Western Intelligence Services Expected A Terrorist Attack To Happen. But Didn’t Know Where

November 28, 2008

Thomas Mathew writes: It turns out that Western intelligence services, primarily the CIA, were actually expecting a ‘spectacular terrorist attack’ to happen before the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama and are now saying that the massacre in Mumbai has proven that they were right. As if it now makes any difference to the dead and wounded people, or to anyone esle for that matter, what the CIA and others were thinking or predicting.

I have always found it strange how government agencies, that are supposed to foresee events and help prevent them, claim after an attack happens in some part of the world that they had their suspicions all along that something of that nature would take place.

Why is it that the security services get it so wrong so often? Are they not supposed to have agents and informers on the ground everywhere? With all the spy satellites and unmanned drones flying above and the the high-tech centres listening to millions of phone calls – why don’t they pick up the important bits of information and detect terrorists getting ready to strike? Every time some terrorist atrocity happens, the intelligence services seem to be caught off guard completely. It is all very fine for security officials posing for cameras and looking sternly at everyone, with carnage in the background, but wouldn’t it have been better if they prevented the tragedy in the first place?

Anti-terrorist experts are now going on record and saying that India was the obvious choice for the terrorists, as it does not have the same strict security measures as the West or some other Asian countries like China, Japan, Singapore have in place. These experts are also saying that India was chosen as a target because the terrorists were able to recruit people on the ground with relative ease and have contacts in the military and the police. It would be interesting to know whether all these experts informed the Indian government of their suspicions.

It was inevitable that the moment the first explosions rocked Mumbai the name of ‘al-Qaeda’ started creeping up in TV news reports. It seems that al-Qaeda is now everywhere and is being blamed for all the sins of the world. TV journalists, who rushed to Mumbai, reported back to their respective countries and talked about the ‘hallmarks’ of an al-Qaeda operation, quoting unnamed security sources who were convinced that it could only have been al-Qaeda. The fact that the terrorists targeted the most expensive hotels in Mumbai, allegedly searching for American and British citizens in them, has convinced everyone in the intelligence community that it could be only al-Qaeda. The small matter of a railway station, a port terminal, a cinema, a hospital and a bar being attacked, where there were mostly local people at the time, somehow escaped the attention of the eagle eyed agents.

As we have already pointed out on our website, the Indian Prime Minister Manmoth Singh was very quick to accuse ‘outsiders’ of being responsible for the attacks in Mumbai. Although responsibility for these attacks was claimed by a group calling itself Deccan Mujahideen, Indian anti-terrorist experts immediately pointed out that it was actually a front for the Students Islamic Movement of India, a group with alleged close links to extremists in Pakistan. How convenient for the Indian government.

Strangely enough no one seemed to be ready to accept that the terrorists could have been homegrown, considering that the Muslim population of India is over 150 million. And what if this homegrown group had absolutely nothing to do with the mythical al-Qaeda and was having an agenda of its own? Like not liking the policies of the government which is seen by many Muslims in India as discriminatory towards them? Also, many Muslims complain that the so-called economic boom in India – another mythical development, confined to several cities in the country and a small percentage of the people – is not bringing any benefits to the majority of the population. Poverty and the huge gap between the few rich and the many poor has always allowed terrorists to recruit young members, and most of the attackers in Mumbai, as it is now turns out, were very young indeed.

Just like in the past world leaders immediately jumped on the band wagon of condemnation and made pointless and banal statements about the outrage that they had experienced when they heard about the attacks. What exactly it is that they could do to stop them is another matter altogether. Nothing, would probably be the best guess.

The most interesting aspect of the attack was the way the world media covered it. There was no sense of shock or total disbelief that we had witnessed in September 2001. It almost seems that the world is getting used to atrocities of this sort of nature.

Which is a deeply worrying thing in itself.

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