The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Terrorism

Mumbai- Notes/Links About Terror

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In the past some commenters have complained about graphic comments and images in posts that discussed war/terrorism. I don’t believe in sugarcoating the truth so we are going to continue to provide specific details about what happened. It is important to do so that people understand the gravity of the situation and are not able to minimize things.

Also, let’s not forget that they made a point of going after Jewish/Israeli targets. That doesn’t mean that I have no sympathy for the other victims. It is just important to mention that we recognize that alongside hotels, rail stations and restaurants they went for a small, obscure house. It was deliberate. But one way or another justice will be served.

Aussie Dave tipped me off to a story that says it appears that the hostages at the Chabad House (Nariman House) were tortured.

“They said that just one look at the bodies of the dead hostages as well as terrorists showed it was a battle of attrition that was fought over three days at the Oberoi and the Taj hotels in Mumbai.

Doctors working in a hospital where all the bodies, including that of the terrorists, were taken said they had not seen anything like this in their lives.

“Bombay has a long history of terror. I have seen bodies of riot victims, gang war and previous terror attacks like bomb blasts. But this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing,” a doctor said.

Asked what was different about the victims of the incident, another doctor said: “It was very strange. I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was yet traumatised. A bomb blast victim’s body might have been torn apart and could be a very disturbing sight. But the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words,” he said.

Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he said: “It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood,” one doctor said.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: “Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,” he said.

Corroborating the doctors’ claims about torture was the information that the Intelligence Bureau had about the terror plan. “During his interrogation, Ajmal Kamal said they were specifically asked to target the foreigners, especially the Israelis,” an IB source said.

It is also said that the Israeli hostages were killed on the first day as keeping them hostage for too long would have focused too much international attention. “They also might have feared the chances of Israeli security agencies taking over the operations at the Nariman House,” he reasoned.”


The Times of India shared a report from a Russian expert who speculates that the terrorists were trained by special forces.

Another report says that the terrorists posed as Malaysian students. The story relates information from the confession of one of the terrorists.

“But the 10 men were apparently not the only ones directly involved:
Another group, he claimed, had checked themselves into hotels four days before,
waiting with weapons and ammunition they had stockpiled in the rooms.

The 10 men in Azam’s group were chosen well: All were trained in marine warfare and had undergone a special course conducted by the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Preparations were also detailed, and started early.

Azam and eight others in the team made a reconnaissance trip to Mumbai several months before the attacks, pretending to be Malaysian students. They rented an apartment at Colaba market, near one of their targets, the Nariman House.

The chief planner of the attacks also visited Mumbai a month before to take photographs and film strategic locations, including the hotel layouts.

Returning to Pakistan, the chief plotter trained the group, telling them to ‘kill till the last breath’.

Surprisingly, the men did not expect themselves to be suicide terrorists. Azam said they had originally planned to sail back on Thursday – the recruiters had even charted out a return route, stored on a GPS device.

On the evening of Nov 21, Azam’s group set off from an isolated creek in Karachi in a boat. The next day, a large Pakistani vessel with four Pakistanis and crew picked them up, whereupon the group was issued arms and ammunition.

Each man in the assault team was handed six to seven magazines of 50 bullets each, eight hand grenades, one AK-47 assault rifle, an automatic loading revolver, credit cards and a supply of dried fruit. They were, as some media put it, in for the long haul.

A day later, the team came across an Indian-owned trawler, Kuber, which they boarded. They killed four of the fishermen onboard, dumped their bodies into the sea, and forced its skipper Amarjit Singh to sail for India.

The next day, they beheaded the skipper, and one of the gunmen, a trained sailor, took the wheel and headed for the shores of Gujarat, India.

Near Gujarat, the terrorists raised a white flag as two officers of the coast guard approached.While the officers questioned them, one of the terrorists grappled with one of them, slit his throat and threw his body into the boat. The group then ordered the other officer to help them get to Mumbai.

On Nov 26, the team reached the Mumbai coast.

Four nautical miles out, they were met by three inflatable speedboats. They killed the other coast guard officer, transferred into the speedboats and proceeded to Colaba jetty as dusk settled.

The Kuber was found later with the body of the 30-year-old captain onboard.

At Badhwar Park in Cuffe Parade – just three blocks away from Nariman House – the 10 men got off, stripped off the orange windbreakers they had been wearing and made sure to take out their large, heavy backpacks.

It was there that they were spotted by fisherman Prasan Dhanur, who was preparing his boat, and harbour official Kashinath Patil, 72, who was on duty nearby.

“Where are you going?” Patil asked them. “What’s in your bags?”

The men replied: “We don’t want any attention. Don’t bother us.”

Thinking little of it, Dhanur and Patil, who said they did not see the guns hidden in the backpacks, did not call the police, and watched the 10 young men walk away.

Then the carnage started.

On hitting the ground, the 10 men broke up.

Four men headed for the Taj Mahal Hotel, two for The Oberoi Trident, two for Nariman House and two – Azam and Ismail – for the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus by taxi.

At the railway station, Azam and his colleague opened fire, targeting Caucasian tourists while trying to spare Muslims.“

September 11- The Memories Continue

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As a child I remember hearing my parents and their friends talk about how the impact that President Kennedy’s assasination had upon them. They talked about how they remembered where they were and what they were doing when it happened.

The child I used to be had trouble understanding that, although the events of my own life taught me otherwise. I can tell you where I was when I learned that President Reagan had been shot. I can tell you what I was doing when we lost the Challenger and Columbia and I can tell you what I was doing on 9/11.

I spent some time trying to decide if I wanted to write a new post for 9/11. I mulled over whether I would just show the firemen raising the flag or post the video of the attack on the towers.

Tomorrow the family will do what we always do. Mom and dad go off to work and the kids will go off to school, it will be business as usual.

In other homes around the country children will mourn the loss of their father/mother/brother/sister/husband/wives. They’ll be faced with the hard reality that time never stops. Tragedy may strike, but the world continues. It is a hard and bitter lesson.

Tomorrow I’ll coach soccer practice and thank god that the boys and I live in a country where we can do this. I’ll listen extra carefully to their conversation to see if any of them discuss the day, and then figure out if we need to talk about it at all.

Regardless of what happens I’ll spend time thinking about the day and I’ll probably take a moment to watch the video. The horror of that day never goes away. I have seen the towers collapse more times than I can count, but it always bothers me. And the day that it doesn’t will be the day I wonder about myself.

I’ll probably spend a few minutes in silent prayer hoping that the country comes together and that whomever is elected president exceeds all expectations. The best thing that we can do to honor the memories of those we lost is work to improve things here. We won’t forget them.

For those who are curious here are some related posts.

As The Bodies Fell- He Played
We Remember
Football Saves Lives
911- Five Years Later An Angry Rant
September 11 Musings

Smooth Stone has a fine memorial post to Welles Remy Crowther, a victim of the terrorists. It should be noted that Smooth’s post was part of the Project 2,996 blog.

The Value of a Mistake

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Rabbi Daniel Gordis’ has issued another dispatch called When Mistakes Are Worth Making that I suggest you read. It discusses the value of the Kuntar exchange, the disengagement and why these mistakes were necessary.

“So, in the face of all the good arguments about how no self-respecting country trades a almost two hundred dead bodies and several living terrorists including Samir Kuntar (who, we should recall, shot a man at point blank range in front of his four-year-old daughter, and then killed the girl by smashing her skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle – and all this at the ripe old age of 17) for two soldiers who were almost certainly dead, how does one justify this decision? Wasn’t it certainly a mistake?

Yes, in strategic terms, it was probably a mistake. But sometimes mistakes are worth making. Take the Disengagement. It is now clear that the Disengagement from Gaza was a horrifying, costly and still painful mistake. But – and I realize that this is not a popular position – it was a mistake that Israel needed to make. It was the mistake that proved, once and for all, that the enemies we face have no interest in a state of their own. They just want to destroy ours. That is what Israelis learned, now without a doubt, as a result of the Disengagement. There’s almost no one left around here myopic enough to imagine even for an instant that further retreats will get us peace. OK, there are still a few arm-chair peace-niks in the States, insisting that there is simply no conflict that cannot be resolved. But here? Precisely the opposite. Now we know that the right was correct – further retreats will only embolden our enemies. They’ll demand more. And more. Until we’re gone.

The benefits of that lesson are understandably of no consolation to the families who paid so dearly in the summer of 2005, who are still living in temporary housing, whose marriages didn’t survive, whose livelihoods have never been restored, whose children hate the country that did that to their parents – but despite all that, the Disengagement was probably a horrifying mistake that Israel needed to make. For now we know, even those of us (and I include myself) who were naive enough to imagine something else. Peace is not around the corner. Peace is not a year or two away. Peace is not possible. Not now. Not a year from now. Not a decade from now. Because their issue isn’t a Palestinian State it’s the end of the Jewish one. We learned that through the mistake we made in 2005, a mistake that we probably needed to make.

And that’s why we had to make the trade this week. Yes, according to a variety of strategic criteria, the trade was problematic. It may raise the price for Gilad Shalit (not that those negotiations have been going anywhere, of course). It may affect future prisoners of war.

But if it was a mistake, it was a calculated mistake, a mistake well worth making.It was a mistake worth making when we think about what is the real challenge facing Israel. The challenge facing Israel isn’t to win the war against the Palestinians. The war can’t be won. We can’t eradicate them, and they won’t accept our being here. The challenge that Israel faces is not to move towards peace. Peace can’t be had. No – the challenge facing Israel is to learn how to live in perpetual, never-ending war, and in the face of that, to flourish, and to be a country that our kids still want to defend. And that is what we did this week.”

And Murderers Are Set Free

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Ynet reports:

The bodies Israel Defense Forces soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were handed over to the Red Cross on the Lebanese side of the border at around 9 am Wednesday, more than two years after they were kidnapped into Lebanon on July 12, 2006.

The prisoner exchange deal with Hizbullah was executed following months of German mediation, and after the government ratified the deal and President Shimon Peres pardoned Lebanese murderer Samir Kuntar.

Kuntar will return to Lebanon along with four other Lebanese prisoners, as well as the bodies of 199 Hizbullah members.

My heart goes out to the Goldwasser and Regev families.

It is a sad day when murderers are pardoned and given license to walk freely among us all. It is a sad day when those who rejoice in evil deeds and revel in the blood of the innocent stroll out of prison.

There was a time when I believed that if we only treated people with respect and dignity they would extend the same courtesy to us. It made sense to me. Be nice and others will be nice to you.

But it is a fantasy that doesn’t extend to the real world. Evil exists. There are far too many examples of people who do not feel, who are capable of doing horrible things that you and I could never imagine.

We can review serial killers. We can talk about Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gacy, BTK etc. We can look at examples of leaders such as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc.

The truth is out there. And that sad and lamentable truth is that there are those who will kill you and your family without compunction. You don’t let these people go. You don’t set them free. You don’t give them the ability to hurt others.

It is not smart. It is not wise and it is most definitely not humane. Save your sympathy for others. Save your tears for those who deserve them. There are monsters who walk the earth during the day and the night and Israel just released some of them.