it became gold bullion and was sent around the world before it could be seized. More concerning is the way organizations are beginning to gather funds to operate. There are many groups with global financing networks, most of them recognized as foreign terrorist organizations. Their sources include nonprofit organizations and charities (whose donors may or may not be aware of their monies' use), companies which send revenue to illegal activities, illegal enterprises, and websites set up for donations.
"The terrorist attacks showed that political globalization is as powerful a phenomenon as the globalization of the economy" (Naím, 2002). To deal with ever-increasing international relations, many organizations were set up, including the United Nations, the North American Treaty Organizations, the Organization of American States, and so on. In these forums, many people can come together to share ideas. At the same time, similar forums provide a hub for ideas and processes of coordination and cooperation used by terrorists.
It is apparent that many things inspired to grow or be created by globalization have unexpectedly been used to facilitate terrorist operations. The international media has made the world much more aware of their aims and activities. Communications technologies have been used to frustrate opposition forces ore ease operations within terrorist groups. Modern conveniences and economic policies have even been known to facilitate terror in some way. International financial systems can help terrorists hide their assets or gather funds. Political globalization can help terrorists meet and share ideas and procedures. It is not a stretch to claim that there are many aspects of globalization that have unfortunately been used to help terrorists.
Does Globalization Cause Terrorism?
Date: 2005

Institution: Contemporary Security Studies, Norwegian Defense Research Establishment

Bibliography: Lia Brynjar 2005. Globalization and the Future of Terrorism: Patterns and Predictions. Great Britain:Routledge

Key Words:
Globalization, social science and terrorism, armed conflicts, organized crime, money laundering.

Summary of Key Issues, Points, Conclusions:
Book written for serious researchers interested in the relationship between globalization and terrorism. Through the book the author discusses salient issues surrounding terrorism and he posits possible implications for the future of terrorism. The work contains in depth research and analysis on globalization and armed conflicts, international relations and politics, the global market economy, demographic factors in terrorism, ideological shifts, and technological effects of globalization and terrorism. Of special interest is the chapter on the globalization of organized crime. The author postulates, transnational crime organizations (TCOs) will continue to grow in diversity and sophistication in many regions of the world, and their global reach will be more pronounced. New and profitable areas of organized crime will emerge. Developed countries will be more affected by TCOs than in the past.
Implications for terrorist include but are not limited to the following:
• Increased access to fabricated identification cards and certificates
• Increased access to military grade weapons and equipment
• Decreased state capacities and increase in ungoverned territories
• Increase in transnational organized crime
o Drug trade
o Human-trafficking-sex trade and slavery
o Alien smuggling
• Increase in productivity of drug producers, refiners, and traffickers worldwide

Name of Researcher: Tyson Voelkel

Institution: Integrative Center for Homeland Security at Texas A&M University


Terrorism's Threat to Globalization
YellowTimes.org, November 12, 2002


Following the attacks of September 11, the United States recognized the threat terrorism posed to the global economy. Whether or not it was their specific intent, the architects of the attacks caused immense damage to the global economic structure. By striking at the economic and military core of this system, the inevitable spread of free trade capitalism throughout the world was temporarily postponed.
Since September 11, the United States has been pursuing a policy of coercion in order to destroy any threats to the current global economic order. The attacks of that day have been used as a justification to eliminate globalization opposition groups; this justification has also been used to mask increased U.S. expansion in parts of the world that were previously beyond Washington's sphere of influence.
Such newly acquired regional control can be seen in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This has given the United States greater influence in the Middle East by encroaching upon Iran's eastern and northwestern border. Military bases have been built in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The U.S. has also been furthering economic ties with Georgia in the middle of fresh invasion threats from Moscow.
By increasing its presence, the United States has worried other regional powers, namely Russia and Iran. Moscow fears that the United States will gain more control over the oil and gas deposits in the southern Caucasus, in countries such as Georgia and Azerbaijan.
Tehran fears that increased U.S. involvement around Iran may limit their country's economic growth and possibly even threaten its existence. Iran recently built a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan and is currently planning a new pipeline with India; Tehran also fears that increased U.S. influence in oil-rich Azerbaijan could limit Iran's access to oil drilling sites in the Caspian Sea. How the resources of the Caspian will be divided is still under contest with the five bordering countries -- Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan -- vying for rights. Further, U.S. corporations are planning on building oil and gas pipelines out of the oil and gas rich Caucasus and Turkmenistan bypassing Iran.
Along with encroaching U.S. troops on its eastern border with Afghanistan, many in Tehran worry about possible U.S. troops along its western border with Iraq. Iran and Iraq have strengthened economic cooperation recently with the Iraqi-Iranian joint committee for trade and economic cooperation. Both sides stressed the development of bilateral cooperation in all fields. All of this may be squandered any day with a U.S. invasion of Iraq. While many in Iran would not mind seeing Hussein go, the prospects of having the U.S. military next door is not a desirable alternative.
But Iran has remained cautiously silent over the encroaching United States. If they do not comply with U.S. demands, Tehran fears that the U.S. may induce "regime change" sooner than later considering that they are already part of the "axis of evil." U.S. President Bush recently stated, "Iran must be a contributor in the war against terror. Our nation and our fight against terror will uphold the doctrine: either you're with us or against us. And any nation that thwarts our ability to rout terror where it exists will be held to account, one way or another." Such statements have put Iran on the defensive.
With the American people supporting the Bush administration against perceived and real threats, the Bush administration has unique leverage to build more military bases and thus increase U.S. influence and intrusion around the world.
Washington is gambling that increased influence will decrease the chance of attacks against the global economic system and its own territory. With U.S. bases now littering previously hostile areas, and authoritarian central governments being propped up by funding from the U.S., the administration is hoping to suppress any militant sections of foreign societies.
However, such a policy is truly risky. The overt use of force by Washington is exposing U.S. policy, making it harder to disguise its strategy in moral and humanist terms. Because voting blocs primarily respond to moral justifications, the Bush administration could lose support at home as such justifications erode under continued scrutiny.
In addition, the administration could further inflame segments of the world already discontented with the global economic system. This could result in more attempts to attack the system. With the spread of U.S. forces as part of this strategy, there will certainly not be a lack of targets.
Further attacks on U.S. and Western interests will severely disrupt opportunity for economic growth. The October bomb attack in Bali, Indonesia was a perfect example of what further attacks will do to the world economy. Indonesia's tourist industry has been damaged, which threatens the entire country's economy since tourism accounts for 3.4 percent of its GDP; it also decreases foreign investment in what looks to be an unstable market. The Bali attack has already sharply reduced the flow of tourists to points of interest throughout Southeast Asia.
Therefore, Washington believes that the best way to increase world stability and thus restart economic growth is to expand U.S. influence across the globe. Instead of relying on foreign governments to control segments of their own populations who resist globalization, the United States is taking matters into its own hands. As for foreign governments who directly threaten global economic growth, either by not taking action against militants or simply hampering the release of economic resources into the world market, they risk certain demise.

Erich Marquardt drafted this report; Matthew Riemer contributed.
[The Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an analysis-based publication that seeks to, as objectively as possible, provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe. PINR approaches a subject based upon the powers and interests involved, leaving the moral judgments to the reader. PINR seeks to inform rather than persuade; it is currently a project of YellowTimes.org. This report may be reproduced, reprinted or broadcast provided that any such reproduction identifies the original source, http://www.YellowTimes.org.
All comments should be directed to PINR@YellowTimes.org

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Terrorism, Oil, Globalization, and the Impact of Computing
Three things have happened in the last few years, which are now converging with a fourth inexorable trend to make major changes in consumer behaviour, mostly for the better.

1) September 11, 2001 showed the world the destruction that a small number of terrorists could cause by hijacking unsuspecting passenger planes. The subsequent increase in security almost did not stop 10 other UK to US flights from being exploded above the Atlantic by British-born terrorists disguising liquid bomb ingredients in soft-drink containers. The terrorists will continue to get more and more creative, and will eventually destroy an airliner in an act of terror. This fear now hangs over all passengers. At the same time, security at airports is increasing pre-flight periods to up to 3 hours in duration. Multiply this by the millions of business passengers per year, and the loss of billions of dollars of productivity is apparent.

2) Oil at $70/barrel is making air travel more expensive for cost-conscious businesses. I happen to believe that $70/barrel is the optimal price for oil for the US, where the economic drag is not enough to cause a recession, but the price is high enough for innovation in alternative energy technologies to accelerate. Nonetheless, economic creative destruction always has casualties that have to make way for new businesses, and airlines might bear a large share of that burden.

3) At the same time, globalization has increased the volume and variety of business conducted between the US and Asia, as well as between other nations. More jobs involve international interaction, and frequent overseas travel. This demand directly clashes with the forced realities of items 1) and 2), creating a market demand for something to ease this conflicting pressure, which leads us to...

4) The Impact of Computing, which estimates that the increasing power and number of computing devices effectively leads to a combined gross impact that increases by approximately 78% a year. One manifestation of the Impact is the development of technologies like Webex, high-definition video conferencing over flat-panel displays, Skype, Google Earth, Wikimapia, etc. These are not only tools to empower individuals with capabilities that did not even exist a few years ago, but these capabilities are almost free. Furthermore, they exhibit noticeable improvements every year, rapidly increasing their popularity.

While the life blood of business is the firm handshake, face-to-face meeting, and slick presentation, the quadruple inflection point above might just permanently elevate the bar that determines which meetings warrant the risks, costs, and hassle of business travel when there are technologies that can enable many of the same interactions. While these technologies are only poor substitutes now, improved display quality, bandwidth, and software capabilities will greatly increase their utility.

The same can even apply to tourism. Google Earth and WikiMapia are very limited substitutes for traveling in person to a vacation locale. However, as these technologies continue to layer more detail onto the simulated Earth, combined with millions of attached photos, movies, and blogs inserted by readers into associated locations, a whole new dimension of tourism emerges.

Imagine if you have a desire to scale Mount Everest, or travel across the Sahara on a camel. You probably don't have the time, money, or risk tolerance to go and do something this exciting, but you can go to Google Earth or WikiMapia, and click on the numerous videos and blogs by people who actually have done these things. Choose whichever content suits you, from whichever blogger does the best job.

See through the eyes of someone kayaking along the coast of British Columbia, walking the length of the Great Wall of China, or spending a summer in Paris as an artist. The possibilities are endless once blogs, video, and Google Earth/WikiMapia merge. Will it be the same as being there yourself? No. Will it open up possibilities to people who could never manage to be there themselves, or behave in certain capacities if there? Absolutely.

http://futurist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/08/terrorism_oil_b.html





Palash Biswas



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