Huntington

The History of the House of Rothschild

The Rothschilds have been in control of the world for a very long time, their tentacles reaching into many aspects of our daily lives, as is documented in the following timeline. However, before you jump to the timeline, please read this invaluable introduction which will tell you who the Rothschilds are as oppose to who they claim to be.
The Rothschilds claim that they are Jewish, when in fact they are Khazars. They are from a country called Khazaria, which occupied the land locked between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea which is now predominantly occupied by Georgia. The reason the Rothschilds claim to be Jewish is that the Khazars under the instruction of the King, converted to the Jewish faith in 740 A.D., but of course that did not include converting their Asiatic Mongolian genes to the genes of the Jewish people.
You will find that approximately 90% of people in the world today who call themselves Jews are actually Khazars, or as they like to be known, Ashkenazi Jews. These people knowingly lie to the world with their claims that the land of Israel is theirs by birthright, when in actual fact their real homeland is over 800 miles away in Georgia.
So, next time you hear an Israeli Prime Minister bleating about the so-called persecution of the Jews, consider this, every Prime Minister of Israel has been an Ashkenazi Jew. Therefore when all these Prime Ministers have curried favour with the West for their re-establishment of a Jewish homeland, they have knowingly and deliberately lied to you, as they were never from that region, and they well know it, because it is they who call themselves Ashkenazi Jews.
The Book of Revelation, Chapter 2, Verse 9, states the following which would appear to be about these Ashkenazi Jews:
"I know thy works, and tribulation and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan."
The most wealthy bloodline in the world bar none and the leader of the Ashkenazi Jews in the world today is the Rothschild family. As you will see in the timeline, the Rothschilds have obtained this position through lies, manipulation and murder. Their bloodline also extends into the Royal Families of Europe, and the following family names: Astor; Bundy; Collins; duPont; Freeman; Kennedy; Morgan; Oppenheimer; Rockefeller; Sassoon; Schiff; Taft; and Van Duyn.
However, these are not the only bloodlines to worry about. You are probably aware of the centuries old pratice undertaken by many Ashkenazi Jews whereby they would change their name, in order for them to appear part of the dominant race of the country in which they lived, so as they could obtain influential positions in that country, which they would then exploit to serve their real masters elsewhere. There is plenty of evidence to prove the Rothschilds continue that deceptive tradition.
Furthermore the Rothschilds are known to sire many children secretly that they can put into positions of power when required. This started with the very first man who took the name Rothschild, who had a secret sixth son. Finally, remember the world is a diverse place, I could if I wanted change my name to Rothschild, or any of the names listed above, and that would not make me part of this family anymore than converting to Judaism in 740 A.D. will make these Ashkenazis Jewish.
Please, therefore, do not automatically assume someone you see with the name Rothschild or any of the names listed above are part of the Rothschild criminal network. Furthermore and most importantly, the majority of Ashkenazi Jews are innocent and not part of this network. Check the facts out for yourself first, this article is designed to inform people who the enemy is, not single out people of a particular race or people with a particular surname, who may have nothing to do with this Rothschild criminal network.

1743: Mayer Amschel Bauer, an Ashkenazi Jew, is born in Frankfurt, Germany, the son of Moses Amschel Bauer, a money lender and the proprietor of a counting house.
Moses Amschel Bauer places a red sign above the entrance door to his counting house. This sign is a red hexagram (which geometrically and numerically translates into the number 666) which under Rothschild instruction will end up on the Israeli flag some two centuries later.
1753: Gutle Schnaper, an Ashkenazi Jew (future wife of Mayer Amschel Bauer), born to respected merchant, Wolf Salomon Schnaper.
1760: During this decade Mayer Amschel Bauer works for a bank owned by the Oppenheimers' in Hanover, Germany. He is highly successful and becomes a junior partner. Whilst working at the bank he becomes acquainted with General von Estorff.
Following his father's death, Bauer returns to Frankfurt to take over his father's business. Bauer recognises the significance of the red hexagram and changes his name from Bauer to Rothschild, after the red hexagram or sign signifying 666 hanging over the entrance door ("Rot," is German for, "Red," "Schild," is German for, "Sign").
Now Mayer Amschel Rothschild, he discovers that General von Estorff is now attached to the court of Prince William IX of Hesse-Hanau, one of the richest royal houses in Europe, which gained its' wealth by the hiring out of Hessian soldiers to foreign countries for vast profits (a practice that continues today in the form of exporting, "peacekeeping," troops throughout the world).
He therefore makes the General's re-acquaintance on the pretext of selling him valuable coins and trinkets at discounted prices. As he plans, Rothschild is subsequently introduced to Prince William himself who is more than pleased with discounted prices he charges for his rare coins and trinkets, and Rothschild offers him a bonus for any other business the Prince can direct his way.
Rothschild subsequently becomes close associates with Prince William, and ends up doing business with him and members of the court. He soon discovers that loaning money to governments and royalty is more profitable than loaning to individuals, as the loans are bigger and are secured by the nation's taxes.
1769: Mayer Amschel Rothschild is given permission by Prince William to hang a sign on the front of his business premises declaring that he is, "M. A. Rothschild, by appointment court factor to his serene highness, Prince William of Hanau."
1770: Mayer Amschel Rothschild draws up plans for the creation of the Illuminati and entrusts Ashkenazi Jew, Adam Weishaupt, a Crypto-Jew who was outwardly Roman Catholic, with its organization and development. The Illuminati is to be based upon the teachings of the Talmud, which is in turn, the teachings of Rabbinical Jews. It was to be called the Illuminati as this is a Luciferian term which means, keepers of the light.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild marries Gutle Schnaper.
1773: Amschel Mayer Rothschild born, the first of Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s sons. He like all his brothers who follow him, will enter the family business at the age of 12.
1774: Salomon Mayer Rothschild born.
1776: Adam Weishaupt officially completes his organisation of the Illuminati on May 1 of this year. The purpose of the Illuminati is to divide the goyim (all non-Jews) through political, economic, social, and religious means. The opposing sides were to be armed and incidents were to be provided in order for them to: fight amongst themselves; destroy national governments; destroy religious institutions; and eventually destroy each other.
Weishaupt soon infiltrates the Continental Order of Freemasons with this Illuminati doctrine and establishes lodges of the Grand Orient to be their secret headquarters. This was all under the orders and finance of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and the concept has spread and is followed within Masonic Lodges worldwide to the present day.
Weishaupt also recruits 2,000 paid followers including the most intelligent men in the field of arts and letters, education, science, finance,and industry. They were instructed to follow the following methods in order to control people.
1) Use monetary and sex bribery to obtain control of men already in high places, in the various levels of all governments and other fields of endeavour. Once influential persons had fallen for the lies, deceits, and temptations of the Illuminati they were to be held in bondage by application of political and other forms of blackmail, threats of financial ruin, public exposure, and fiscal harm, even death to themselves and loved members of their families.
2) The faculties of colleges and universities were to cultivate students possessing exceptional mental ability belonging to well-bred families with international leanings, and recommend them for special training in internationalism, or rather the notion that only a one-world government can put an end to recurring wars and strife. Such training was to be provided by granting scholarships to those selected by the Illuminati.
3) All influential people trapped into coming under the control of the Illuminati, plus the students who had been specially educated and trained, were to be used as agents and placed behind the scenes of all governments as experts and specialists. This was so they would advise the top executives to adopt policies which would in the long-run serve the secret plans of the Illuminati one-world conspiracy and bring about the destruction of the governments and religions they were elected or appointed to serve.
4) To obtain absolute-control of the press, at that time the only mass-communications media which distributed information to the public, so that all news and information could be slanted in order to make the masses believe that a one-world government is the only solution to our many and varied problems.
1777: Nathan Mayer Rothschild born.
1784: Adam Weishaupt issues his order for the French Revolution to be started by by Maximilien Robespierre in book form. This book was written by one of Weishaupt's associates, Xavier Zwack, and sent by courier from Frankfurt to Paris. However en route there, the courier is struck by lightning, the book detailing this plan discovered by the police, and handed over to the Bavarian authorities.
As a consequence, the Bavarian government orders the police to raid Weishaupt's masonic lodges of the Grand Orient, and the homes of his most influential associates. Clearly, the Bavarian authorities were convinced that the book that was discovered was a very real threat by a private group of influential people, to use wars and revolutions to achieve their political ends.
1785: The Bavarian government outlaw the Illuminati and close all the Bavarian lodges of the Grand Orient.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild moves his family home to a five storey house in Frankfurt which he shares with the Schiff family.
1786: The Bavarian government publish the details of the Illuminati plot in a document entitled, "The Original Writings of The Order and Sect of The Illuminati." They then send this document to all the heads of church and state throughout Europe, but sadly their warning is ignored.
1788: Kalmann (Carl) Mayer Rothschild Born.
1789: Due to the European ignorance of the Bavarian government's warning, the Illuminati's plan for a French Revolution succeeded from this year to 1793. This revolution was a bankers' dream, it established a new constitution and passed laws that forbade the Roman Church from levying tithes (taxes) and also removed its exemption from taxation.
1790: Mayer Amschel Rothschild states,
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."
1791: The Rothschilds get, "control of a nation's money," through Alexander Hamilton (their agent in George Washington’s cabinet) when they set up a central bank in the USA called the First Bank of the United States. This is established with a 20 year charter.
1792: Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild born.
1796: Amschel Mayer Rothschild marries Eva Hanau.
1798: John Robison publishes a book entitled, "Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies." In this book, Professor Robison of the University of Edinburgh, one of the leading intellects of his time, who in 1783 was elected general secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, gave details of the whole Rothschild Illuminati plot.
He advised how he had been a high degree mason in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and had been invited by Adam Weishaupt to Europe, where he had been given a revised copy of Weishaupt's conspiracy. However, although he pretended to go along with it, Professor Robison did not agree with it and therefore published his aforementioned book. The book included details of the Bavarian government's investigation into the Illuminati and the French Revolution.
That same year on July 19th, David Pappen, President of Harvard University, lectured the graduating class on the influence illuminism was having on American politics and religion.
At the age of 21, Nathan Mayer Rothschild leaves Frankfurt for England, where with a large sum of money given to him by his father, he sets up a banking house in London.
1800: Salomon Mayer Rothschild marries Caroline Stern.
1806: Napolean states that it is his,
"object to remove the house of Hess-Cassel from rulership and to strike it out of the list of powers."
On hearing this, Prince William IX of Hesse-Hanau, flees Germany, goes to Denmark and entrusts his fortune valued at $3,000,000 at that time to Mayer Amschel Rothschild for safekeeping.
Nathan Mayer Rothschild marries Hannah Barent Cohen the daughter of a wealthy London merchant.
1808: Nathan Mayer Rothschild has his first son born Lionel Nathan de Rothschild.
1810: Sir Francis Baring and Abraham Goldsmid die. This leaves Nathan Mayer Rothschild as the remaining major banker in England.
Salomon Mayer Rothschild goes to Vienna, Austria and sets up the bank, M. von Rothschild und Söhne.
1811: The charter for the Rothschilds Bank of the United States runs out and Congress votes against its renewal. Nathan Mayer Rothschild is not amused and he states,
"Either the application for renewal of the charter is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war."
However the United States stands firm and the Charter is not renewed, which causes Nathan Mayer Rothschild to issue another threat,
"Teach those impudent Americans a lesson. Bring them back to colonial status."
1812: Backed by Rothschild money, and Nathan Mayer Rothschild's orders, the British declare war on the United States. The Rothschilds plan was to cause the United States to build up such a debt in fighting this war that they would have to surrender to the Rothschilds and allow the charter for the Rothschild owned First Bank of the United States to be renewed.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild dies. In his will he lays out specific laws that the House of Rothschild were to follow: all key positions in the family business were only to be held by family members; only male members of the family were allowed to participate in the family business, this included a reported sixth secret bastard son (It is important to note that Mayer Amschel Rothschild also has five daughters, so today the spread of the Rothschild Zionist dynasty without the Rothschild name is far and wide, and Jews believe the mixed offspring of a Jewish mother is solely Jewish); the family was to intermarry with it’s first and second cousins to preserve the family fortune (of the 18 marriages by Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s grandchildren, 16 were between first cousins - a practice known today as inbreeding); no public inventory of his estate was to be published; no legal action was to be taken with regard to the value of the inheritance; the eldest son of the eldest son was to become the head of the family (this condition could only be overturned when the majority of the family agreed otherwise).
This was straightaway the case and Nathan Mayer Rothschild was elected head of the family following his father, Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s death.
Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild goes to Paris, France to set up the bank, de Rothschild Frères.
Nathaniel de Rothschild, the son in law of Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild, born.
1814: With regard to the $3,000,000 Prince William IX of Hesse-Hanau had entrusted to Mayer Amschel Rothschild for safekeeping, for an account of what happened next we turn to the Jewish Encyclopaedia, 1905 edition, Volume 10, page 494, which states,
"According to legend this money was hidden away in wine casks, and, escaping the search of Napoleon's soldiers when they entered Frankfurt, was restored intact in the same casks in 1814, when the elector (Prince William IX of Hesse-Hanau) returned to the electorate (Germany). The facts are somewhat less romantic, and more businesslike."
This last line indicates the money was never returned by Rothschild to Prince William IX of Hesse-Hanau. The encyclopaedia goes on to state,
"Nathan Mayer Rothschild invested this $3,000,000 in, gold from the East India Company knowing that it would be needed for Wellington's peninsula campaign."
On the stolen money Nathan made,
"no less than four profits:
i) On the sale of Wellington's paper which he bought at 50 cents on the dollar and collected at par;
ii) on the sale of gold to Wellington;
iii) on its repurchase; and
iv) on forwarding it to Portugal."
1815: The five Rothschild brothers work to supply gold to both Wellington's army (through Nathan in England) and Napoleon's army (through Jacob in France), and begin their policy of funding both sides in wars. The Rothschilds love wars because they are massive generators of risk free debt.
This is because they are guaranteed by the government of a country, and therefore the efforts of the population of that country, and it doesn't matter if that country loses the war because the loans are given on the guarantee that the victor will honour the debts of the vanquished.
Whilst the Rothschilds are funding both sides in this war, they use the banks they have spread out across Europe to give them the opportunity to set up an unrivalled postal service network of secret routes and fast couriers. The post these couriers carried was to be opened up by these couriers and their details given to the Rothschilds so they always were one step ahead of current events.
Furthermore, these Rothschild couriers were the only merchants allowed to pass through the English and French blockades. It was these couriers who also kept Nathan Mayer Rothschild up to date with how the war was going so he could use that intelligence to buy and sell from his position on the stock exchange in accordance with that intelligence.
One of Rothschild's couriers was a man named Rothworth. When the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo was won by the British, Rothworth took off for the Channel and was able to deliver this news to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, a full 24 hours before Wellington's own courier.
At that time British bonds were called consuls and they were traded on the floor of the stock exchange. Nathan Mayer Rothschild instructed all his workers on the floor to start selling consuls. The made all the other traders believe that the British had lost the war so they started selling frantically.
Therefore the consuls plummeted in value which was when Nathan Mayer Rothschild discreetly instructed his workers to purchase all the consuls they could lay their hands on.
When news came through that the British had actually won the war, the consuls went up to a level even higher than before the war ended leaving Nathan Mayer Rothschild with a return of approximately 20 to 1 on his investment.
This gave the Rothschild family complete control of the British economy, now the financial centre of the world following Napolean's defeat, and forced England to set up a new Bank of England, which Nathan Mayer Rothschild controlled.
Interestingly 100 years later the New York Times would run a story stating that Nathan Mayer Rothschild's grandson had attempted to secure a court order to suppress publication of a book which had this insider trading story in it. The Rothschild family claimed the story was untrue and libellous, but the court denied the Rothschilds request and ordered the family to pay all court costs.
Back to 1815, this is the year Nathan Mayer Rothschild makes his famous statement,
"I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply."
He would go onto brag that in the 17 years he had been in England he had increased the £20,000 stake given to him by his father, 2500 times to £50 million.
The Rothschilds also use their control of the Bank of England to replace the method of shipping gold from country to country and instead used their five banks spread across Europe to set up a system of paper debits and credits, the banking system of today.
By the end of this century, a period of time that was known as the, "Age of the Rothschilds," it is estimated that the Rothschild family controlled half the wealth of the world.
However something that did not go well for the Rothschilds this year was the Congress of Vienna, which started in September, 1814 and concluded in June of this year. The reason for this Congress of Vienna, was for the Rothschilds to create a form of world government, to give them complete political control over much of the civilized world.
Many of the European governments were in debt to the Rothschilds, so they figured they could use that as a bargaining tool. However the Tsar Alexander I of Russia, who had not succumbed to a Rothschild central bank, would not go along with the plan, so the Rothschild world government plan failed.
Enraged by this, Nathan Mayer Rothschild swore that some day he or his descendants would destroy the Tsar Alexander I's entire family and descendants. Unfortunately he was true to his word and 102 years later Rothschild funded Bolsheviks would act upon that promise.
Interestingly, world government fanatic and Ashkenazi Jew, Henry Kissinger, did his doctoral dissertation on the Congress of Vienna.
1816: The American Congress passes a bill permitting yet another Rothschild dominated central bank, which gives the Rothschilds control of the American money supply again. This is called the Second Bank of the United States and is given a twenty year charter. The British war against the America therefore ends with the deaths of thousands of British and American soldiers, but the Rothschilds get their bank.
1818: Following the French securing massive loans in 1817 in order to help rebuild after their disastrous defeat at Waterloo, Rothschild agents bought vast amounts of French government bonds causing their value to increase.
On November 5th they dumped the lot on the open market causing their value to plummet and France to go into a financial panic. The Rothschilds then stepped in to take control of the French money supply. This was the same year the Rothschilds were able to loan £5,000,000 to the Prussian government.
1821: Kalmann (Carl) Mayer Rothschild was sent to Naples, Italy. He would end up doing a lot of business with the Vatican and Pope Gregory XVI subsequently conferred upon him the Order of St. George.
Also, whenever the Pope received Kalmann, he would give him his hand rather than the customary toe to kiss, which showed the extent of Kalmann's power over the Vatican.
1822: The emperor of Austria made the five Rothschild brothers Barons. Nathan Mayer Rothschild chose not to take up the title.
1823: The Rothschilds take over the financial operations of the Catholic Church, worldwide.
1827: Sir Walter Scott publishes his nine volume set, The life of Napolean and in volume two he states that the French Revolution was planned by the Illuminati (Adam Weishaupt) and was financed by the money changers of Europe (The Rothschilds).
1832: President Andrew Jackson (the 7th President of the United States from 1829 to 1837), runs the campaign for his second term in office under the slogan, "Jackson And No Bank!" This is in reference to his plan to take the control of the American money system to benefit the American people, not for the profiteering of the Rothschilds.
1833: President Andrew Jackson starts removing the government's deposits from the Rothschild controlled, Second Bank of the United States and instead deposits them into banks directed by democratic bankers.
This causes the Rothschilds to panic and so they do what they do best, contract the money supply causing a depression. President Jackson knows what they are up to and later states,
"You are a den of thieves vipers, and I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out."
1834: The Italian revolutionary leader, Guiseppe Mazzini, is selected by the Illuminati to direct their revolutionary program throughout the world and would serve in that capacity until he died in 1872.
1835: On January 30, an assassin tries to shoot President Jackson, but miraculously both of the assassin's pistols misfired. President Jackson would later claim that he knew the Rothschilds were responsible for that attempted assassination. He is not the only one, the assassin, Richard Lawrence, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity, later bragged that powerful people in Europe had hired him and promised to protect him if he were caught.
The Rothschilds acquire the rights in the Almadén quicksilver mines in Spain. This was at the time the biggest concession in the world and as quicksilver was a vital component in the refining of gold or silver this gave the Rothschilds a virtual world monopoly.
1836: Following his years of fighting against the Rothschilds and their central bank in America, President Andrew Jackson finally succeeds in throwing the Rothschilds central bank out of America, when the bank's charter is not renewed. It would not be until 1913 that the Rothschilds would be able to set up their third central bank in America, the Federal Reserve, and to ensure no mistakes are made, this time they will put one of their own bloodline, Jacob Schiff, in charge of the project.
Nathan Mayer Rothschild dies and the control of his bank, N. M. Rothschild & Sons is passed on to his younger brother, James Mayer Rothschild.
1837: The Rothschilds send one of their own, August Belmont, an Ashkenazi Jew, to America to salvage their banking interests defeated by President Andrew Jackson.
1840: The Rothschilds become the Bank of England’s bullion brokers. They set up agencies in California and Australia.
1841: President John Tyler (the 10th President of the United States From 1841 to 1845) vetoed the act to renew the charter for the Bank of the United States. He goes on to receive hundreds of letters threatening him with assassination.
1844: Salomon Mayer Rothschild purchases the United Coal Mines of Vítkovice and Austro-Hungarian Blast Furnace Company that would go on to be one of the top ten global industrial concerns.
Benjamin Disraeli, an Ashkenazi Jew (who would go on to become British Prime Minister twice - the only admitted Ashkenazi Jew to do so) publishes Coningsby, in which he characterises Nathan Mayer Rothschild as,
"the Lord and Master of the money markets of the world, and of course virtually Lord and Master of everything else. He literally held the revenues of Southern Italy in pawn, and Monarchs and Ministers of all countries courted his advice and were guided by his suggestions."
1845: The Great American Patriot, Andrew Jackson (7th President of the United States) dies.
Before his death he is asked what he regarded his as greatest achievement. He replies without hesitation,
"I Killed The Bank,"
This is in reference to the fact he banished the Rothschilds Second Bank of the United States in 1836.
Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild (who by now had married his niece, Betty, Salomon Mayer Rothschild's daughter), now known as Baron James de Rothschild, wins the contract to build the first major railway line across the country.
This was called the Chemin De Fer Du Nord and ran initially from Paris to Valenciennes and then joined with the Austrian rail network built by his brother (and wife's father - all sounds a bit sordid doesn't it) Salomon Mayer Rothschild.
1847: Lionel De Rothschild now married to the daughter of his uncle, Kalmann (Carl) Mayer Rothschild, is elected to the parliamentary seat for the City of London.
A requirement for entering parliament was to take an oath in the true faith of a Christian. Lionel De Rothschild refused to do this as he was Jewish and his seat in parliament remained empty for 11 years until new oaths were allowed. He must have been an invaluable representative for his constituency, bearing in mind he could never vote on any bill as he never entered parliament! I wonder how he managed to keep his parliamentary seat for 11 years?
1848: Karl Marx, an Ashkenazi Jew, publishes, "The Communist Manifesto." Interestingly at the same time as he is working on this, Karl Ritter of Frankfurt University was writing the antithesis which would form the basis for Freidrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's, "Nietzscheanism." This Nietzecheanism was later developed into Fascism and then into Nazism and was used to forment the first and second world wars.
Marx, Ritter, and Nietzsche were all funded and under the instruction of the Rothschilds. The idea was that those who direct the overall conspiracy could use the differences in those two so-called ideologies to enable them to divide larger and larger factions of the human race into opposing camps so that they could be armed and then brainwashed into fighting and destroying each other, and particularly, to destroy all political and religious institutions. The same plan put forward by Weishaupt in 1776.
Eva Hanau, Amschel Mayer Rothschild’s wife dies.
1849: Gutle Schnaper, Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s wife dies. Before her death she would nonchalantly state,
"If my sons did not want wars, there would be none."
1850: Construction begins this decade on the manor houses of Mentmore in England and Ferrières in France, more Rothschilds Manors will follow throughout the world, all of them filled with works of art.
Jacob (James) Rothschild in France is said to be worth 600 million francs, which at the time was 150 million francs more than all the other bankers in France put together.
1852: N.M. Rothschild & Sons begins refining gold and silver for the Royal Mint and the Bank of England and other international customers.
1853: Nathaniel de Rothschild, the son in law of Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild, purchases Château Brane Mouton, the Bordeaux vineyard of Mouton, and renames it Château Mouton Rothschild.
1854: Caroline Stern, Salomon Mayer Rothschild’s wife, dies.
1855: Amschel Mayer Rothschild dies.
Salomon Mayer Rothschild dies.
Kalmann (Carl) Mayer Rothschild dies.
1858: Lionel De Rothschild finally takes his seat in parliament when the requirement to take an oath in the true faith of a Christian is broadened to include other oaths. He becomes the first Jewish member of the British parliament.
1861: President Abraham Lincoln (16th President of the United States from 1860 till his assassination in 1865) approaches the big banks in New York to try to obtain loans to support the ongoing American civil war. As these large banks were heavily under the influence of the Rothschilds, they offer him a deal they know he cannot accept, 24% to 36% interest on all monies loaned.
Lincoln is very angry about this high level of interest and so he prints his own debt free money and informs the public that this is now legal tender for both public and private debts.
1862: By April $449,338,902 worth of Lincoln’s debt free money has been printed and distributed. He states of this,
“We gave the people of this republic the greatest blessing they ever had, their own paper money to pay their own debts.”
That same year The Times of London publishes a story containing the following statement,
"If that mischievous financial policy, which had its origin in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without a debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce.
It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of civilized governments of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe."
1863: President Abraham Lincoln discovers the Tsar of Russia, Alexander II (1855 – 1881), was having problems with the Rothschilds as well as he was refusing their continual attempts to set up a central bank in Russia. The Tsar then gives President Lincoln some unexpected help.
The Tsar issued orders that if either England or France actively intervened in the American Civil War, and help the South, Russia would consider such action a declaration of war, and take the side of President Lincoln. To show that he wasn't messing about, he sent part of his Pacific Fleet to port in San Francisco and another part to New York.
The Rothschild banking house in Naples, Italy, C. M. de Rothschild e figli, closes following the unification of Italy. The Rothschilds use one of their own in America, John D. Rockefeller, to form an oil business called Standard Oil which eventually takes over all of its competition.
1864: Rothschild, August Belmont, who by now is the Democratic Party's National Chairman, supports General George McClellan as the Democratic nominee to run against President Abraham Lincoln in this year's election. Much to the anger of Belmont, President Lincoln wins the election.
1865: In a statement to Congress, President Abraham Lincoln states,
"I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one in my rear is my greatest foe."
Later that year, on April 14, President Lincoln is assassinated, less than two months before the end of the American Civil War.
Following a brief training period in the Rothschilds London Bank, Jacob Schiff, a Rothschild, born in their house in Frankfurt, arrives in America at the age of 18, with instructions and the finance necessary to buy into a banking house there. The purpose of this was to carry out the following tasks.
1. Gain control of America's money system through the establishment of a central bank.
2. Find desirable men, who for a price, would be willing to serve as stooges for the Illuminati and promote them into high places in the federal government, the Congress, Supreme Court, and all the federal agencies.
3. Create minority group strife throughout the nations, particularly targeting the whites and blacks.
4. Create a movement to destroy religion in the United States, with Christianity as the main target.
Nathaniel de Rothschild becomes Member of Parliament for Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.
1868: Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild dies, shortly after purchasing Château Lafite, one of the four great premier grand cru estates of France. He is the last of Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s sons to die.
1870: Nathaniel de Rothschild dies.
1871: An American General named, Albert Pike, who had been enticed into the Illuminati by Guissepe Mazzini, completes his military blueprint for three world wars and various revolutions throughout the world, culminating into moving this great conspiracy into its final stage.
The first world war is to be fought for the purpose of destroying the Tsar in Russia,as promised by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in 1815. The Tsar is to be replaced with communism which is to be used to attack religions, predominantly Christianity. The differences between the British and German empires are to be used to forment this war.
The second world war is to be used to forment the controversy between facism and political zionism with the slaughter of Jews in Germany a lynchpin in bringing hatred against the German people. This is designed to destroy fascism (which the Rothschilds created) and increase the power of political zionism. This war is also designed to increase the power of communism to the level that it equalled that of united Christendom.
The third world war is to be played out by stirring up hatred of the Muslim world for the purposes of playing the Islamic world and the political zionists off against one another. Whilst this is going on, the remaining nations would be forced to fight themselves into a state of mental, physical, spiritual and economic exhaustion.
On August 15th of this year, Albert Pike writes a letter (now catalogued in the British Museum) to Guiseppe Mazzini in which he states the following,
"We shall unleash the nihilists and the atheists and we shall provoke a great social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to all nations the effect of absolute atheism; the origins of savagery and of most bloody turmoil.
Then everywhere, the people will be forced to defend themselves against the world minority of the world revolutionaries and will exterminate those destroyers of civilization and the multitudes disillusioned with Christianity whose spirits will be from that moment without direction and leadership and anxious for an ideal, but without knowledge where to send its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer brought finally out into public view.
A manifestation which will result from a general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and Atheism; both conquered and exterminated at the same time."
Pike, who having been elected as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry's Southern Jurisdiction in 1859, was the most powerful Freemason in America. He would retain that post for 32 years until his death in 1891. He also published a book on the subject in 1872 entitled, "Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry," in which he candidly states the following,
"LUCIFER, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darknesss! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual or selfish Souls? Doubt it not!"
1872: Prior to Guiseppe Mazzini's death this year, he makes another revolutionary leader named Adrian Lemmy his successor. Lemmy will be subsequently succeeded by Lenin and Trotsky, then by Stalin. The revolutionary activities of all these men are financed by the Rothschilds.
1873: The loss making Rio Tinto copper mines in Spain, are purchased by a group of foreign financiers including the Rothschilds. These mines represented Europe’s largest source of copper.
1875: On January 1 of this year Jacob Schiff, now Solomon Loeb's son-in-law after marrying his daughter, Teresa, takes control of the banking house, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. He goes on to finance John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, Edward R. Harriman's Railroad Empire, and Andrew Carnegie's Steel Empire. This is all with Rothschild money.
He then identifies the other largest bankers in America at that time. They are, J.P. Morgan who controls Wall Street, and the Drexels and the Biddles of Philadelphia. All the other financiers, big and little, danced to the music of those three houses. Schiff then gets the European Rothschilds to set up European branches of these three large banks on the understanding that Schiff, and therefore Rothschild, is to be the boss of banking in New York and therefore America.
N M Rothschild & Sons undertake a share issue to raise capital for the first channel tunnel project to link France to England, with half of its capital coming from the Rothschild owned Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Nord.
This year Lionel De Rothschild also loans Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli the finance for the British government to purchase the shares in the Suez Canal, from Khedive Said of Egypt. This was done as the Rothschilds needed this access route to be held by a government they controlled, so they could use that government's military to protect their huge business interests in the Middle East.
1876: Otto von Bismarck states,
"The division of the United States into two federations of equal force was decided long before the civil war by the high financial power of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economical and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world.
The voice of the Rothschilds predominated. They foresaw the tremendous booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies, indebted to the financiers, to the vigorous Republic, confident and self-providing.
Therefore they started their emissaries in order to exploit the question of slavery and thus dig an abyss between the two parts of the Republic."
1879: Lionel de Rothschild dies.
1880: Rothschild agents begin formenting a series of pogroms predominantly in Russia, but also in Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. These pogroms resulted in the slaughter of thousands of innocent Jews, causing approximately 2 million to flee, mainly to New York, but also to Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Los Angeles.
The reason these pogroms were initiated, was to create a large Jewish base in America, who when they arrived, would be educated to register as Democrat voters. Some twenty years later, this would result in in a massive Democratic power base in the United States and be used to elect Rothschild front men such as Woodrow Wilson, to the Presidency, to carry out the bidding of the Rothschilds.
1881: President James A. Garfield (The 20th President of the United States who lasted only 100 Days) states two weeks before he is assassinated,
“Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce…and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”
Edmond James de Rothschild has a son Maurice de Rothschild.
1883: After 6,000 feet of tunnel in the channel tunnel project being excavated, the British government halt the project citing the fact that it would be a threat to Britain’s security.
1885: Nathaniel Rothschild, son of Lionel De Rothschild, becomes the first Jewish peer and is takes the title of Lord Rothschild.
1886: The French Rothschild bank, de Rothschild Frères obtains substantial amounts of Russia's oil fields and forms the Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company, which quickly becomes the world's second largest oil producer.
1887: Opium trafficker in China, Edward Albert Sassoon, marries Aline Caroline de Rothschild, the grand-daughter of Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild. Aline Caroline's father, Gustave, together with his brother, Alphonse, took over the Rothschild's french arm following their father Jacob's death.
The Rothschilds finance the amalgamation of the Kimberley diamond mines in South Africa. They subsequently become the biggest shareholders of this company, De Beers, and mine precious stones in Africa and India.
1888: Noémie Halphen, future wife of Maurice de Rothschild born.
1891: The British Labour Leader makes the following statement on the subject of the Rothschilds,
"This blood-sucking crew has been the cause of untold mischief and misery in Europe during the present century, and has piled up its prodigious wealth chiefly through fomenting wars between States which ought never to have quarrelled.
Whenever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumours of war circulate and men’s minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity you may be sure that a hook-nosed Rothschild is at his games somewhere near the region of the disturbance."
Comments like this worry the Rothschilds and towards the end of the 1800’s they purchase Reuters news agency so they can have some control of the media.
1895: Edmond James de Rothschild the youngest son of Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild visits Palestine and subsequently supplies the funds to found the first Jewish colonies there, this is to further their long term objective of creating a Rothschild owned country.
1897: The Rothschilds found the Zionist Congress to promote Zionism (a political movement with the sole aim of moving all Jews into a singularly Jewish nation state) and arrange its first meeting in Munich. However due to extreme opposition from local Jews, who are quite happy where they are, this meeting has to be moved to Basle, Switzerland and takes place on 29 August. The meeting is chaired by Ashkenazi Jew, Theodor Herzl, who would state in his diaries,
"It is essential that the sufferings of Jews….become worse….this will assist in realization of our plans….I have an excellent idea….I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth….The anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The anti-Semites shall be our best friends."
Herzl is subsequently elected President of the Zionist Organisation which adopts the, "Rothschild Red Hexagram or Sign," as the Zionist flag which 51 years later will end up as the flag of Israel.
Edward Henry Harriman becomes a director of the Union Pacific Railroad and goes on to take control of the Southern Pacific Railroad. This is all financed by the Rothschilds.
1898: Ferdinand de Rothschild dies.
1901: The Jews from the colonies set up in Palestine by Edmond James de Rothschild, send a delegation to him which tell him,
"If you wish to save the Yishuv (The Jewish settlement) first take your hands from it, and…for once permit the colonists to have the possibility of correcting for themselves what needs correcting."
Edmond James de Rothschild is very angry about this and states,
"I created the Yishuv, I alone. Therefore no men, neither colonists nor organisations have the right to interfere in my plans."
The Rothschild banking house in Frankfurt, Germany, M. A. von Rothschild und Söhne, closes as there is no male Rothschild heir to take it on.
1902: Philippe de Rothschild born.
1905: A group of Rothschild backed Zionist Jews led by Georgi Apollonovich Gapon attempt to overthrow the Tsar in Russia in a Communist Coup. They fail and are forced to flee Russia only to be given refuge in Germany.
The Jewish Encyclopaedia (Vol. 2, p.497) states,
"It is a somewhat curious sequel to the attempt to set up a Catholic competitor to the Rothschilds that at the present time the latter are the guardians of the papal treasure."
1906: The Rothschilds claim that due to growing instability in the region and increasing competition from Rockefeller (the Rockefeller family are Rothschild descendants through a female bloodline) owned Standard Oil, this is why they sell their Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company to Royal Dutch and Shell. This is another example of the Rothschilds trying to hide their true wealth.
1907: Rothschild, Jacob Schiff, the head of Kuhn, Loeb and Co., in a speech to the New York Chamber of Commerce, warns that,
"Unless we have a Central Bank with adequate control of credit resources, this country is going to undergo the most severe and far reaching money panic in its history."
Suddenly America finds itself in the middle of another typical run of the mill Rothschild engineered financial crisis, which ruins as usual ruins the lives of millions of innocent people throughout America and makes billions for the Rothschilds.
1909: Jacob Schiff founds the National Advancement for the Association of the Coloured People (NAACP). This was done to incite black people into roiting, looting and other forms of disorder, in order to cause a rift between the black and white communities. Jewish historian, Howard Sachar, states the following in his book, "A History of the Jews in America,"
"In 1914, Professor Emeritus Joel Spingarn of Columbia University became chairman of the NAACP and recruited for its board such Jewish leaders as Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise."
Other Ashkenazi Jew co-founders included Julius Rosenthal, Lillian Wald and Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch. It was not until 1920 that the NAACP appointed its first black president, James Weldon Johnson.
Maurice de Rothschild marries Ashkenazi Jew, Noémie Halphen.
1911: Werner Sombart, in his book, "The Jews and Modern Capitalism," stated that from 1820 on, it was the,
"Age of the Rothschild," and concluded that there was, "Only one power in Europe, and that is Rothschild."
1912: In the December issue of, "Truth," magazine, George R. Conroy states of banker Jacob Schiff,
"Mr Schiff is head of the great private banking house of Kuhn, Loeb, and co, which represents the Rothschilds interests on this side of the Atlantic.
He has been described as financial strategist and has been for years the financial minister of the great impersonal power known as Standard Oil.
He was hand in glove with the Harrimans, the Goulds, and the Rockefellers in all their railroad enterprises and has become the dominant power in the railroad and financial power of America."
1913: On March 4, Woodrow Wilson is elected the 28th President of the United States. Shortly after he is inaugurated, he is visited in the White House by Ashkenazi Jew, Samuel Untermyer, of law firm, Guggenheim, Untermyer, and Marshall, who tries to blackmail him for the sum of $40,000 in relation to an affair Wilson had whilst he was a professor at Princeton University, with a fellow professor's wife.
President Wilson does not have the money, so Untermyer volunteers to pay the $40,000 out of his own pocket to the woman Wilson had had the affair with, on the condition that Wilson promise to appoint to the first vacancy on the United States Supreme Court a nominee to be recommended to President Wilson by Untermyer. Wilson agrees to this.
Jacob Schiff sets up the Anti Defamation League (ADL) in the United States. This organisation is formed to slander anyone who questions or challenges the Rothschild global conspiracy as, "anti-semitic."
Strangely enough, the same year that they do this they also set up their last and current central bank in America, the Federal Reserve. Congressman Charles Lindbergh stated following the passing of the Federal Reserve Act on December 23,
"The Act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this Bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized.......The greatest crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill."
It is important to note that the Federal Reserve is a private company, it is neither Federal nor does it have any Reserve. It is conservatively estimated that profits exceed $150 billion per year and the Federal Reserve has never once in its history published accounts.
1914: The start of World War I. In this war, the German Rothschilds loan money to the Germans, the British Rothschilds loan money to the British, and the French Rothschilds loan money to the French.
Futhermore, the Rothschilds have control of the three European news agencies, Wolff (est. 1849) in Germany, Reuters (est. 1851) in England, and Havas (est. 1835) in France.
The Rothschilds use Wolff to manipulate the German people into a fervour for war. From around this time, the Rothschilds are rarely reported in the media, because they own the media.
1916: On June 4, Ashkenazi Jew, Louis Dembitz Brandeis is appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Wilson as per his agreed blackmail payment to Samuel Untermyer some three years earlier. Justice Brandeis is also the elected leader of the Executive Committee for Zionist Affairs, a position he has held since 1914.
The middle of World War II. Germany were winning the war as they were being financed by the Rothschilds to a greater extent than France, Italy and England, because Rothschilds, did not want to support the Tsar in Russia, and of course Russia was on the same side as France, Italy and England.
Then a significant event occurred. Germany, although they were winning the war and not one foreign soldier had set foot on their soil, offered armistice to Britain with no requirement of reparations. The Rothschilds were anxious to make sure this didn't happen as they were expecting to make far more money off this war, so they played another card they had up their sleeve.
Whilst the British were considering Germany's offer, Rothschild agent Louis Brandeis sends a Zionist delegation from America to Britain to promise to bring America into the war on the side of the British, provided the British agree to give the land of Palestine to the Rothschilds.
The Rothschilds wanted Palestine for the following reason. They had great business interests in the far east and desired their own state in that area along with their own military which they could use as an aggressor to any state that threatened those interests.
The British subsequently agree to the deal for Palestine and the Zionists in London contact their counterparts in America and inform them of this fact. Suddenly all the major newspapers in America that up to that point had been pro-German turned on Germany running propaganda pieces such as: German soldiers were killing Red Cross Nurses; German soldiers were cutting off babies hands, etc, in order to manipulate the American public against the Germans.
This same year, President Woodrow Wilson, ran a re-election campaign under the slogan, "Re-Elect The Man Who Will Keep Your Sons Out Of The War."
On December 12, Germany and her allies offer peace terms to end the war.
1917: As a result of Germany's offer of peace the Rothschild war machine goes into overdrive in America, spreading propaganda which leads to President Wilson under the instructions of American Zionist leader and Supreme Court Justice, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, reneging on his promise to the electorate and taking America into the first world war on April 6.
As per the Rothschild Zionist promise to the British, to take America into the war, they decide they want something in writing from the British to prove that they will uphold their side of the bargain. The British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour therefore drafts a letter which is commonly known as the, "Balfour Declaration," which is reprinted below.
Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour
The Rothschilds order the execution by the Bolsheviks they control, of Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family in Russia, even though the Tsar had already abdicated on March 2. This is both to get control of the country and an act of revenge for Tsar Alexander I blocking their world government plan in 1815 at the Congress Of Vienna, and Tsar Alexander II siding with President Abraham Lincoln in 1864.
It is extremely important for them to slaughter the entire family including women and children in order to make good on the promise to do so made by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in 1815. It is designed to show the world what happens if you ever attempt to cross the Rothschilds.
U.S. Congressman Oscar Callaway informs Congress that J. P. Morgan is a Rothschild front and has taken control of the American media industry. He states,
"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press...
...They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers...An agreement was reached. The policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month, an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."
1919: In January, Ashkenazi Jews, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, are killed as they attempt to lead another Rothschild funded Communist coup, this time in Berlin, Germany.
The Versailles peace conference is held to decide reparations that the Germans need to pay to the victors following the end of the first world war. A delegation of 117 Zionists headed up by Ashkenazi Jew, Bernard Baruch, bring up the subject of the promise of Palestine for them. At this point the Germans realised why America had turned on them and under whose influence, the Rothschilds.
The Germans, naturally, felt they had been betrayed by the Zionists. This is because, at the time the Rothschilds made their deal with Britain for Palestine, in exchange for bringing America into the war, Germany was the most friendly country in the world towards the Jews, indeed the German Emancipation Edict of 1822 guaranteed Jews in Germany all civil rights enjoyed by Germans.
Also, Germany was the only country in Europe which did not place restrictions on Jews, even giving them refuge when they had to flee from Russia after their first attempted Communist coup failed there in 1905.
Nevertheless, the Rothschilds had held up their side of the bargain to spill the blood of millions of innocents and as a result, Palestine is confirmed as a Jewish homeland, and whilst its handover to the Rothschilds takes place it is to remain under the control of Britain as the Rothschilds control Britain. At that time less than one percent of the population of Palestine was Jewish. Interestingly, the host of the Versailles peace conference is its boss, Baron Edmond de Rothschild.
The Versailles peace conference is also used as an attempt by the Rothschilds to set up a world government under the pretext of ending all wars (which they create). This was called the, "League of Nations." Fortunately not enough countries accepted it and so it soon died.
On March 29th The Times of London reports on the Bolsheviks in Russia,
"One of the curious features of the Bolshevist movement is the high percentage of non Russian elements among its leaders. Of the twenty or thirty commissaries, or leaders, who provide the central machinery of the Bolshevist movement, not less than 75% were Jews."
It is reported that the Rothschilds were angry with the Russians because they were not prepared to allow them to form a central bank within their nation. They therefore gathered groups of Jewish spies and sent them into Russia to drum up a revolution for the benefit of the common man, which was actually a takeover of Russia by a Rothschild controlled satanic elite.
These Jewish spies were, in age old deceptive Ashkenazi tradition, given Russian names, for example Trotsky was a member of the first group and his original name was Bronstein. These groups were sent to areas throughout Russia to incite riots and rebellion.
The Jewish Post International Edition, week ending January 24th 1991, confirms Vladimir Lenin was Jewish. Lenin is also on record as having stated,
“The establishment of a central bank is 90% of communizing a nation.”
These Jewish, Rothschild funded Bolsheviks would go on in the course of history to slaughter 60 million Christians and Non-Jews in Soviet controlled territory. Indeed the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his work, “Gulag Archipelago, Vol 2,” affirms that Zionist Jews created and administered the organized Soviet concentration camp system in which these tens of millions of Christians and Non-Jews died.
On page 79 of this book he even names the administrators of this the greatest killing machine in the history of the world. They are Aron Solts, Yakov Rappoport, Lazar Kogan, Matvei Berman, Genrikh Yagoda, and Naftaly Frenkel. All six are Zionist Jews. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for literature.
N. M. Rothschild & Sons’ are given a permanent role to fix the world’s daily gold price. This takes place in the City of London offices, daily at 1100 hours, in the same room until 2004.
1920: Winston Churchill (whose mother, Jenny (Jacobson) Jerome, was Jewish – meaning he is Jewish under Ashkenazi law as he was born of a Jewish mother) writes in an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, dated February 8th,
"From the days of Illuminati leader Weishaupt, to those of Karl Marx, to those of Trotsky, this worldwide conspiracy has been steadily growing.
And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America, have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
1921: Under the orders of Jacob Schiff the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is founded by Ashkenazi Jews, Bernard Baruch and Colonel Edward Mandell House. Schiff gave his orders prior to his death in 1920, as he knew an organisation in America needed to be set up to select politicians to carry on the Rothschild conspiracy,and the formation of the CFR was actually agreed in a meeting on May 30, 1919 at the Hotel Majestic in Paris, France.
The CFR membership at the start was approximately 1000 people in the United States. This membership included the heads of virtually every industrial empire in America, all the American based international bankers, and the heads of all their tax free foundations. In essence all those people who would provide the capital required for anyone who wished to run for Congress, the Senate or the Presidency.
The first job of the CFR was to gain control of the press. This task was given to John D. Rockefeller who set up a number of national news magazines such as Life, and Time. He financed Samuel Newhouse to buy up and establish a chain of newspapers all across the country, and Eugene Meyer also who would go on to buy up many publications such as the Washington Post, Newsweek, ant The Weekly Magazine.
The CFR also needed to gate control of radio, television and the motion picture industry. This task was split amongst the international bankers from, Kuhn Loeb, Goldman Sachs, the Warburgs, and the Lehmanns.
1925: This year's Jewish Encyclopaedia, states of the existence of Ashkenazi Jews (who represent approximately 90% of so-called world Jewry), with the startling admission that the so called enemy of the Jews, Esau (also known as Edom, see Genesis 36:1), now actually represents the Jewish race, when on page 42 of Volume V it is stated,
"Edom is in modern Jewry."
So what they're basically saying is that these Ashkenazi Jews, who represent 90% of the so-called Jewish population, are actually gentiles or goyim themselves.
1926: N. M. Rothschild & Sons refinance the Underground Electric Railways Company of London Ltd which has a controlling interest in the entire London Underground transport system.
Maurice de Rothschild has a son, Edmond de Rothschild.
1929: The Rothschilds crash the United States economy by contracting the money supply.
1930: The first Rothschild world bank, the, "Bank for International Settlements (BIS)," is established in Basle, Switzerland. The same place as where 33 years earlier the first ever World Zionist Congress was held.
1933: On January 30, Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. He drives Jews, many of which were Communist out of Governmental positions within Germany. As a result of this, in July, the Jews hold a World Conference in Amsterdam during which they demand that Hitler re-instate every Jew back to his former position.
Hitler refuses and as a result of this, Samuel Untermyer, the Ashkenazi Jew who blackmailed President Wilson,and is now the head of the American delegation and the president of the whole conference, returns to the United States, and makes a speech on radio which was transcribed in the From the New York Times, Monday, August 7, 1933. In the speech he made the following statements,
"...the Jews are the aristocrats of the world...Our campaign is...the economic boycott against all German goods, shipping and services...What we are proposing...is to prosecute a purely defensive economic boycott that will undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends...
...Each of you, Jew and Gentile alike...must refuse to deal with any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronizes German ships or shipping."
As two thirds of Germany's food supply had to be imported, and could only be imported with the proceeds of what they exported, if Germany could not export, two thirds of Germany's population would starve, as there would be not enough food for more than one third of the population.
As a result of this boycott, Jews throughout America, would protest outside and damage any stores in which they found any products with, "Made in Germany," printed on them, causing stores to have to dump these products or risk bankruptcy.
Once the effects of this boycott began to be felt in Germany, the Germans, who had demonstrated no violence towards the Jews up to this point, simply began boycotting Jewish stores in the same way the Jews had done to stores selling German products in America.
Rothschild financed IBM, supply machines to the Nazis which produce punch cards to help organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews, the confiscation of their property and their extermination.
On November 16, President Roosevelt recognizes the Zionist regime of Stalin in Russia without consultation with Congress even as 8,000 Ukrainians march in protest in New York.
Also this year, President Roosevelt, born of a Jewish mother, therefore satisfying Ashkenazi rules of being Jewish, orders the all-seeing eye to be placed upon all new dollar bills along with the motto, "Novus Ordo Seclorum." This is latin for, "A New Order of the Ages."
1934: Swiss banking secrecy laws are reformed and it becomes an offence resulting in imprisonment for any bank employee to violate bank secrecy. This is all in preparation for the Rothschild engineered Second World War in which as usual they will fund both sides.
Edmond de Rothschild dies.
1936: With regard to the increase in anti-semitism in Germany, Samuel Landman (at the time, secretary to the World Zionist Organisation), in his 1936 book, Great Britain, The Jews, and Palestine states the following of the United States entry into World War 1,
"The fact that it was Jewish help that brought USA into the War on the side of the Allies has rankled ever since in German – especially Nazi – minds, and has contributed in no small measure to the prominence which anti-Semitism occupies in the Nazi programme."
1938: On 7th November, a Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a minor official at the German Embassy in Paris. As a result of this German hostility towards Jews in Germany started to turn violent.
The Rothschilds Austrian banking house in Vienna, S. M. von Rothschild und Söhne, closes following the Nazi occupation of Austria.
1939: I.G. Farben the leading producer of chemicals in the world and largest German producer of steel dramatically increases its production. This increased production is almost exclusively used to arm Germany for the Second World War. This company was controlled by the Rothschilds and would go on to use Jews and other disaffected peoples as slave labour in the concentration camps. I.G. Farben also created the lethal Zyklon B gas that was used to exterminate the Jews.
On 1 September, the Second world war starts when Germany invades Poland. This was because the German leadership were a Christian leadership, who understood that Soviet Russia was led by Rothschild funded Communists, and they feared that as the Soviet Union grew in strength, these Jewish Communists would invade and wipe all the Christians off the map.
1940: Hansjurgen Koehler in his book, "Inside The Gestapo," states the following, of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, Adolf Hitler's grandmother,
"A little servant girl…….came to Vienna and became a domestic servant…….at the Rothschild mansion…….and Hitler’s unknown grandfather must be probably looked for in this magnificent house."
This is backed up by Walter Langer in his book, "The Mind Of Hitler," in which he states,
"Adolf’s father, Alois Hitler, was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber…….Maria Anna Schicklgruber was living in Vienna at the time she conceived. At that time she was employed as a servant in the home of Baron Rothschild. As soon as the family discovered her pregnancy she was sent back home…….where Alois was born."
On the surface, it would appear Hitler was unlikely to be a Rothschild, but then again, when you discover the benefits that the Rothschilds got out of this war, both financially and politically, a Rothschild connection does not appear as outlandish as it may initially seem.
1941: President Roosevelt takes America into the second world war by refusing to sell Japan any more steel scrap or oil. Japan was in the midst of a war against China and without that scrap steel and oil, Japan would be unable to continue that war. Japan was totally dependent upon the United States for both steel scrap and oil. Roosevelt knew this action would provoke the Japanese to attack America, which they subsequently did at Pearl Harbor.
1942: Prescott Bush, father of future American Presidents’ George Herbert Walker and George W, has his company seized under the, “Trading With The Enemy,” Act. He was funding Hitler from America, whilst American soldiers were being killed by German soldiers.
Jews are also being slaughtered by these same soldiers. Interestingly the ADL never criticizes any of the Bushes for this.
1943: February 18th, Zionist, Izaak Greenbaum, head of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee, in a speech to the Zionist Executive Council states,
“If I am asked, could you give from the UJA (United Jewish Appeal) monies to rescue Jews, I say, no and I say again no!”
He would go onto state,
“One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland!”
This is not a surprise, the whole idea of Zionist support for the slaughter of innocent Jews was to scare the survivors into believing that their only place of safety was Israel. How else do you think the Zionists could ensure Jews leave the beautiful European cities in which they live, in order to settle in a desert!
1944: On 6 November Lord Moyne, British Minister Resident in the Middle East was assassinated in Cairo by two members of the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, led by future Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir. He is also responsible for an assassination attempt against Harold MacMichael, the High Commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine, this same year.
Interestingly he also masterminds another successful assassination this year against the United Nations representative in the Middle East, Count Folke Bernadotte who, although he had secured the release of 21,000 prisoners from German camps during World War II, was seen by Yitzak Shamir and his terrorist collaborators as an anti-Zionist.
In Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, two further Rothschild world banks are created. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank.
1945: The end of the Second World War. It is reported that I.G. Farben plants were specifically not targeted in the bombing raids on Germany. Interestingly at the end of the war, they were found to have only sustained 15% damage.
The tribunals held at the end of the Second World War, to investigate Nazi War Crimes, censored any materials recording Western assistance to Hitler.
The Rothschilds take a giant step towards their goal of world domination when the second, "League of Nations," called the, "United Nations," was approved this year.
1946: On July 22 the future Prime Minister of Israel, Ashkenazi Jew, David Ben-Gurion, orders another future Prime Minister of Israel, Ashkenazi Jew, Menachem Begin, to carry out a terrorist attack on the King David Hotel in Palestine, to try and drive out the British. As a result of this 91 people were killed, most of them civilians: 28 British, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews, and 5 others. Around 45 people are injured.
Menachem Begin went on to proudly proclaimed himself as, "the father of modern terrorism." Just to put the gravity of the attack on the King David Hotel into perspective, it was at the time the biggest death toll as a result of single terrorist action ever and was only surpassed over forty years later by the Bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie.
1947: The British who prior to World War 2 declared that there would be no more immigration of Jews to Palestine in order to protect the Palestinians from their acts of terror against both them and British soldiers, transfer control of Palestine to the United Nations. The United Nations resolve to have Palestine partitioned into two states, one zionist and one arab, with Jerusalem to remain as an international zone to be enjoyed by all religious faiths.
This transfer was scheduled to take place on May 15, 1948. The United Nations had no right to give Arab property to anyone, as indeed even thought the Jews owned 6% of Palestine at that time, resolution 181 granted the Jews 57% of the land leaving the Arabs who at that time had 94% with only 43%.
Information collected by the ADL in its spy operations on US citizens is used by the House Select Committee on Unamerican Activities. Subcommittee Chair Clare Hoffman dismisses the ADL’s reports on suspected communists as "hearsay."
1948: In the Spring of this year, the Rothschilds bribe President Harry S. Truman (33rd President of the United States 1945 – 1953) to recognise Israel (Rothschild owned Zionist not Jewish territory) as a sovereign state with $2,000,000 which they give to him on his campaign train.
They then declare Israel to be a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine and within half an hour President Truman declared the United States to be the first foreign nation to recognise it.
The Flag of Israel is unveiled. Despite tremendous opposition the emblem on the flag is a blue coloured version of the Rothschild, "Red Hexagram or Sign."
This angers many Jews who realise this Hexagram was used in the ancient mystery religions as the symbol of, "Moloch," (described as a demon of unwilling sacrifice and is also interestingly the name of the stone owl the elite worship at Bohemian Grove), and, "Astaroth," (described as the Lord Treasurer of Hell).
The Hexagram was also used to represent Saturn, which has been identified as the esoteric name for, "Satan." This indicates that anyone killed in the name of Israel is actually a sacrifice to Satan. These dissenting Jews believe the, "Menorah," the oldest Jewish symbol should be used and pointed out that the Hexagram is not even a Jewish symbol, but of course as the Rothschild Zionists use it that is what ends up on the Rothschild, I mean Zionist, I mean Israeli flag.
In the early hours of April 19, 132 Jewish terrorists from the Irgun gang, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and the Stern gang, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, brutally massacre 200 men, women and children as they are sleeping peacefully in the Arab village of Deir Yassin.
Following the United Nations transfer of Palestine to an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state on May 15, the Israelis launched a military assault on the Arabs with blaring loudspeakers on their trucks informing the Arabs that if they did not flee immediately, they would be slaughtered.
800,000 Arabs with the recent memory of the Deir Yassin massacre at the forefront of their minds, fled in panic. They asked for help from nighbouring Arab states, but those states did not get involved as they were no match for the Israelis whose up to date military hardware had been supplied by the Jewish Stalinist regime in Russia. Following this assault, the Jews now controlled 78% of the former Palestine as oppose to the 57% that had been given to them illegally by the United Nations.
The Palestinians, many of them Christians, were never paid compensation for their homes, property and businesses stolen from them during this illegal Jewish assault, and these people ended up in slum refugee cities of tents. Futhermore at least half of the Palestinians in their hurry to flee, left their birth certificates behind. The State of Israel then passed a law that only those who could prove citizenship were allowed to return to Israel, thus meaning these 400,000 Palestinians could not return and lost all their property they had left there.
Ashkenazi Jew, David Ben-Gurion, one of the father founders of Israel and its first Prime Minister, candidly describes Zionist aims in his diary (21 May 1948) as follows,
“The Achilles heel of the Arab coalition is the Lebanon. Muslim supremacy in this country is artificial and can easily be overthrown. A Christian State ought to be set up there, with its southern frontier on the river Litani.
We would sign a treaty of alliance with this State. Thus when we have broken the strength of the Arab Legion and bombed Amman, we could wipe out Trans-Jordan, after that Syria would fall. And if Egypt still dared to make war on us, we would bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.
We should thus end the war and would have but paid to Egypt, Assyria and Chaldea on behalf of our ancestors.”
1949: On October 1, Mao Tse Tsung declares the founding of the People's Republic Of China in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. He is funded by Rothschild created Communism in Russia and also the following Rothschild agents: Solomon Adler, a former United States Treasury official who was a Soviet Spy; Israel Epstein, the son of a Jewish Bolshevik imprisoned by the Tsar in Russia for trying to forment a revolution there; and Frank Coe, a leading official of the Rothschild owned IMF.
1950: Israel passes their law of return, guaranteeing every Jew worldwide the right to dwell in the state of Israel, however the Palestinians even though they had lived there for 1300 years, were denied that right.
John Davitt, former chief of the Justice Department's internal security section notes that the Israeli intelligence service is the second most active in the United States after the Soviets and of course both Israel and the Soviet Union are run by an Ashkenazi Jewish leadership.
1951: On 1 April the Israeli Secret Intelligence Agency the Mossad, which will go on to terrorize the world, is formed. The motto of the Mossad is probably the most disgusting secret service motto in the world, it is,
"By Way Of Deception,
Thou Shalt Do War."
1953: N. M. Rothschild & Sons found the British Newfoundland Corporation Limited to develop 60,000 square miles of land in Newfoundland, Canada, which comprised a power station to harness the power of the Hamilton (later renamed Churchill) Falls. At the time this was the largest construction project ever to be undertaken by a private company.
1954: "The Lavon Affair." Israeli agents recruit Egyptian citizens of Jewish descent to bomb Western targets in Egypt, and plant evidence to frame Arabs, in an apparent attempt to upset American/Egyptian relations. Israeli defense minister, Ashkenazi Jew, Pinhas Lavon is eventually removed from office, though many think real responsibility lay with David Ben-Gurion.
A hidden microphone planted by the Israelis is discovered in the Office of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv.
1955: Edmond de Rothschild founds Compagnie Financiere, Paris.
1956: Telephone taps are found connected to two telephones in the residence of the US military attaché in Tel Aviv.
1957: James de Rothschild dies and it is reported (by the Rothschild owned media) that he bequeaths a large sum of money to the state of Israel to pay for the construction of their parliament building, the Knesset. He states that the Knesset should be,
"a symbol, in the eyes of all men, of the permanence of the State of Israel."
On page 219 of his book, "Tales of the British Aristocracy," L.G. Pine, the Editor of Burke’s Peerage, states that the Jews,
"have made themselves so closely connected with the British peerage that the two classes are unlikely to suffer loss which is not mutual. So closely linked are the Jews and the lords that a blow against the Jews in this country would not be possible without injuring the aristocracy also."
Maurice de Rothschild dies in Paris.
1962: de Rothschild Frères establishes Imétal as an umbrella company for all their mineral mining interests.
Frederic Morton publishes his book, The Rothschilds, in which he states,
"Though they control scores of industrial, commercial, mining and tourist corporations, not one bears the name Rothschild. Being private partnerships, the family houses never need to, and never do, publish a single public balance sheet, or any other report of their financial condition."
This attitude reveals the true aim of the Rothschilds, to eliminate all competition and create their own worldwide monopoly.
1963: On June 4th President John F. Kennedy (the 35th President of the United States 1961 – 1963) signs Executive Order 11110 which returned to the U.S. government the power to issue currency, without going through the Rosthchilds owned Federal Reserve.
Less than 6 months later on November 22nd , president Kennedy is assassinated by the Rothschilds for the same reason as they assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, he wanted to print American money for the American people, as oppose to for the benefit of a money grabbing war mongering foreign elite.
This Executive Order 11110, is rescinded by President Lyndon Baines Johnson (the 36th President of the United States 1963 to 1969) on Air Force One from Dallas to Washington, the same day as President Kennedy was assassinated.
Another, and probably the primary, reason for Kennedy's assassination is however, the fact that he made it quite clear to Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, that under no circumstances would he agree to Israel becoming a nuclear state. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on February 5, 1999, in a review of, Avner Cohen's book, "Israel and the Bomb," states the following,
"The murder of American President John F. Kennedy brought to an abrupt end the massive pressure being applied by the U.S. administration on the government of Israel to discontinue the nuclear program...The book implied that, had Kennedy remained alive, it is doubtful whether Israel would today have a nuclear option."
Edmond de Rothschild establishes La Compagnie Financière Edmond de Rothschild (LCF), in Switzerland as a venture capital house. This later develops into an investment bank and asset management company with many affiliates. He also marries his wife Nadine and they have a son, Benjamin de Rothschild.
1965: Israel illegally obtains enriched uranium from NUMEC (Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation).
1967: The treatment of the Palestinians by the Zionist Jews, finally ignites enough anger in the Arab world for Egypt, Jordan and Syria to mobilise on Israel's borders. All of these three countries are suddenly attacked by Israel and as a result the Sinai which included Gaza was stolen from Egypt, and the West Bank and the Jordan River stolen from Jordan.
As a result of this, on June 8, the Israelis launch an attack on the USS Liberty with Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats, in an effort to blame it on Egypt, to bring America into the war on their side, and of course follow to the letter, their Mossad motto,
"By Way Of Deception,
Thou Shalt Do War."
As a result of their attack, 34 American servicemen were killed and 174 wounded. Israel lies as usual, claiming it mistook this warship that was flying a large United States flag, for an ancient out-of-service Egyptian horse carrier El Quseir, that was 180 feet shorter. They also claim the ship was in the war zone, when it was actually in international waters, far from any fighting. The Israeli's attack on this warship lasts for 75 minutes during which time they shoot up one of the United States flags, resulting in the sailors desperately raising another one.
In the aftermath of this attack, the American sailors who survived are warned by the United States military not to discuss the matter with anyone due to, "national security." This story gets no prominence in the Rothschild controlled mainstream media and as usual Israel is in no way even rebuked for their crimes by their subservient country of America.
The following day, June 9th, Israel illegally occupies the Golan Heights which it seizes from Syria. This area goes on to provide Israel with one third of its fresh water.
Israeli General Matityahu Peled, is quoted in Ha'aretz (19 March 1972) with the following statement,
"The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Another sickening and deceptive statement but again at least he's consistent with the Mossad motto, "By Way Of Deception, Thou Shalt Do War."
de Rothschild Frères is renamed Banque Rothschild.
1968: Noémie Halphen, wife of Maurice de Rothschild dies.
1970: While working for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Ashkenazi Jew, Richard Perle is caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel. Nothing is done.
British Prime Minister Edward Heath makes Lord Victor Rothschild the head of his policy unit. Whilst he is in that role Britain enters the European Community.
1973: In his book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, Gary Allen states,
"One major reason for the historical blackout on the role of the international bankers in political history is the Rothschilds were Jewish…
….The Jewish members of the conspiracy have used an organisation called The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as an instrument to try and convince everyone that any mention of the Rothschilds and their allies is an attack on all Jews.
In this way they have stifled almost all honest scholarship on international bankers and made the subject taboo within universities.
Any individual or book exploring this subject is immediately attacked by hundreds of ADL communities all over the country. The ADL has never let the truth or logic interfere with its highly professional smear jobs…
….Actually, nobody has a right to be more angry at the Rothschild clique than their fellow Jews…
….The Rothschild empire helped finance Adolf Hitler."”
George J. Laurer an employee of the Rothschilds controlled IBM, invents the UPC (Universal Product Code) barcode which will eventually be placed upon every item traded worldwide and bear the number, 666. The Book of Revelation, Chapter 13, Verse 17 through 18, states the following in relation to this number,
"And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."
The whole Satanic aims of the Rothschilds are now in full view of the world, everything bought or sold carries the mark of the beast, 666.
N. M. Rothschild & Sons British Newfoundland Corporation, Churchill Falls project in Newfoundland, Canada, is completed.
N. M. Rothschild & Sons also create a new asset management part of the company which traded worldwide. This eventually became, Rothschild Private Management Limited.
Edmond de Rothschild, a great-grandson of Jacob (James) Mayer Rothschild, bought the cru bourgeois estate of Château Clarke in Bordeaux.
1976: Ashkenazi Jew, Harold Rosenthal, aide to Ashkenazi Jew, Senator Jacob Javits, states,
"Most Jews do not like to admit it, but our god is Lucifer."
1978: Ashkenazi Jew, Stephen Bryen, then a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, is overheard in a Washington D.C. hotel offering confidential documents to top Israeli military officials.
Bryen obtains a lawyer, Nathan Lewin, and the case heads for the grand jury, but is mysteriously dropped. Bryen later goes to work for Richard Perle.
1979: The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979 was underwritten by United States aid which pledged $3 billion annually to Israel from the United States taxpayer (not even a drop in the ocean when you consider the amount they make off the Federal Reserve).
Shin Bet (the Israeli internal security agency) tries to penetrate the US Consulate General in Jerusalem through a “Honey Trap”, using a clerical employee who was having an affair with a Jerusalem girl.
Baron and Baroness Phillipi de Rothschild in a joint venture with Robert Mondavi, begin the construction of a pyramid in Napa Valley, California, where the leader/founder of the Church Of Satan, Ashkenazi Jew, Anton LaVey, was based. This is known as Opus 1 (which means, the first work), and the front for this temple is that it is a winery.
1980: The global phenomenon of privatisation starts. The Rothschilds are behind this from the very beginning in order to seize control of all publicly owned assets worldwide.
1981: Banque Rothschild is nationalised by the French government. The new bank is called, Compagnie Européenne de Banque. The Rothschilds subsequently set up a successor to this French bank, Rothschild & Cie Banque (RCB), which goes on to become a leading French investment house.
1982: From September 16 to 18, future Prime Minister of Israel and then Defence Minister, Ashkenazi Jew, Ariel Sharon, orchestrates Israel's invasion of Lebanon, which provided ariel lighting in order to facilitate the killing of between 1000 and 2000 men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
1985: Eustace Mullins publishes, "Who Owns The TV Networks," in which he reveals the Rothschilds have control of all three major U.S. Networks, which are: NBC; CBS; and ABC.
The New York Times reports the FBI is aware of at least a dozen incidents in which American officials transferred classified information to the Israelis, quoting (former Assistant Director of the F.B.I.) Raymond Wannal. The Justice Department does not prosecute.
Richard Smyth, the owner of MILCO, is indicted on charges of smuggling nuclear timing devices to Israel.
N. M. Rothschild & Sons advise the British government on the privatisation of British Gas. They subsequently advise the British government on virtually all of their other privatisations of state owned assets including: British Steel; British Coal; all the British regional electricity boards; and all the British regional water boards.
A British MP heavily involved in these privatisations is future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, a former Rothschild banker.
1986: Mordechai Vanunu a technician at Dimona, Israel's nuclear installation, from 1976 to 1985, discovers that the plant was secretly producing nuclear weapons.
His conscience made him speak out and in 1986 he provided the London Sunday Times with the facts and photos they used to tell the world about Israel's nuclear weapons programme.
His evidence showed that Israel had stockpiled up to 200 nuclear warheads, with no debate or authorisation from it own citizens. On 30th September 1986, Vanunu was lured from London to Rome. There he was kidnapped, drugged and shipped to Israel.
After a secret trial he was sentenced to 18 years for, "treason," and, "espionage," (something Israel are very familiar with) though he had received no payment and had communicated with no foreign power.
He goes on to be held in complete isolation for 11 years, only allowed occasional visits from his family, lawyer and a priest, conducted through a metal screen. Although he completes his sentence, the Israeli government continues to hold him against his will.
1987: Edmond de Rothschild creates the World Conservation Bank which is designed to transfer debts from third world countries to this bank and in return those countries would give land to this bank. This is designed so the Rothschilds can gain control of the third world which represents 30% of the land surface of the Earth.
On April 24 the Wall Street Journal reveals the, "Role of Israel in Iran-Contra Scandal Won't be Explored in Detail by Panels."
1988: The ADL initiate a nationwide competition for law students to draft anti-hate legislation for minority groups. That competition is won by a man named, Joseph Ribakoff, whose thesis proposes that not only must hate motivated violence be banned, but also any words which stimulate: supiscion; friction; hate; and possible violence, these must also be criminalised.
This ADL prize-winning paper suggests that not only should state-agencies monitor and restrict free speech in general, but they should also censor all films that criticize identifiable groups. Furthermore, even if the person making the statement can justify it, for example Christians criticizing homosexuality because the bible expressly forbids it, Ribakoff asserts that the truth is to be no defence in court.
The only proof a court will need in order to secure a conviction of hate speech is that something has been said, and a minority group or member of such group has felt emotionally damaged as a result of such criticism. Therefore, under these proposals which the ADL will have forced into law all over the world less than 15 years later, Jesus Christ would have been arrested as a hate criminal.
This law is designed to protect the Rothschild conspiracy from being revealed in that if you criticize the Rothschilds criminal cabal, you will be targeted as anti-semitic, and thus risk imprisonment.
Philippe de Rothschild dies.
1989: Many of the satellite states in Eastern Europe, through the influence of Glasnost, become more open in their demands of freedom from Communist governance in their Republics.
Many revolutions happen in 1989, most of them involving the overthrow of their respective Communist governments and the replacement of them with Republics.
Thus, the hold the Communists had over Eastern Europe (the Iron Curtain) becomes very weak. Eventually, as a result of Perestroika and Glasnost, Communism collapses, not only in the Soviet Union but also in Eastern Europe.
In Russia, Boris Yeltsin (whose wife is the daughter of Joseph Stalin’s marriage to Rosa Kaganovich) and the Republican government takes steps to end the power of the Communist party by suspending and banning the party and seizing all their property.
This symbolised the fall of Communism in Russia, and resulted in the start of a mass exodus of 700,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union to Israel.
In the Israeli Journal, Hotam (24 November 1989), there is a report of a speech that then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, Ashkenazi Jew, Binyamin Netanyahu, gave to students at Bar Ilan University in which he states,
"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
The London and Paris Rothschilds announce the launch of a new subsidiary, Rothschild GmbH, in Frankfurt, Germany.
1991: Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, on January 16 of this year the United States and Britain began an aerial bombing campaign of targets within Iraq. On 24 February the ground campaign commenced which was to last 100 hours until on February 28 when a horrendous war crime occurred.
This crime was the slaughter of 150,000 Iraqi troops with fuel air bombs. These Iraqis were fleeing on a crowded highway from Kuwait to Basra. President George Herbert Walker Bush ordered United States military aircraft and ground units to kill these surrendering troops, they were then bulldozed into mass unmarked graves in the desert, some still alive.
President Bush then ordered a cessation of hostilities. What was the significance of this slaughter and President Bush declaring the war over on this day? Well it was the day the, "Day of Purim," fell on this year. This the day the Jews celebrate their victory over Ancient Babylon, now based within the borders of Iraq and a day when the Jews are encouraged to get bloody revenge against their perceived enemies.
At the Bilderberg Conference on June 6 to 9 of this year, in Baden-Baden, Germany, David Rockefeller (a Rothschild) made the following statement,
"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world, if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.
But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The super-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practised in past centuries."
1992: In March, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Paul A. Volker became Chairman of the European banking firm, J. Rothschild, Wolfensohn and Co.
Stephen Bryen, caught offering confidential documents to Israel in 1978, is serving on board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs while continuing as a paid consultant, with security clearance, on exports of sensitive US technology.
“The Samson Option,” by Seymour M. Hersh reports,
“Illicitly obtained intelligence was flying so voluminously from LAKAM (a secret Israeli intelligence unit, a Hebrew acronym for Scientific Liaison Bureau) into Israeli intelligence that a special code name, JUMBO, was added to the security markings already on the documents. There were strict orders, Ari Ben-Menashe recalled, “Anything marked JUMBO was not supposed to be discussed with your American counterparts.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that Israeli agents apparently tried to steal Recon Optical Inc's top-secret airborne spy-camera system.
On September 16th Britain’s pound collapses when currency speculators led by Rothschild agent, Ashkenazi Jew, George Soros, borrow pounds and sell them for Deutsche Marks, in the expectation of being able to repay the loan in devalued currency and to pocket the difference.
This results in the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, announcing a rise in interest rates of 5% in one day and as a result drives Britain into a recession which lasts many years as large numbers of businesses fail and the housing market crashes.
This is right on cue for the Rothschilds, after they had privatised Britain’s state owned assets during the 1980’s, driven the share price up, and then collapsed the markets so they could buy them up for pennies on the pound, a carbon copy of what Nathan Mayer Rothschild did to the British economy 180 years before, in 1812.
It cannot be overstated that the Chancellor of the Exchequer at that time, Norman Lamont, prior to becoming a MP, was a Merchant Banker with N. M. Rothschild and Sons, who he joined after reading Economics at Cambridge.
1993: Norman Lamont leaves the British government to return to N. M. Rothschild and Sons as a director, after his mission to collapse the British economy to profit the Rothschilds is accomplished.
Former Congressman, Paul Findley publishes his seminal book, Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts About the U.S. Israeli Relationship.
In this book he lists the 65 United Nations Member Resolutions against Israel from the period 1955 to 1992, and the 30 United States vetoes on Israel’s behalf which if not made would have seen Israel have 95 resolutions against them at this point.
No matter, even with Israel’s puppet the United States helping them terrorise others, the 65 Resolutions passed against Israel are more than all the Resolutions passed against all other countries combined.
Not that Israel care too much about the views of the United Nations when you consider that less than two weeks after Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty (an attack designed to sink the Liberty and blame it on Egypt prompting the USA into a war with Egypt on behalf of Israeli Lies, remember the Mossad motto, “By Way Of Deception, Thou Shalt Do War”), the Israeli Foreign Minister, Aba Eban, stated of the United Nations,
"If the General Assembly were to vote by 121 votes to 1 in favor of, "Israel," returning to the armistice lines (pre June 1967 borders), "Israel," would refuse to comply with the decision," New York Times – 19 June 1967.
The ADL is caught operating a massive spying operation on critics of Israel, Arab-Americans, the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, Oakland Educational Association, NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Police.
Data collected was sent to Israel and in some cases to South Africa. Pressure from Jewish organizations forces the city to drop the criminal case, but the ADL settles a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum of cash.
1995: Former atomic energy scientist, Dr Kitty Little claims the Rothschilds now control 80% of the world’s uranium supplies giving them a monopoly over nuclear power.
The Defense Investigative Service circulates a memo warning US military contractors that,
"Israel aggressively collects (US) military and industrial technology."
The report stated that Israel obtains information using,
"ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and identification and exploitation of individual frailties," of US citizens.
1996: A General Accounting Office report, "Defense Industrial Security: Weaknesses in US Security Arrangements With Foreign-Owned Defense Contractors," found that according to intelligence sources, "Country A," (identified by intelligence sources as Israel, Washington Times, 22 February 1996),
"conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally."
A pdf file of the report is here:
www.gao.gov/archive/1996/ns96064.pdf
An unformated text version is here:
http://fas.org/man/gao/gao9664.htm

The Jerusalem Post (30 August 1996) quoted the report,
"“Classified military information and sensitive military technologies are high-priority targets for the intelligence agencies of this country."
The report described, "An espionage operation run by the intelligence organization responsible for collecting scientific and technologic information for (Israel) paid a US government employee to obtain US classified military intelligence documents."
The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Shawn L. Twing, April 1996) noted that this was,
"a reference to the 1985 arrest of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian US naval intelligence analyst who provided Israel's LAKAM espionage agency an estimated 800,000 pages of classified US intelligence information."
www.washington-report.org/backissues/0496/9604014.htm

The GAO report also noted that, "Several citizens of (Israel) were caught in the United States stealing sensitive technology used in manufacturing artillery gun tubes."
An Office of Naval Intelligence document, "Worldwide Challenges to Naval Strike Warfare" reported that,
"US technology has been acquired (by China) through Israel in the form of the Lavi fighter and possibly SAM (surface-to-air) missile technology."
Jane's Defense Weekly (28 February 1996) noted that, "until now, the intelligence community has not openly confirmed the transfer of US technology (via Israel) to China." The report noted that this, "represents a dramatic step forward for Chinese military aviation." (Flight International, 13 March 1996).
Amschel Rothschild, 41, is strangled with the heavy cord of his own towel robe in his hotel room in Paris. French Prime Minister orders the French Police to close their investigation, and, Rupert Murdoch, born of a Jewish mother and so a Jew by Ashkenazi standards, instructs his editors and news managers around the world to report it as a heart attack, if they need to report it at all.
On 12 May United Nations Ambassador and Ashkenazi Jew, Madeleine Albright, when appearing on 60 Minutes, was asked the following by correspondent Lesley Stahl, in reference to the years of United States led economic sanctions against Iraq,
"We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
To which Ambassador Albright replied,
"I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it."
Her comments cause no public outcry. In fact, the holocaust of half a million Iraqi children is positively admired by the United States government when you consider less than 8 months later, President Clinton appointed Albright as secretary of state. Whilst appearing before the Senate Committee, who were considering her appointment, Albright is literally chomping at the bit for the blood of more Iraqi children and she states,
"We will insist on maintaining tough UN sanctions against Iraq unless and until that regime complies with relevant Security Council resolutions."
1997: An Army mechanical engineer, Ashkenazi Jew, David A. Tenenbaum, "inadvertently," gives classified military information on missile systems and armored vehicles to Israeli officials (New York Times, 20 February 1997).
The Washington Post reports US intelligence has intercepted a conversation in which two Israeli officials had discussed the possibility of getting a confidential letter that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher had written to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
One of the Israelis, identified only as, “Dov,” had commented that they may get the letter from, “Mega,” the code name for Israel’s top agent inside the United States.
US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, complains privately to the Israeli government about heavy-handed surveillance by Israeli intelligence agents.
Israeli agents place a tap on Ashkenazi Jew and daughter of a Rabbi, Monica Lewinsky’s, phone at the Watergate and record phone sex sessions between her and President Bill Clinton. The Ken Starr report confirms that Clinton warned Lewinsky their conversations were being taped and ended the affair. Interestingly, at the same time, the FBI’s hunt for, "Mega," is called off.
On 29 October Edmond de Rothschild dies in Geneva. Interestingly on the exact same day Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan also dies, who in his book, "Satan Speaks," he states in relation to The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion,
"The first time I read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, my instinctive reaction was, So what's wrong with THAT? Isn't that the way any master plan should work? Doesn't the public deserve - nay, demand - such despotism?"
Kofi Annan becomes Secretary General to the United Nations. He is married to Nane Lagergren, a Rothschild, who he wed in 1984.
1998: The European Central Bank is set up in Frankfurt, the city from which the Rothschilds originate.
2000: George W. Bush is elected (so they tell me) President of the United States. Bush and his family claim to be descendants of the House of Plantagenet which is descended from the Royal House of Judah.
2001: On September 11th the attack on the World Trade Center is orchestrated by Israel with the complicity of Britain and America, under the orders of the Rothschilds as a pretext for removing the liberty of people worldwide in exchange for security, just as happened with the Reichstag fire in Germany where the citizens were lied to in order to give up liberty for security.
They also will use the attacks to gain control of the few nations in the world who don’t allow Rothschild central banks and so less than one month after these attacks, US forces attack Afghanistan, one of only 7 nations in the world who don’t have a Rothschild controlled central bank.
Less than a week before the 9-11 attack on 5 September, the so-called lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and several other hijackers made a still-unexplained visit onboard one of Pro Israeli lobbyist, Ashkenazi Jew, Jack Abramoff’s casino boats.
No investigation is undertook as to what they were doing there. It is discovered that US drug agents’ communications have been penetrated. Suspicion falls on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis. AMDOCS generates billing data for most US phone companies and is able to provide detailed logs of who is talking to whom.
Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls, but suspicion forms that Comverse Infosys, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, has built a back door into the system that is being exploited by Israeli intelligence and that the information gleaned on US drug interdiction efforts is finding its way to drug smugglers.
The investigation by the FBI leads to the exposure of the largest foreign spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, operated by Israel. Half of the suspected spies have been arrested when 9-11 happens.
On 9-11, 5 Israelis are arrested for dancing and cheering while the World Trade Towers collapse. Supposedly employed by Urban Moving Systems, the Israelis are caught with multiple passports and a lot of cash.
Two of them are later revealed to be Mossad. As witness reports track the activity of the Israelis, it emerges that they were seen at Liberty Park at the time of the first impact, suggesting a foreknowledge of what was to come. The Israelis are interrogated, and then eventually sent back to Israel.
The owner of the moving company used as a cover by the Mossad agents abandons his business and flees to Israel. The United States Government then classifies all of the evidence related to the Israeli agents and their connections to 9-11.
All of this is reported to the public via a four part story on Fox News by Carl Cameron. Pressure from Jewish groups, primarily AIPAC, forces Fox News to remove the story from their website. Two hours prior to the 9-11 attacks, Odigo, an Israeli company with offices just a few blocks from the World Trade Towers, receives an advance warning via the internet.
The manager of the New York Office provides the FBI with the IP address of the sender of the message, but the FBI does not follow this up. The FBI is investigating 5 Israeli moving companies as possible fronts for Israeli intelligence.
It is revealed that prior to the attack millions of dollars of put options on both American Airlines and United Airlines, were traded. The FBI have promised to followed the purchasers up, but have never revealed their findings. That is because this would lead directly to Israel, the state behind the 911 attacks.
Following the World Trade Center attack, anonymous letters containing anthrax are sent to various politicians and media executives. Like the 9-11 attack this is immediately blamed on Al-Qaeda , until it is discovered that the anthrax contained within those letters is a specific type of weaponized anthrax made by a United States military laboratory.
The FBI then discover that the main suspect for these anthrax letters is a Ashkenazi Jew, Dr. Philip Zack, who had been reprimanded several times by his employers due to offensive remarks he made about Arabs. Dr. Philip Zack, was caught on camera entering the storage area where he worked at Fort Detrick which is where the Anthrax was kept. At this point, both the FBI and the mainstream media stopped making any public comments on the case.
Jewish Defence League Chairman since 1985, Ashkenazi Jew, Irv Rubin is jailed for allegedly plotting to bomb a mosque and the offices of a Arab-American congressman. He dies shortly after slitting his throat in a suicide attempt, before he can be brought to trial.
One week prior to the WTC attack, the Zim Shipping Company moves out of its offices in the WTC, breaking its lease and costing the company $50,000. No reason has ever been given, but Zim Shipping Company is half owned by the State of Israel (The Rothschilds).
On October 3, Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, makes the following statement to Ashkenazi Jew, Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that....I want to tell you something very clear, don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
2002: Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged), re-printed in 2002, provides a new definition of Anti Semitism which has not been updated since 1956. It reads,
"Anti-Semitism: (1) hostility toward Jews as a religious or racial minority group, often accompanied by social, political or economic discrimination (2) opposition to Zionism (3) sympathy for the opponents of Israel."
It was definition (2) and (3) that were added in the 2002 edition, just before the USA decide to invade Iraq under orders from the State of Rothschild, I mean Israel. Also this year, the Prime Minister of Israel, war criminal, Ariel Sharon, orders the massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Best get that definition updated to protect these criminals.
The DEA issues a report that Israeli spies, posing as art students, have been trying to penetrate US Government offices. Police near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in southern Washington State stop a suspicious truck and detain two Israelis, one of whom is illegally in the United States. The two men were driving at high speed in a Ryder rental truck, which they claimed had been used to, "deliver furniture."
The next day, police discovered traces of TNT and RDX military-grade plastic explosives inside the passenger cabin and on the steering wheel of the vehicle. The FBI then announces that the tests that showed explosives were, "false positived," by cigarette smoke, a claim test experts say is ridiculous.
Based on an alibi provided by a woman, the case is closed and the Israelis are handed over to INS to be sent back to Israel. One week later, the woman who provided the alibi vanishes.
2003: The United States invade Iraq on 19 March, which this year is the holy, "Day of Purim," in the Jewish calendar. This, "Day of Purim," is a day the Jews celebrate their victory over Ancient Babylon, now based within the borders of Iraq, how interesting.
What is also significant is that the previous U.S. led invasion of Iraq ended on the Day of Purim ten years earlier with the slaughter of 150,000 fleeing Iraqis under the current President's father, George Herbert Walker Bush. Purim is also the time when the Jews are encouraged to get bloody revenge against their perceived enemies.
Ancient Babylon, I mean Iraq, is now one of six nations left in the world who don’t have a Rothschild controlled central bank. This war is mainly about stealing Iraq’s water supply for Israel and is being fought with the blood of the American military which the State of Rothschild, I mean Israel control.
Israel has always struggled for water, it had to steal the Golan Heights from Syria which provided Israel with one third of its fresh water 36 years before, yet still in Israel water extraction has surpassed replacement by 2.5 billion metres in the last 25 years.
This means the water is far more precious to them than the oil reserves which are the second largest reserves of oil on the planet.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed states in a speech,
"Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
The Police Chief of Cloudcroft stops a truck speeding through a school zone. The drivers turn out to be Israelis with expired passports. Claiming to be movers, the truck contains junk furniture and several boxes.
The Israelis are handed over to immigration. The contents of the boxers are not revealed to the public.
Israel deploys assassination squads into other countries, including the United States. The US Government does not protest.
2004: Two years into an investigation of AIPAC’s (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee – the largest political lobbying group in the USA with over 65,000 members whose only purpose is to use the USA for the purposes of Israel) possible role as a spy front for Israel, Ashkenazi Jew, Larry Franklin, a mid-level Pentagon Analyst is observed by the FBI giving classified information to two officials of AIPAC suspected of being Israeli spies.
AIPAC hires lawyer Nathan Lewin to handle their legal defense, the same lawyer who defended suspected Israeli spy Stephen Bryen in 1978. Larry Franklin worked in the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, run by Richard Perle, at the time Perle (who was caught giving classified information to Israel back in 1970) was insisting that Iraq was crawling with weapons of mass destruction requiring the United States to invade and conquer Iraq.
There were no WMDs, of course, and Perle has dumped the blame for the, "bad intelligence," on George Tenet. But what is known is that the Pentagon Office of Special Plans was coordinating with a similar group in Israel, in Ariel Sharon’s office.
With two suspected Israeli spies (at least) inside the office from which the lies that launched the war in Iraq originated, it appears that the people of the United States are the victims of a deadly hoax, a hoax that started a war using the blood and money of American citizens for the purposes of Israeli oppression.
The leaking of the investigation of AIPAC to the media on August 28th, 2004 gave advance warning to other spies working with Franklin. The damage to the FBI’s investigation was completed when United States Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered the FBI to stop all arrests in the case.
Like the Stephen Bryen case and the hunt for, "Mega," this latest spy scandal seems destined by officials who have their own secret allegiances to protect, barring a massive public outcry.
Police near the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Tennessee stop a truck after a three mile chase, during which the driver throws a bottle containing a strange liquid from the cab. The drivers turn out to be Israelis using fake identifications. The FBI refuses to investigate and the Israelis are released.
Two Israelis try to enter Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, home to eight Trident submarines. The truck tests positive for explosives.
The National Director of the ADL, Abraham H. Foxman, publishes a book entitled, "Never Again? The Threat Of The New Anti-Semitism," in which he states that the New Testament's "lie," that the ancient Pharisees were responsible for the death of Christ, has been responsible for anti-semitism throughout the millennia and thus the New Testament of the bible is, "hate speech," and should be censored or banned.
2005: On January 20, President Bush makes the following statement as part of his second inaugural address, "When our Founders declared a new order of the ages." This is not true. The founders did not declare a, "new order of the ages," President Roosevelt did when in 1933, he put it's latin translation, "Novus Ordo Seclorum," on the dollar bill.
On 7 July the London Underground Network is bombed. Israel’s Finance Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu is in London on the morning of the attacks in order to attend an economic conference in a hotel over the underground station where one of the blasts occurred, but stayed in his hotel room instead after he had been informed by Israeli intelligence officials attacks were expected.
There are now only 5 nations on the world left without a Rothschild controlled central bank: Iran; North Korea; Sudan; Cuba; and Libya.
Physics Professor, Stephen E. Jones of Brigham Young University publishes a paper in which he proves the World Trade Center buildings could have only been brought down in the manner they were by explosives. He receives no coverage in the mainstream media for his scientific and provable claims.
2006: The Edmond De Rothschild Banque, a subsidiary of Europe's Edmond De Rothschild family bank group in France, becomes the first foreign family bank that has obtained approval of the China Banking Regulatory Commission and entered China's financial market.
The ADL ruthlessly leans on governments throughout the world to pass hate crimes legislation, as they are scared that the criminal cabal that is Israel and the Rothschilds is being exposed more and more on a daily basis, predominantly on the internet. Their job is to protect this criminal network and what better way to do it than by passing laws in which anyone who exposes a Jewish criminal becomes a criminal.
David Irving is sentenced to three years in jail in Austria, for denying the holocaust. It is important to note that the only historical event you can be arrested for questioning is the holocaust. This is because this has been the Rothschilds greatest weapon in brainwashing YOU, THE STUPID GOY! is that the Jews are so poor and persecuted when in actual fact they control the vast majority of international finance and international corporations throughout the world.

Resources
Here is a link to 6 pages of autographs from the 1929 Zionist congress with some very interesting names on it.
Main page: www.historyforsale.com

Sources
Holy Bible - King James Version
Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies - John Robison - 1798
The Life of Napolean - Sir Walter Scott - 1827
Coningsby - Benjamin Disraeli - 1844
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Martin Malia - 1848
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry - Albert Pike - 1872
The Rothschilds, Financial Rulers Of Nations - John Reeves - 1887
The Jews and Modern Capitalism - Werner Sombart - 1911
Great Britain, The Jews, and Palestine - Samuel Landman - 1936
Pawns In The Game - William Guy Carr - 1937
Inside The Gestapo - Hansjurgen Koehler - 1940
Barriers Down - Kent Cooper - 1942
The Mind Of Adolf Hitler - Walter Langer - 1943
The Empire Of The City - E. C. Knuth - 1946
The Jewish State - Theodor Herzl - 1946
The Curious History of the Six-Pointed Star - G. Scholem - 1949
Secrets Of The Federal Reserve - Eustace Mullins - 1952
Tales Of The British Aristocracy - L. G. Pine - 1957
Red Fog Over America - William Guy Carr - 1958
A Jewish Defector Warns America (Spoken Word Recording) - Benjamin H. Freedman - 1961
The Rothschilds - Frederic Morton - 1962
The Illuminati and the Council on Foreign Relations (Spoken Word Recording) - Myron Fagan - 1967
Ben-Gurion: The Armed Prophet - Michael Bar-Zohar - 1967
The Hidden Tyranny - Benjamin Freedman - 1971
None Dare Call It Conspiracy - Gary Allen - 1972
The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 2, Parts 3 and 4 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - First English translation published 1975.
Wall Street And The Rise Of Hitler - Anthony C. Sutton - 1976
The Rosenthal Document - Walter White, Jr. - 1978
Two Rothschilds And The Land Of Israel - Simon Schama - 1978
The Six Pointed Star - Dr O. J. Graham - 1984
The Last Days In America - Bob Fraley - 1984
Who Owns The TV Networks - Eustace Mullins - 1985
The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy - Seymour M. Hersh - 1991
A History of the Jews in America - Howard M. Sachar - 1992
Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts About the U.S. Israeli Relationship - Paul Findley - 1993
Descent Into Slavery - Des Griffin - 1994
Bloodlines Of The Illuminati - Fritz Springmeier - 1995
Jewish History, Jewish Religion - Israel Shahak - 1994
Satan Speaks - Anton Szandor LaVey - 1998
The Elite Serial Killers of Lincoln, JFK, RFK & MLK - Robert Gaylon Ross - 2001
Never Again? The Threat Of The New Anti-Semitism - Abraham H. Foxman - 2004
The Elite Don’t Dare Let Us Tell The People - Robert Gaylon Ross - 2004
Codex Magica - Texe Marrs - 2005

Bhutto's Death

27th December

Pakistan, India can’t afford war: analysts

AFP
Sunday, Dec 28, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Dec 28 (AFP) Dec 28, 2008
The risk of war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan has increased with the redeployment of troops along the common border, but neither can afford the cost of such a conflict, analysts say.

The two sides have raised tensions by whipping up war hype for domestic reasons since the Mumbai attacks last month, but must step back from the brink to focus on more pressing issues such as the spread of militancy, they say.

A war is even less likely as the United States, a key ally of both Islamabad and New Delhi, would suffer as a result, the experts warn.

"The risk of war has increased with troop mobilisation," Hasan Askari, a political analyst and former head of the political science department at the University of Punjab, told AFP.

"However this does not necessarily mean that the two countries will go to war. There are a number of considerations which impel the two sides not to cross the red line."

Senior Pakistani security and defence officials said Friday the military had moved a "limited number" of troops fighting Taliban militants in the tribal areas near Afghanistan to the Indian border as a "minimum security" measure.

This followed intelligence intercepts indicating that India had put its forces on notice to move to the border and cancelled all leave, they said. An Indian army spokesman however told AFP that no troops had been moved.

Retired Pakistani general Talat Masood said: "While the political and military leadership in both countries don't want war to happen, this action-and-reaction phenomenon is promoting escalation."

Both sides say they do not want war but would respond if attacked.

Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee has said that "all options" are open since the Mumbai attacks, which New Delhi has blamed on Pakistan-based militants. The attacks left 172 people dead.

"By declaring all options are on the table, New Delhi has pushed Pakistan toward a limited war scenario -- something which Islamabad was reluctant to contemplate a couple of weeks ago," defence analyst Riffat Hussain told AFP.

Hussain, the head of strategic studies at Islamabad's Quaid-e-Azam University, said any escalation could lead to a catastrophic point of no return that no one could envision.

"As nuclear-armed adversaries, India and Pakistan cannot afford any kind of shooting war between them," he said.

Analysts say while tensions in South Asia may persist for some time, they will eventually be defused because of international interest in the region, especially in Washington.

Askari said US and Western interests in Afghanistan would be "threatened" if Pakistan were to pull significant numbers of troops out of the tribal areas, as it would expose foreign forces to more cross-border militant attacks.

Such a withdrawal would also endanger the flow of supplies to NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, as the roads through northwest Pakistan would not be secure, he said.

Masood agreed, saying: "Pakistan should be focusing more on the tribal territories to fight Al-Qaeda and control Talibanisation. Any diversion will be disastrous for the country, for the region and for international peace."

New Delhi-based security expert C. Uday Bhaskar said Pakistani troop movements "seem to be part of the army's strategy to obfuscate the real issue of the (Mumbai) attacks."

"It is a signal to the Americans that they should not push the Pakistani army beyond a point. Although it seems like an India-Pakistan issue, the operative part is Pakistan-US ties," Bhaskar told AFP.

Hussain warned that India's tough stance would backfire if maintained, as it would embolden the forces of extremism in Pakistan -- a price neither country could afford to pay.

"That would not only imperil the internal security of Pakistan but also permanently damage prospects of a lasting peace between the two states," he said.

http://www.spacewar.com/2006/081228015612.iqkb96f4.html

Pakistan says no war with India, US leads diplomatic efforts

Susan Stumme
AFP
Saturday, Dec 27, 2008


Pakistan again said on Saturday that it does not want war with India, as the international community tries to defuse tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours after Islamabad moved troops to the border.

The White House called for calm amid a flurry of diplomatic activity in both Islamabad and New Delhi aimed at easing already badly strained ties, one month after the Mumbai attacks, which India has blamed on Pakistan-based militants.
"We don't want to have aggression with our neighbours. We want to have friendly relations with our neighbours," Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said at his official residence in remarks broadcast on state television.
"I assure you once again that we will not act. We will only react," he added, as he led a special prayer ceremony in honour of two-time former premier Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated one year ago in a gun and suicide attack.
On Friday, Pakistani officials said the military had moved troops from the tribal areas near Afghanistan, where they are fighting Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants, to the eastern border with India as a "minimum security" measure.
The senior security and defence officials described the troop movements as "limited" but the news set off alarm bells in New Delhi, where Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh summoned his military chiefs for a strategy session.
India also advised its nationals to avoid travel to Pakistan, saying it was unsafe for them to be in the country.
In Washington, the White House sought to restore calm between the South Asian neighbours, which have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.
"US officials are in touch with both the Indians and Pakistanis. We continue to urge both sides to cooperate on the Mumbai investigation as well as counter-terrorism in general," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told AFP.
"We also do not want either side to take any unnecessary steps that raise tensions in an already tense situation."
Both Islamabad and New Delhi have repeatedly said they do not want war and have called on the other to tone down the rhetoric, but warn they would act if provoked.
Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee again called on Pakistan to do more to crack down on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the banned militant group that New Delhi says masterminded the Mumbai attacks, which left 172 people dead.
"Pakistan should not divert attention from the real issue of taking action against terrorists by raising war hysteria," he told reporters in New Delhi.
Islamabad has said it is willing to cooperate with India in investigating the carnage but says New Delhi has offered no solid proof that Pakistani nationals were involved.
Mukherjee met Friday in the Indian capital with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal, and spoke to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi, and Iran's Manouchehr Mottaki, his office said.
Pakistan's Shah Mehmood Qureshi also spoke with the Chinese and Iranian ministers, who pledged their support in efforts to maintain peace in South Asia, Qureshi's office said in a statement.
Ties between India and Pakistan recently sank to their lowest point in late 2001, when militants staged a brazen attack on the Indian parliament -- a strike New Delhi also blamed on Lashkar-e-Taiba.
That attack prompted both sides to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops to the common border but they eventually pulled back following intense international mediation.
On Friday, Pakistani officials said a "limited number of troops" -- local media put the figure at 20,000 -- had been moved to the eastern border near India, and leave had been suspended for armed forces on active duty.
"We do not want to create any war hysteria but we have to take minimum security measures to ward off any threat," a defence ministry official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Any major shift of Pakistani troops out of the tribal areas would likely spark concern in Washington and other Western capitals, as it could open the door to more cross-border militant attacks on foreign forces in Afghanistan

Conflict Between Pakistan and India: Realizing RAND’s Plan for World War Three

Kurt Nimmo

According to the New York Times, Pakistan has moved troops away from its western border with Afghanistan while India has issued a warning to travelers to avoid Pakistan. “The redeployment came as Indian authorities warned their citizens not to travel to Pakistan given the heightened tensions between the two nations, news agencies reported, particularly since Indian citizens had been arrested there in connection with a bombing in the Pakistani city of Lahore,” the newspaper reports. The Associated Press quoted two Pakistani intelligence officials as saying that the Pakistani Army’s 14th division was being sent to Kasur and Sialkot, near the Indian border, and that around 20,000 troops were being redeployed.

Alex Jones discusses with Bob Chapman a report by Paul Joseph Watson on the RAND Corporation’s effort to launch a major war.

Pakistan’s troop redeployment comes on the heels of its warning India that it would face a “stern response” if it engaged in surgical strikes in response to the Mumbai attacks, now demonstrated to be a false flag attack. “Pakistan did not want war but is ready to defend its frontiers, Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters in his hometown of Multan. If India made the “mistake of carrying out a surgical strike”, Pakistan will deal sternly with such an eventuality. Pakistan has purportedly moved its tenth brigade to Lahore and ordered its third Armed Brigade to march towards Jhelum,” ZeeNews reported on December 25. “A lot of military movement is being noticed in districts just across the international border for the last few days, which is not normal,” said RC Dhyani, DIG of Rajasthan frontier BSF.

Analysts note that in the event of a war between the two nuclear armed nations, the Pakistani military would effectively abandon its part in the contrived U.S.-led GWOT and pull its troops away from the western border with Afghanistan, where they have been battling Pakistan ISI and CIA spawned militants, and deploy them on the eastern border with India.

“Pakistani Taliban militants have already said they would rally to help the Pakistani military in the event of war against India,” Reuters noted on December 24. “Public sympathy and support for militant groups would soar as they would be seen as national defenders against the ‘real enemy’, India.”

A war between Pakistan and India and Pakistan’s abandonment of the GWOT in its tribal regions would provide the U.S. with a near perfect pretext to attack targets inside Pakistan. Last August Barack Obama promised to launch just such attacks “with or without approval from the Pakistani government, a move that would likely cause anxiety in the already troubled region” and exacerbate any conflict between India and Pakistan.

Earlier this year Nisar A. Memon of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q alleged in the upper house said that the U.S. plans to foment civil war and strife in order to break up Pakistan, according to the Pakistan Daily. “He urged the government to take cognizance of a research report by Prof Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research (Canada) which said that the recent regime change would be followed by a ‘deliberate’ political impasse. The report said that the political impasse was part of an evolving US foreign policy agenda which favored disruption and disarray in the structure of the state.” An earlier report by the CIA predicted a “Yugoslavia-like fate for Pakistan in a decade with civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries as seen in Balochsitan.”

A conflict between India and Pakistan, however, has the potential to escalate far beyond mere conventional and civil war. “No conventional war between India and Pakistan will remain limited for long and will gradually lead to a full-scale war and ultimately to a nuclear conflict,” a study by a Pakistani defense official warned in 2004, Space Daily reported. If India conducts surgical strikes against Pakistan, explained the official, “Pakistan is not going to sit quiet. It will be an act of war which will not remain limited and it can escalate to a full-scale war and ultimately it can lead to a nuclear conflict if Pakistan’s national interests are threatened.”

Earlier this month J. Sri Raman reported on India’s fanatical Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh party and its call for nuclear war in response to the Mumbai attacks. Kuppahalli Sitaramayya Sudarshan, leader of the RSS, believes “there is no other way left” to deal with terrorism and “that this terrorism may ultimately result in a Third World War. And this will be a nuclear war in which many of us are going to be finished.”

“According to reports out of top Chinese mainstream news outlets, the RAND Corporation recently presented a shocking proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession,” Paul Joseph Watson and Yihan Dai wrote for Prison Planet on October 30. “The reports cite French media news sources as having uncovered the proposal, in which RAND suggested that the $700 billion dollars that has been earmarked to bailout Wall Street and failing banks instead be used to finance a new war which would in turn re-invigorate the flagging stock markets.”

A war between India and Pakistan may provide an ideal pretext for U.S. involvement in the region. “Reportedly, the RAND proposal brazenly urged that a new war could be launched to benefit the economy, but stressed that the target country would have to be a major influential power, and not a smaller country on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq,” Watson notes. “The reported RAND proposal dovetails with recent comments made by Joe Biden, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and others, concerning the ‘guarantee’ that Barack Obama will face a major ‘international crisis’ soon after taking office.” As noted above, Obama has made a point of mentioning Pakistan as a target of U.S. intervention.

It now appears a brewing war between India and Pakistan is precisely the sort of conflict imagined by the RAND Corporation to stimulate the deteriorating American economy. It will also provide a pretext to declare martial law in America and put the finishing touches on the New World Order’s high-tech surveillance state and control grid.

The Tailor of Mumbai

Jeff Huber

Recyclable Sources

The Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the Indian attack, according to an unnamed State Department official who was rephrasing what unnamed American and Pakistani authorities had told him; but, unnamed American Embassy officials wouldn’t verify the story for the unnamed State official, nor would unnamed Pakistani officials in Islamabad.

NYT's unnamed source at State also said that his/her/its unnamed sources said that unnamed Pakistani authorities, under pressure from unnamed sources in India, had arrested Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a member of Lashkar. (Don't get the two confused now. "Lakhvi" is they guy; "Lashkar" is the thing.) NYT reported that Lakhvi (the guy) reportedly "masterminded the attacks," but didn't make clear which unnamed sources had leveled that allegation.

An anonymous senior Pakistani official apparently confirmed that Lakhvi had been arrested along with a bunch of other guys who belonged to Lashkar the thing, but the official "later backed away from the assertion."

Another NYT article reported that unnamed American counterterrorism officials in Washington "wanted to see proof that Mr. Lakhvi was actually in custody," but apparently zero officials, named or unnamed, American or Indian or Pakistani, gave a dog's last lunch about seeing proof that Lakhvi the guy or Lashkar the thing actually had anything to do with the Mumbai attacks.

The Washington Post took the Mumbai tale to the next level of incredibility when it published a piece by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke that purported to be expert opinion but read like the beginning of Clarke's next bad spy thriller. Clarke essentially tells us that in order to understand what's really happening in South Asia right now, we have to imagine that the shake and bake scenario he's about to present is true. By the end of the article, the Mumbai incident, like all terror acts, leads to al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden is giving orders to a couple of Taliban characters and a guy from Lashkar the thing and a Pakistani intelligence dude on how they need to get cocked and loaded to defile with the new American president's head.

It took the BBC to report that all of the allegations against Lashkar stemmed from interrogations by the Mumbai police of the surviving member of the terror group, who might not have been a whole lot less dead than his nine former buddies when they shot truth serum into him.

Snow Thy Enemy

On December 11, Britain's Times Online reported that the UN Security Council, under pressure from the ubiquitous unnamed sources in India and the U.S., has placed Lakhvi and four other guys in Lashkar on a "terrorist blacklist." I'm dying to find out what kind of list Dean Wormer put them on. Keep in mind that Lakhvi and Lashkar are still only "suspects," still based on the sole evidence of a guy nobody has seen except the Indian police he supposedly confessed to. The UN has also placed sanctions against Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity arm of Lashkar.

On December 17, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Pakistan has given the U.S. a "very solemn commitment" to disentangle the charitable Jamaat from the evildoing Lashkar. "I think the Pakistani government is being very sincere," Wood said.

Yeah.

Wood also said, "Look, they're (Pakistan) on the front lines of terrorism, as we've said many times before." However many times State has said Pakistan is on the front line of terrorism, I missed all of them. The last time I paid attention to that sort of bull jargon, Iraq was the "central front" in the war on terrorism. I expected the next central front to be Afghanistan, until the last minute to withdraw troops from Iraq came along and the central front shifted back there. I guess with Pakistan in the mix we now have a three front circus. I don't know how Iran fits into all this; maybe it's the enemy at our back. (Oh, watch the Pentagon propaganda fairies steal that one. And those Muslim agitators in Somalia, we'll call them "the enemy below!")

Indian police allegedly questioned two Indian Muslims they claim to have arrested in February during an attack on a police camp in northern India. One of the prisoners, Fahim Ansari, was said to be carrying maps highlighting Mumbai landmarks, several of which were hit in last month's attack, at the time of his arrest. If he were really carrying such maps, you'd think that might have clued in the Indian authorities that some evildoing was headed down the pike for Mumbai, but maybe I'm being too critical. I mean, think how many U.S. authorities had to be a-snooze at the switch for 9/11 to happen.

But one also has to wonder what Ansari was doing with maps of the next big terror job in his pocket while he and his buds were shagging the Indian police camp. Come to think of it, Indian authorities supposedly identified all those dead guys who pulled the Mumbai job from I.D.s they were carrying. If ten twenty-something year old guys were smart enough to sneak into the largest city of a nuclear power and hold its entire law enforcement and military establishment at bay for days, how could they be dumb enough to carry their wallets with them? Is that a Lashkar thing, a way make sure the authorities can trace their suicide commandos back to them? If so, why are the Lashkar guys denying they had anything to do with the Mumbai incident?

Pakistani news group Dawn claims to have visited the Pakistani hometown of the alleged suspect Indian police are holding and spoken to his father, who allegedly admits the alleged suspect is his son. India's The Hindu claims Pakistani authorities have cordoned off the town so no one can confirm Dawn's story.

Dawn and other Pakistani news outlets claim that the FBI, after interrogating the surviving Mumbai attacker, cleared Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) organization of any involvement in the attack. As best one can tell, the Pakistani media's source for this story was Efrem Zimbalist Jr. An earlier story by Pakistan's The Nation claimed that the FBI, along with India's intelligence agency and Israel, were "hatching" a conspiracy to destabilize the ISI.

Then there's the scoop from India's Times Now about this guy they identify as "Sabauddin" who is the "alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) finance[r] in India." The alleged financer Sabauddin is alleged to...

be the guy Indian authorities arrested in February along with that Fahim Ansari guy who was allegedly carrying maps of the Mumbai terror sites while he and Sabauddin supposedly shagged the police station in northern India. One has to wonder why LeT allowed its financer to go on a field job; maybe it was like in Twelve O'clock High where the chaplain and the admin officer sneak aboard a B-17 for a raid over Germany and General Savage doesn’t find out until afterwards.

The only thing we can say for sure regarding this unholy narrative is that both India and Pakistan are incompetent and crooked, that their news media are every bit as untrustworthy as ours, and that we'll never get to the bottom of the story.

But that doesn't matter. What matters is that we have "upheaval" in South Asia that constitutes "clear and present" security concerns to us in North America and which demands that we pour more troops into the Banastans and keep them there until things become less up-heaved, which they never will be as long as we're there heaving our weight around.

India's Reckless Road to Washington

By VIJAY PRASHAD
On Thursday, November 27, in the middle of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Imran Babar, one of the terrorists, called India TV from Nariman House. He used a cellphone that belonged to Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the co-director of the Chabad-Lubavitch Center. The following day, Babar and his associates killed Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka. The phone call he made was not long. Babar opened with a comment that made little sense to most people: “You call [Israel’s] army staff to visit Kashmir. Who are they to come to J &K [Jammu and Kashmir]? This is a matter between us and Hindus, the Hindu government. Why does Israel come here?”
Little is known of Babar’s babbles outside the confines of Hakirya, the “campus” of the Israeli high command, and of South Block, which houses the Indian External Affairs and Defense ministries. What he referred to are the growing military and security ties between India and Israel. As well, he might have referenced the now rather solid links between the Hindu Right and the Israeli Right, and how their view of the conflicts that run from Jerusalem to Srinagar mirror those of the jihadis like Babar. Imran Babar and his fellow terrorists come to their critique from the standard anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism that blinds many aggrieved jihadis. Rather than make a concrete assessment of their grievances, they take refuge in as mythical a world as sketched out by the Israeli Right-Hindu Right, where Jews, Hindus and America are arrayed against Muslims.
That the terrorists attacked the Chabad-Lubavitch Center has renewed the call to see the commonalities between the victims of terrorism, whether those in a Haifa restaurant or a Mumbai train, between 9/11 and 11/26. To do so flattens out a significant differences, and reduces the violence to their acts themselves rather than to the social context that leads people to acts of terror. Mumbai provokes the Right to seek recourse to the solutions of war and surveillance, methods that might create a moment’s sense of security before the wily adversary finds a new technological means to strike back. There is no common technical solution: better sniper rifles or iris scanners, better intelligence databases or cattle prods. The weapons used to deal the fatal blow to the terrorists are also incubators of a new generation of terrorists. This is an elementary lesson, lost to those who seek the silver bullet.
Why Does Israel Come Here?
On September 10, 2008, Israel’s top army official, General Avi Mizrahi landed in New Delhi. He met with India’s leading army, navy and air force officials before leaving for a short visit to Jammu and Kashmir. Mizrahi, a long-standing officer in the Israeli Defense Force, lectured senior Indian army officers at the Akhnur Military Base, near the Indo-Pakistan border, on the theme of counterterrorism. Later, in Srinagar, Mizrahi and his Indian counterpart, Army Chief Deepak Kapoor agreed to joint counterterrorism activities, notably for Israeli commandoes to train Indian soldiers in urban combat.
The Mizrahi visit in 2008 is not extraordinary. He had been to India in February 2007. In June 2007, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky brought a team of IDF officers to Jammu and Kashmir, where they met senior Indian officials at the 16 Corps headquarters at Nagrota in the Jammu region near the India-Pakistan border. Kaplinsky’s team discussed the problem of infiltration, how militants from the Pakistani side enter the India. The 720-kilometer barbed wire fence, an echo of Israel’s wall, has not prevented the transit of militants. Kaplinsky came to push other, high-tech means, such as night-vision devices, to help interdict militants. En route to Israel, Kaplinsky’s team went to the Mumbai-based Western Naval Command.
In January 2008, to continue these contacts, the IDF’s chief, Brigadier General Pinchas Buchris came to India and met the top civilians and the top brass. They discussed the procedures to share intelligence on terrorist activity. A week after Buchris returned to Israel, India’s Navy Chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta spent time in Jerusalem, meeting IDF heads Gabi Askhenazi and Buchris. Between 2007 and early 2008, all three Indian defense chiefs visited Israel. The framework for these meetings is the 2002 agreement to form an Indo-Israeli Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, a long-standing attempt to create an entente between the armies of India and Israel, and to consolidate the immense arms trade between the two countries (India is now Israel’s largest arms buyer).
The impetus for the relations goes back to the 1990s, when the governing Congress Party began to dismantle the dirigiste Indian State and to withdraw from India’s long-standing non-aligned policy. The Congress government believed that it was time to reassess its relations with the United States, and that the best way to get to Washington was through Tel Aviv. Stronger ties with Israel might soften the reticence in Washington toward India, and lead it to loosen its bonds with Pakistan and China. India banked on Israel to play the broker with Washington. (This is the argument of my book, Namaste Sharon: Hindutva and Sharonism Under U. S. Hegemony, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2003).
In January 1992, the Indian government recognized the state of Israel. The next month, Defense Minister Sharad Pawar called for Indo-Israeli cooperation on counter-terrorism. Israel’s Director-General of Police Ya’acov Lapidot visited India for an international police convention, and returned to Israel with news that the Indian government wanted Israeli expertise on counter-terror operations. Government spokesperson Benjamin Netanyahu told India Abroad (29 February 1992) that Israel “developed expertise in dealing with terrorism at the field level and also internationally, at the political and legal level, and would be happy to share it with India.” In the Congress years, the main arena of cooperation came in arms deals, as India’s massive purchases provided stability to Israel’s previously volatile arms industry.
When the Hindu Right came to power in the late 1990s, it hastened both the economic “liberalization” policy (with a Minister for Privatization in office) and it shifted its attentions to Washington, DC and Tel Aviv: an axis of the three powers against what it called Islamic terrorism was to be the new foundation of India’s emergent foreign policy. The close relationship between Netanyahu (then Prime Minister) and L. K. Advani (the Home Minister of India, and a brigand of the Hard Right) smoothed the path to intensive collaboration. Advani admires Netanyahu’s personal history as a member of the Sayeret Matcal (special forces) unit of the IDF; Advani himself has no such on-the-ground experience. In 1995, when in Israel, Advani happily received Netanyahu’s new book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism.
Advani has since made it his practice to quote from the book, particularly the view that a “free society must know what they are fighting,” which is the “rising tide of Islamic terrorism.” This was all honey in Advani’s ear. He drew the central concepts of his counter-terrorism policy from his friends in the Israeli government: a wall at the border, threats of “hot pursuit” across it; demur against political negotiation, escalation of rhetoric; limits on civil liberties when it comes to suspects in terror cases. Netanyahu had purposely refused to distinguish between Iran and Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood. Advani too began to collapse the distinction between Kashmiri separatist groups and post-Afghan war terror outfits based in Pakistan, between aggrieved Indian Muslims and Pakistani proxy forces. As well, Netanyahu and Advani crafted a stage on which to enact an endless battle between Democracy and Terrorism, where the role of Democracy is played by the United States, Israel and India and where the role of Terrorism is played by Islam. It is all simple and dangerous.
During his June 2000 visit to Israel, Advani underscored his adoption of Netanyahu’s framework during a lecture at the Indian Embassy. “In recent years we have been facing a growing internal security problem,” he said. “We are concerned with cross-border terrorism launched by proxies of Pakistan. We share with Israel a common perception of terrorism as a menace, even more so when coupled with religious fundamentalism. Our mutual determination to combat terrorism is the basis for discussions with Israel, whose reputation in dealing with such problems is quite successful.” Advani invited a team of Israeli counter-terrorism experts to tour Jammu and Kashmir in September 2000. Led by Eli Katzir, an aide to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the team conducted a feasibility study of India’s military security needs and offered suggestions for Israeli assistance. Three years later, Israel and India signed a military-arms pact that included a specific training mission. Israeli forces would train four new Special Forces battalions of the Indian Army; other battalions would learn the practice of “irregular warfare” and work with the Northern Command in Kashmir.
When the Hindu Right lost the election in 2004 to a Congress-led alliance, the pace of contacts lessened. With both Advani and Netanyahu in the shadows, the alliance lost its main champions. The Congress government recognized how toxic this alliance would be, unnecessarily inflaming an already difficult relationship with Pakistan. This was also recognized within Israel. Efraim Inbar, director of Israel’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, who is actively involved in the Indo-Israeli contacts, recognizes the political problem; “this kind of cooperation needs to be secret if it can be,” he told Newsweek. The military and arms deals between India and Israel continued, even if it was now treated as a sideshow. India remains a major importer of Israeli arms. What lingers in the shadows is the Israeli work in Kashmir. Little is officially revealed of it, even as leaks here and there hint at the extent of the contacts.
Technocrats of Terrorism.
Ami Pedazhur, a political scientist from the University of Austin-Texas, joins the chorus on the New York Times op-ed page with suggestions for the Indian government after Mumbai (“From Munich to Mumbai,” December 20). Rather than see anything new in the Mumbai attacks, Pedazhur conjoins it with an unbroken history that stretches back at least to the 1972 Munich attacks. What links Munich to Mumbai is neither the identity of those who kill nor those who are killed, but the means by which the killing occurs. Analysts of terrorism, like Pedazhur, are technocrats of counter-terrorist actions. They study how terrorists operate, and so what best security and military force can constrain them. The public policy that stems from this sort of technocratic view of terrorism has one end, to restrain the terrorist with more security checkpoints, more hot pursuit.
Why does the Indian government take advice from a government whose own security services have a dismal record of preventing terror attacks and whose own armed forces have failed to create stability on its borders? Israel’s weaponry works fine. But Israel’s counter-terror expertise is questionable. Pedazhur takes pride in Israel’s counterterrorism policy. What pride there can be in a regime that maintains its safety through a ruthless military strategy is questionable. The Israeli government, regardless of the party in charge, is conspicuous not only for its treatment of the Palestinians but also, significantly, for its failure to create a secure society for its own citizens. It is easy enough to make the Palestinians the author of the troubles, but this of course ignores the intransigence of Israel’s political leadership to produce a settlement. Because it cannot make a political peace, the Israeli authorities have perfected various technological means to minimize the consequences of its failures. This is what it wishes to export to India. For India, the imports signal the surrender of its leadership to the current imbroglio. Gated countries wallow in fear and hatred.
The costs of the Tel Aviv-New Delhi-Washington axis are too much to bear, at least for India. India cannot afford to mimic Israel’s failed neighborhood policy, nor can it follow the U. S. example that seeks to solve its problems by aerial bombardment. South Asia requires a regional solution to what is without doubt a regional problem, one with its roots in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s as much as the unresolved Kashmir question (with close to a million troops in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian government runs what is tantamount to an occupation – they provide the opposite of security for the residents of the state). When the Afghan civil wars came to a unjust quiet in the early 1990s, the various foreign fighters returned to their homelands, emboldened by their self-perception of their victorious struggle: they went to Chechnya, the Philippines, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and into the Kashmir struggle. Pakistan and India are equally victims of these veterans of the jihad, and both have a vested interest in their demobilization. But more than that, there is a danger that as the U. S. amps up its war in Afghanistan and treats Pakistan with contempt, the jihadis will take out their wrath with the same kind of ferocity as they demonstrated in Mumbai. Rather than risk a failed military strategy against the jihadis, it is time for a regional conference on human security, one that includes better cooperation between the states and a program for the lives of those who are driven to the compounds of hatred through their many, many grievances.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007.

He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu

Pakistan: Conditions attached to IMF “bailout” will exacerbate slump and poverty

By Vilani Peiris

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in its first "bailout" of an Asian country during the current world financial crisis, approved a 23-month, US $7.6 billion loan to Pakistan last month in order to avert a current accounts crisis and Pakistan's default on foreign loans. On November 27, the IMF released to Islamabad a first installment of $3.1 billion.

Under its emergency financing mechanism, the IMF has approved more than $40 billion in loans in recent weeks to countries such as the Ukraine, Serbia, and Iceland.

The conditions the IMF is attaching to its loan to Pakistan will severely impact the country's workers and toilers. They include: eliminating all subsidies on energy, petroleum products, and fertilizer; slashing government spending, including "non-priority" development spending; and raising taxes.

In order to pave the way for the IMF loan, Pakistan's central bank raised its bank lending rate in early November by 2 percentage points to 15 percent and the government has let it be known that a further 1.5 percentage point hike will be implemented in January.

The high-interest rate policy the IMF is imposing on the State Bank of Pakistan has caused consternation among large sections of Pakistan's business elite, including various trade and industrial lobby groups. According to an Asia Times Online report, Anjum Nisar, the president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry, has said, "Pakistan's industrial landscape may soon be marked with dead and sick units and there will be massive unemployment because of the devastating impact on businesses of the higher cost of bank loans arising from the interest rate increase."

The IMF's November 24 press release announcing its executive board's decision to approve the $7 billion plus loan to Pakistan said that Islamabad has committed to an economic stabilization package that calls for the government's annual budget deficit to "be reduced from 7.4 percent of GDP in 2007/2008 (July-June) to 4.2 percent in 2008/2009 and 3.3 percent in 2009/2010." The IMF added, "This fiscal adjustment will be achieved primarily by phasing out energy subsidies, better prioritizing development spending, and implementing strong tax policy and administration measures."

The achievement of these targets will require dramatic spending and tax cuts—all the more so given that economic growth in Pakistan has already fallen off sharply and is expected to continue to contract in 2009 due to the world recession. The IMF and World Bank are themselves forecasting that Pakistan's economy will grow by only 3 percent in 2009 as compared with 6 percent in each of 2007 and 2008.

The IMF is reportedly pressing, as part of a scheme to raise the Pakistan state's income from the present 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 15 percent by 2013, for the introduction of a tax on agricultural income. Pakistan's large landowners have tenaciously resisted such proposals in the past. Should Islamabad ultimately impose a tax on agricultural income, it will only be after a bitter struggle within the Pakistani bourgeoisie over how to fashion it so small producers bear a disproportionate share of the tax burden.

The IMF, which is controlled by the US and other western powers, made no demands for cuts to Pakistan's massive military budget. Juan Carlos Di Tata, IMF senior special advisor for the Middle East and Central Asia, expressed concern about the rise in Pakistan's defence spending, but then added that the question of Pakistan's military expenditure had been excluded from the bank's negotiations with the country's Pakistan People's Party-led coalition government. "The issue of defence spending was not discussed during the programme negotiations," said Di Tata. "Defence spending is basically an item that was determined by the government and included in the budget projections for this fiscal year. There was no discussion of this topic."

For years the US has had a close partnership with the Pakistani military, using it as an instrument of its predatory foreign policy, first again the USSR and now in expanding US influence in oil-rich Central Asia. This has included support for a succession of Pakistani military dictatorships. At Washington's prodding, the Pakistani military has dramatically stepped up its efforts over the past five months to crush support within Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) for the anti-US insurgency in Afghanistan, mounting an offensive involving tens of thousands of troops, tanks, and fighter planes.

In last summer's budget the government officially listed defence expenditure at 290 billion rupees ($4.4 billion). But this figure is a gross underestimation, as much military spending is included in other departments' budgets and the military budget does not include the $1.5 billion per year Washington has been funneling to the Pakistani military in payments for services rendered in the so-called war on terror.

The Pakistan Daily News reports Di Tata as observing "Pakistan's defence spending ... clubbed with administrative expenditure, has reached the alarming figure of 10 percent of GDP, compared with 4 percent three years ago."

The Pakistani economy was already mired in crisis before the eruption in September of what is conceded to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In the first eight months of the year, Pakistan was roiled by rising oil and food prices, a sharp decline in the value of the rupee, a chronic shortage of electricity and recurring brownouts and blackouts, and a slowdown in Pakistan's real-estate and services-led economic expansion.

The financial crisis and continuing political instability dealt the economy a further bodyblow. Not only foreign investors, but also large swathes of the Pakistani elite, pulled their money, or at least much of it, out of the country. By November the country's foreign reserves had fallen by 75 percent to just $3.45 billion.

Pakistanis have bitter memories of the IMF austerity programs implemented by the PPP and Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) governments in the late 1980s and 1990s. Fearing a hostile public reaction and not wanting to countenance a further loss of Pakistani "sovereignty" under conditions where the US is routinely carrying out military operations within Pakistan, the PPP-led government long hesitated in contracting a loan with the IMF.

But the deteriorating economic situation left it no choice. Under conditions of a global credit crunch, its closest allies—the US, China, Saudi Arabia and the EU—rebuffed Islamabad's request for emergency financial aid, insisting that any aid would be conditional on Pakistan first obtaining IMF support.

According to the IMF itself, even after last month's IMF loan, Pakistan will need another $20 billion "to get control over its imbalances." It is far from clear from whence these funds will come. The so-called "Friends of Pakistan"—an inter-state group recently founded on the initiative of the US, Britain and Saudi Arabia and including Germany, France, and China—met on November 16, but failed to commit any funds to Pakistan. The "Friends" are scheduled to meet again January 13-16.

In recent weeks, inflation, which in September was approaching 30 percent, has abated somewhat due to falling world prices for oil, edible oil, steel, and other goods. But this is being offset by stagnating Pakistani exports. Pakistan's export trade, as that of other Asian countries, is being hit by the drying up of credit and plummetting demand from the advanced capitalist countries.

In its press release, the IMF said, "The IMF-supported program has two key objectives: to restore macroeconomic stability and confidence through a tightening of macroeconomic policies; and to ensure social stability and adequate support for the poor and vulnerable in Pakistan." It went on to promise support to Pakistani authorities in putting "in place a comprehensive and effectively-targeted social safety net in close cooperation with the World Bank." As a first step "spending on the social safety net will be increased by 0.6 percentage point of GDP, to 0.9 percent of GDP in 2008/2009."

The reality is that Pakistan's IMF-approved stabilization program is aimed at making the country a better source of profit for international and domestic capital. Indeed, the IMF's own statement bluntly says, "The programme aims to restore the confidence of domestic and foreign investors with a tightening of fiscal and monetary policies."

As for the claims of a "targeted social safety net," not only would .9 percent of GDP, even if achieved, constitute a pittance in a country where more than 40 million people are living in dire poverty, the other policies being imposed by the PPP-government, its pro-poor rhetoric notwithstanding, and the IMF will have a devastating impact on the economy as a whole, and especially the most vulnerable layers of society. Already there have been significant popular protests against the subsidy cuts.

Just as importantly, the interest rates increases and government spending cuts will lead to widespread job losses, thus further swelling the ranks of the poor.

Sakeeb Sherani of the Royal Bank of Scotland, told a meeting organized by Pakistan's Centre for Research and Security Studies that the IMF package will "cause up to three million job cuts in deferment sectors and push another 5.6 million to 7.5 million Pakistanis into poverty over the next two years."

Shahid Javed Burki, himself a former World Bank vice-president and ex-Pakistani finance minister has strongly criticized the IMF/PPP-led government's "stabilization" program saying that it will deflate the economy at a time when demand threatens to fall dramatically due to world recession. "While other Asian countries," said Burki, have introduced stimulation packages to generate growth, Pakistan has done no such thing. Pakistan is being advised, in fact, to cut expenditure when it needs to invest in employment generating projects. ... At the present rate, only high growth in poverty can be expected."

Who Killed Hemant Karkare

The Late Hemant Karkare

For the first time, the Indian state was conducting a thorough professional probe into a terror network involving Hindu extremist organisations. The implications of this investigation bring to question the death of the lead investigator of the Anti-Terrorism Squad, Chief Hemant Karkare, on the day of the Mumbai attacks.In all the confusion and horror generated by the Bombay attacks, the circumstances surrounding the death of Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare and two of his colleagues, encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar and Additional Commissioner of Police Ashok Kamte deserve greater attention. The operations involved well-organised attacks on high-profile sites in Colaba - the Taj, Oberoi and Trident Hotels and Nariman House - and a parallel set of operations targeting Victoria Terminus station, Cama Hospital and the Metro cinema, near the police headquarters where Karkare worked. The latter is an area where foreigners are much less likely to be found

Why is a Proper Investigation Crucial?

Prior to his death, Hemant Karkare was unearthing a terror network unlike any that has been seen thus far. The investigation started by tracing the motorcycle used to plant bombs in Malegaon in September 2008 to a Hindu Sadhvi, Pragyasingh Thakur. In a cellphone conversation between Thakur and Ramji, the man who planted the bombs, she asked why more people had not been killed. For the first time, the Indian state was conducting a thorough professional probe into a terror network involving Hindu extremist organisations, this one with huge ramifications, some leading into military and bomb-making training camps and politicised elements in the army, others into organisations and political leaders affiliated to the BJP. One of the most potentially explosive discoveries was that a serving army officer, Lt.Col. Srikant Purohit, had procured 60 kg of RDX from government supplies for use in the terrorist attack on the Samjhauta Express (the India-Pakistan 'Understanding' train) in February 2007, in which 68 people were killed, the majority of them Pakistanis. Initially, militants of Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Islamist terror groups had been accused of carrying out the attack, but no evidence against them had been found.

The investigation generated enormous hostility, with allegations (refuted by medical examinations) that the suspects had been tortured and that Karkare was being used as a political tool, and demands that the ATS team should be changed. Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and BJP Prime Ministerial candidate, L.K.Advani accused him of being a 'desh drohi' or traitor, a charge that in India carries a death penalty, and the Shiv Sena offered legal aid to those accused of the terrorist attack, complaining that 'The government does not save Hindus from terrorists, and if Hindus defend themselves, they are maligned'. In an interview shortly before he died, Karkare admitted he was hurt by the campaign against him. On November 26, just before the terrorist attack, the police in Pune received a call from an anonymous caller saying in Marathi that Karkare would be killed in a bomb blast within two or three days.Just as attitudes to Karkare in society at large were polarised, with some admiring him as a hero - one Maulana went so far as to call him a 'massiha (messiah) of Muslims', an amazing tribute from a Muslim to a Hindu - while others hated him as a traitor worthy of death, attitudes within the police force too were polarised. For example, dismissed encounter specialist Sachin Vaze (who with three colleagues was charged with murder, criminal conspiracy, destruction of evidence and concealment of the dead body in the case of Khwaja Yunus shortly before the terrorist attack) was a member of the Shiv Sena who was actively engaged in the campaign against Karkare and in support of the Malegaon blast accused.

Vaze and several other encounter specialists who had been dismissed for corruption, extortion and links with the underworld also had a grudge against Salaskar, whom they suspected of informing on them.Hard Evidence or Pulp Fiction?Given this background, and reports that are riddled with inconsistencies, it is not surprising that many residents of Bombay are asking questions about the exact circumstances of the death of Hemant Karkare and his colleagues. The earliest reports, presumably relayed from the police via the media, said that Karkare had been killed at the Taj, and Salaskar and Kamte at Metro. If this was not true, why were we told this? And why was the story later changed? Was it because it conflicted with eye-witness accounts? In the early hours of the 27th, under the heading 'ATS Chief Hemant Karkare Killed: His Last Pics', IBNlive showed footage first of Karkare putting on a helmet and bullet-proof vest, then cut to a shootout at Metro, where an unconscious man who looks like Karkare and wearing the same light blue shirt and dark trousers (but without any blood on his shirt or the terrible wounds we saw on his face at his funeral) is being pulled into a car by two youths in saffron shirts. The commentary says that Karkare 'could well have fallen prey to just indiscriminate, random firing by the cops', and also reports that there were two vehicles, a Toyota Qualis and Honda City, from which the occupants were firing indiscriminately.

Later we were given two accounts of the killings where the venue is shifted to a deserted lane without cameras or eye-witnesses. The first account is by the lone terrorist captured alive, claiming to be A.A.Kasab from Faridkot in Pakistan and a member of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. According to him, just two gunmen, he and Ismail (also from Pakistan), first attacked VT station, where they sprayed bullets indiscriminately. (Around 58 people were killed there, over one-third of them Muslims, and many more might have been killed if the announcer, Mr Zende, had not risked his life to direct passengers to safety.) They then went to Cama, a government hospital for women and children used mainly by the poor. Initially, according to the police, Kasab claimed he and Ismail had killed Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte. Later, in his confession, he claimed that while coming out of the hospital, he and Ismail saw a police vehicle passing and hid behind a bush; then another vehicle passed them and stopped some distance away. A police officer got out and started firing at them, hitting Kasab on the hand so that he dropped his AK47, but Ismail opened fire on the officers in the car until they stopped firing. There were three bodies in the vehicle, which Ismail removed, and then drove off in it with Kasab.

The other account is by police constable Arun Jadhav. According to him, Karkare, Salaskar, Kamte, a driver and four police constables including himself were driving down the alley from VT to the back entrance of Cama (barely a ten-minute drive) in their Toyota Qualis to check on injured police officer Sadanand Date when two gunmen emerged from behind trees by the left side of the road and sprayed the vehicle with bullets, killing all its passengers except Jadhav. They then dragged out the three officers, hijacked the vehicle, drove to Metro junction and then Mantralaya in South Bombay, abandoned it when a tyre burst, and grabbed another car. According to police accounts, they then drove to Girgaum, where Kasab was injured and arrested and his companion killed.These accounts raise more questions than they answer. Kasab claimed that a band of ten terrorists landed and split up into twos, going to various destinations, he and his companion going to VT. He said they wanted to blow up the Taj, as in the attack on the Marriott in Islamabad; yet we are told that only 8kg of RDX were found at the Taj, and even that was not used; contrast this with 600kg of RDX and TNT used to blow up the Marriott: could they really have expected to blow up the Taj? How did the invaders from the sea get one bomb to go off in Dockyard Road and another in Vile Parle, 25 kilometres away? He said that the terrorists planned to use their hostages as a means of escape, yet there was no attempt at any such negotiations; at other times, he also said they had been instructed to fight to the death. He says he is a labourer from Faridkot near Multan and only studied up to Class IV, but it is reported that he speaks fluent English.

Several people have pointed out that the pictures of him in VT show him wearing a saffron wrist-band, a Hindu custom, and police later revealed that he could not recite a single verse from the Koran, which any child growing up in a Muslim family would have been able to do. Indeed, a thoughtful article on the soc.culture.jewish group argued that none of the terrorists were Muslims, given their appearance and behaviour (especially their reported consumption of alcohol and drugs), pointing out that they did not need to disguise themselves, since Muslims who look like Muslims are plentiful in Bombay, and would not attract undue attention.During his interrogation, Kasab said that he and eight of the operatives had done a reconnaissance trip to Bombay a few months back, pretending to be students and renting a room at Colaba market, which is close to Nariman House. It is extremely hard for Pakistani nationals to get Indian visas, and they are kept under close surveillance by the police; it is also most unlikely that the Indian immigration authorities would be fooled by forged passports of another country. In that case, the Indian immigration authorities would have visa applications of nine of the terrorists including Kasab, and could match the photographs in them to those of the terrorists: has this been done?

Later, Kasab changed his mind and said that the team who carried out reconnaisance was different from the team who had carried out the attacks.The events in VT and Cama and the back lane also put a question mark over his story. According to witnesses, two gunmen started firing at the mainline terminus in VT at 21:55 on Wednesday night, but at precisely the same time, according to CCTV footage, two gunmen began an assault on the suburban terminus. If the first account is true, there were four gunmen at the station: where did the other two come from, and where did they go? We are shown video footage, claiming to be CCTV but without the timeline of normal CCTV footage, of Kasab and Ismail wandering around the parking lot near the mainline terminus. This surely cannot be before the shootout, since the station is completely deserted; and after the shootout, Kasab and Ismail are supposed to have escaped via the footbridge from Platform 1 of the suburban station on the other side of VT: this, again, suggests there were four gunmen. Even if Kasab and Ismail had been shown photographs of Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte before they embarked on their trip, how could they possibly have identified the police officers in a dark alley in the dead of night according to Kasab's first story?

According to later his confession, a police officer got out of the vehicle and started firing first, injuring him; how, then, did Ismail manage to kill the rest by himself?Witnesses in Cama hospital say the terrorists spoke fluent Marathi, and this report has been confirmed. The gunmen killed two guards in uniform, spared a third, who was in civilian dress and begged for his life saying he was the husband of a patient, demanded water from an employee in the staff quarters and then killed him. They then appear to have made a beeline for the 6th floor (which was empty) and the terrace, taking with them the liftman, Tikhe. 15-30 minutes later, six to eight policemen arrived, and another employee took them up to the 6th floor. The policemen threw a piece of steel up to the terrace, whereupon Tikhe came running down and told them there were two terrorists on the terrace. A fierce gun-battle ensued for 30 to 45 minutes, in which ACP Sadanand Date was injured. Panic-stricken patients and staff in the maternity ward on the 5th floor barricaded the door; nurses instructed the women to breast-feed their babies to keep them quiet, and one woman, who was in the middle of labour, was told to hold back the birth; but they were not invaded. Eventually the gunmen appear to have escaped, it is not clear how. If they were Kasab and Ismail, then these two must have been fluent Marathi speakers. And why would they have taken up positions on the terrace? Was it because they would have a direct view of the lane in which Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte were later supposedly killed?The other account is equally dubious.

In his first account, Jadhav said Karkare was in the second row of the Qualis, while in the second he was supposed to be in the front row with Kamte. In the second account, Salaskar was initially sitting behind the driver, but then asked the driver to slow down and got behind the wheel himself: is it plausible that an experienced encounter specialist would deliberately make himself into a sitting duck like this when they were in hot pursuit of terrorists? In the first account they were supposed to be going to check up on their injured colleague Sadanand Date, but in the second were supposed to be looking for a red car in which they had been told the gunmen were traveling. If the report about the red car was a decoy to lure them into an ambush, it is important to know who told them that the terrorists were in a red car. If the gunmen were firing from the left side, as Jadhav claimed, how was Karkare hit three times in the chest while Jadhav himself got two bullets in his right arm? In fact, the only vegetation in that part of the lane is on the right side and has wire netting around it; it would be necessary to climb over the netting to hide behind it, and climb over again to come out: impossible under the circumstances. Witnesses say only two bodies were found at the spot next morning: what happened to the third officer?

Who were the three constables killed?How did two terrorists manage to kill six police personnel, including Karkare and Kamte who he said were armed with AK47s and Salaskar, an encounter specialist, when one terrorist was later captured and the other killed by policemen armed only with two rifles and lathis? Assistant Police Inspector Ombale was killed in that encounter, but his colleagues survived.There was also an intriguing report in DNA on 28 November saying that Anand Raorane, a resident of a building opposite Nariman House, heard sounds of celebration from the terrorists there when the news of Karkare getting killed was flashed on TV: isn't that strange? The same report quoted a resident of Nariman House and a local shopkeeper who said that the terrorists had purchased large quantities of food and liquor before the attack, suggesting that more than two of them were planning to occupy the place for a long time. Another DNA report, on 2 December, said that sub-inspector Durgude, who had been posted in front of St Xavier's College, between Cama Hospital and the exit point of the back lane onto Mahapalika Road, saw two young men whom he took to be students and called out to warn them that there was firing at Cama. When they ignored him, he approached them, upon which one of them turned an AK47 on him and killed him. If Kasab and Ismail were there, who was firing inside Cama?

Eye-witnesses in St Xavier's saw a man shot and lying on the pavement in front of the college around 12.30 a.m., while about three gunmen stood over him: who was that? Various reports said that two to eight terrorists were captured alive. Now there is only one in police custody: what happened to the other(s)?A careful scrutiny of all the reports available so far suggests, to this writer anyway, that the killing of Karkare and his colleagues was a premeditated act, executed by a group that had stationed gunmen at various points along the general route between VT and the Metro cinema with a view to maximising their chances of a successful murderous assault.

The Objective: Shutting Down Terrorist NetworksThese are just a few of the numerous questions being asked by vigilant Bombayites who find themselves thoroughly dissatisfied with the information that has been doled out. These are citizens who understand the importance of identifying terrorist networks and shutting them down, but doubt that this will be done by the authorities. Why are they so cynical about the possibility of a genuine professional investigation? The answer is that we have too much bitter experience of investigations in which innocent people (usually Muslim youth) are rounded up, tortured and even killed, while the real culprits are allowed to go free. Karkare broke with this dismal record, but now he is dead. When a person who has been vilified, slandered and threatened with death is killed in suspicious circumstances, it is imperative that a proper investigation should be carried out soon, before too much evidence can be manufactured and/or destroyed. If Kasab aka Iman disappears or is assassinated like Lee Harvey Oswald, or is executed, that would be further evidence of a conspiracy.The government and people of Pakistan have as much interest as the government and people of India in eliminating the terror networks that have killed President Asif Ali Zardari's wife Benazir Bhutto and thousands of others in both Pakistan and India. The terrorists, on the other hand, be they Islamist or Hindutva, have a common interest in destroying secularism, democracy and peace within and between the two countries. That is their precise agenda. Pakistani politicians have offered a joint investigation into the terrorist attacks, a far more sensible suggestion than the belligerent statements by some Indians accusing Pakistan of harbouring terrorists who are killing Indians.

It should be obvious that a military conflict between India and Pakistan would be disastrous for both countries economically, while a nuclear war, which might ensue if extremist forces captured power in both countries, would have unthinkable consequences. If the Indo-Pakistan peace process is halted, as L.K.Advani advocates, the terrorists would have won.Indeed, without a joint investigation, the terrorist networks behind this outrage can never be uncovered: how else could the names and addresses in Pakistan revealed by Kasab be followed up to the satisfaction of all parties? A team of Pakistani investigators should be invited to come to Bombay and interview Kasab. If he is indeed a Lashkar-e-Taiba militant, he will be able to provide invaluable information, and a team of investigators from India should be invited to Pakistan to pursue the investigation there. If, as some reports have indicated, he is not what he claims to be, that too would become clear.

The Indian government owes it to the memory of Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte, who died fighting terrorism of all hues, to establish exactly where, when and how they were killed, identify their killers, and make sure that their work is continued. They also owe it to us, the public, who are the prime targets of all terrorist attacks, to carry out a credible investigation which identifies and puts behind bars all the mass murderers involved in this and other attacks.The Spirit of Bombay SurvivesDespite all the hype, this was not the worst terrorist attack in Bombay; that title goes to the reign of terror which started it all, the anti-Muslim pogrom following the demolition of the Babri masjid in December 1992, in which over 900 people were killed. After each attack, the residents of Bombay have worked hard to restore the inclusiveness and warmth which characterises their city, and this was no exception. On 10 December, exactly two weeks after the attack began, women's groups perambulated the whole of VT station with a single slogan: jang nahin, aman chahiye (no to war, we want peace). A few people contradicted them, but the majority accepted or even asked for leaflets.

On 12 December, over 60,000 people from all walks of life formed a human chain throughout the length and breadth of Bombay, proclaiming unity and peace in opposition to terrorism, war, communalism and violence. In a TV interview, a group of very articulate schoolgirls, carrying placards with slogans like 'Love Conquers All,' expressed their determination to stay united and unafraid in the face of all efforts to divide the people of India. The spirit of Bombay lives on, thanks to these people.R.H. is a writer, researcher and social activist based in Bombay.

Mumbai Carnage: The Police Story stands shattered

Amaresh Misra

Today, 18th December 2008, is a historic day. It marks the beginning of a process wherein my `theory' about the Mumbai attack might just turn out to be true. But there is no joy. There is just an emptiness, a sadness at Karkare's death and the killing of hundreds of innocents by the Hindutva-Mossad-CIA combine using factions in the ISI and International/Israeli mercenaries. The Minorities Affairs Minister AR Antulay was once a firebrand leader. But he has been quiet for long--too long; today he spoke and questioned directly Karkare's killing in the Parliament. Antulay is a cabinet Minister; he is not known to speak out of line. Despite Abhishek Singhvi's remark distancing the Congress from what Antulay said, the latter, it seems, definitely has the sanction of the Congress High Command at some level. Anyone supposing something else is deluding himself/herself. Here is the text of the Times of India report: Maintaining that "there is more than what meets the eyes", Antulay said Karkare was investigating some cases in which "there are non-Muslims also", an apparent reference to the Malegaon blasts case in which sadhvi Pragya Thakur and a Lt-Colonel Shrikant Prasad Purohit were among the 11 persons to be arrested. "Unfortunately his end came. It may be a separate inquiry how his (Karkare's) end came," he told reporters outside Parliament. Antulay said "Karkare found that there are non-Muslims involved in the acts of terrorism during his investigations in some cases. Any person going to the roots of terror has always been the target, he said. "Superficially speaking they (terrorists) had no reason to kill Karkare. Whether he (Karkare) was victim of terrorism or terrorism plus something. I do not know," he added. When he came under attack in Lok Sabha on the issue, Antulay sought to wriggle out saying he had not talked about who killed Karkare but about "who sent him in the direction" of Cama hospital, outside which he was killed. "Who had sent them to Cama hospital (a lane opposite which he and two other officers were killed by Pakistani terrorists on Nov 26). What were they told that made them leave for the same spot in the same vehicle. "I repeat what I had said. I had not said who had killed them but only questioned who had sent them there (Cama Hospital) in that direction," he said in Lok Sabha where BJP and Shiv Sena members attacked him for his remarks. Anant Geete of Shiv Sena accused him of "misleading" the house and sought Chidambaram's clarification. Earlier in the day, describing Hemant Karkare as a very bold officer having great acumen and vision, Antulay asked "How come instead of going to Hotel Taj or Oberai or even the Nariman House, he went to such a place where there was nothing compared to what happened in the three places?" "Why all the three (Hemant Karakre, Vijay Salaskar and Ashok Kamte) went together. It is beyond my comprehension," the minister said. The minister's remarks came under immediate attack from BJP which asked the prime minister to clarify whether his remarks are an "individual misdemeanour or the collective wisdom of the Cabinet". "The remarks are obnoxious and deserves a clarification from the prime minister," BJP spokesmanRajiv Pratap Rudy told reporters. Reacting to Antulay's remarks, Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi they should be treated his "personal views" and Congress party does not agree with them and does not support such a formulation. To a question, he said there was no question of embarrassment to the party. Samajwadi Party MP Amar Singh, who himself was in the centre of a controversy when he had raised doubts over the killing of a Delhi police official in an encounter recently, said a senior leader like Antulay should before issuing any statement uphold the cherished tradition of collective wisdom of the cabinet. Not completely disapproving the remarks, Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan said Antulay must be having "more information" since he hails from Maharashtra. The issue came up when the house was discussing two bills brought in by the government to tackle terror against the backdrop of Mumbai terror attacks. Geete said the prime minister and several senior union ministers have gone on record to say that Karkare was killed by terrorists. Not satisfied with Antulay's reply, Geete charged the union minister with "misleading" the house, which he "did not "expect". The basic evil/criminal intent of BJP-Shiv Sena politics along with their pathetic `soft' and `hard' supporters, stands exposed; the questions here are vital: a cabinet minister, not an Independent analyst, has questioned the Police theory about Karkare's death. Note what Antulay is saying: WHO sent them there (Cama Hospital); how come they were traveling together? This is exactly what we have been asking---Antulay's statement means that that he is hinting at the role of some top functionary WHO SEND THEM THERE--(TO THEIR DEATHS)! Now put this in context with proceedings that have begun against AN Roy, the Mumbai DGP, Hasan Ghaffoor, theMumbai Police Commissioner and the Maharashtra Home Secretary. What do you get? That the entire Police story put forward by the likes of Rakesh Maria is suddenly under suspicion--so much for those savvy journalists like Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt. Rajdeep in fact quoted Maria as his source and a reliable, honest officer--if he had to sell himself I am sure he could have found a better buyer. He should have learnt from Javed and Teesta. This means that the entire police version might be wrong! Which means that there is a question mark over Kasab and Ismail killing Karkare, Salaskar and Kaamte. Which means that Kasab and Ismail might not have killed the three; which then raises the question: who killed them? Was it the Mumbai Police top brass? Or the Gujarat ATS under Narendra Modi? Or a combination of the two--again--WHO SENT THEM THERE? This means that there is sufficient doubt over Kasab's version! Which means that Kasab's entire story of how he killed the three officers, plus the entire thing that he is a Jehadi etc, is a plant, something which our Police excels in! Which means that the so-called CCTV grabs etc showing the footage of Kasab and Ismail were all fake! Aziz Burney of the Rashtriya Sahara Urdu and the Marathi Press has said this in so many words! The Mumbai and the Indian Police has been known for keeping informers, ex-militants and Pakistani spies in illegal confinement or on their payroll. And then planting them in situations where either Police or the corporate-politician-bureaucrat nexus or foreign powers or Hindutva forces have carried out attacks and bomb blasts. This happened on numerous occasions say, in 2006 when the RSS Headquarters in Nagpur were attacked allegedly by `terrorists', who then died in an encounter with the Nagpur Police. It later turned out, and this was proved by Jusice Kondse Patil's report on this issue and by Suresh Khairnar, a veteran socialist and human rights activist, that these `terrorists' were in fact people who had been killed by a non-Maharashtrian Special Crime Branch Police in a fake encounter and then brought and placed before the RSS Headquarters. The Nagpur chief of Police in fact went on record to say that his Police actually did not engage in any encounter! Now comes a report that Kasab was actually kidnapped by RAW officials in Nepal in 2006. In fact a PIL has been filed in a Pakistani court and the Times of India carried a report on this in its 17th December Mumbai edition. In my last piece I had mentioned the Red Fort case. Indians, including some leaders of so-called secular parties are so ill informed that they do not even remember there was a Red Fort attack! They only know of the Parliamentary attack, which was again a fake drama staged by the Delhi Police--the best part is that our wily parliamentarians know this! That is why they did not turn up to commemorate the `martyrdom' of Police personal who died defending the Parliament! Kasab is a fake; the real terrorists who came to Mumbai wreaked their mayhem and went back safely--some of them, as testified by eye-witness near Nariman House were definitely Israeli. The main aim of the entire operaiton was to eliminate Karkare and to create something so big that the Malegaon blast investigation pales in comparison. But Karkare killers and Hindutva forces had the backing it seems of Manmohan Singh. Why else would Advani meet Singh before 26th November on the issue of `torture' of Praggya Singh? Has anyone heard of a leader of the opposition meeting the Prime Minister on such an issue? Apparently a deal was struck between them; and remember Advani could not have met Singh like this, without American mediation. Was Sonia in the knowhow? Probably not--the Sonia angle is very important--there are reports that probably she was unaware of what happened on 26th November and that depite throwing in her lot with the Manmohan Singh lobby on other issues, she saw that their plan included upstaging her! Karkare's killing is the result of the larger fight between Hindutva-pro-Israeli, pro-American lobby which is now deeply entrenched in India and whatever is left of Congress' old legacy in the establishment. Both these factions often unite, as they did against the Left on the nuclear deal issue. But the `old legacy' faction does not realize that pro-US, pro-Israel lobby is planning to overthrow it--and maybe sink Sonia and Rahul as well! WHAT IS THE BIGGEST FAILURE OF THE CURRENT ESTABLISHMENT? NOT THAT THERE WERE SECURITY LAPSES AND INTELLIGENCE FAILURE--THE BIGGEST FAILURE IS THAT THEY WERE NOT ABLE TO COOK UP A FALSE STORY ABOUT A TERRORIST ATTACK--THEY FAILED TO ESTABLISH A CONVINCING COVER-UP! EVERYONE WHO HAS SUPPORTED THE POLICE THEORY HAS TO ANSWER. THE VENGEANCE OF THE INDIAN PEOPLE WILL BE UPON YOU. AND NOW COMES THE STARTLING FACT--KARKARE WAS KILLED BY A 9 MM BULLET--WHICH COULD NOT HAVE COME FROM AK-47 OR 56! WHERE IS HIS POST-PARTUM REPORT?

Strategic motivations for the Mumbai attack

by George Friedman

Evidence and logic suggest that radical Pakistani Islamists carried out the attack. These groups have a highly complex and deliberately amorphous structure. Rather than being centrally controlled, ad hoc teams are created with links to one or more groups. Conceivably, they might have lacked links to any group, but this is hard to believe. Too much planning and training were involved in this attack for it to have been conceived by a bunch of guys in a garage. While precisely which radical Pakistani Islamist group or groups were involved is unknown, the Mumbai attack appears to have originated in Pakistan. It could have been linked to al Qaeda prime or its various franchises and/or to Kashmiri insurgents.

More important than the question of the exact group that carried out the attack, however, is the attackers’ strategic end. There is a tendency to regard terror attacks as ends in themselves, carried out simply for the sake of spreading terror. In the highly politicized atmosphere of Pakistan’s radical Islamist factions, however, terror frequently has a more sophisticated and strategic purpose. Whoever invested the time and took the risk in organizing this attack had a reason to do so. Let’s work backward to that reason by examining the logical outcomes following this attack.

An end to New Delhi’s restraint

The most striking aspect of the Mumbai attack is the challenge it presents to the Indian government --- a challenge almost impossible for New Delhi to ignore. A December 2001 Islamist attack on the Indian parliament triggered an intense confrontation between India and Pakistan. Since then, New Delhi has not responded in a dramatic fashion to numerous Islamist attacks against India that were traceable to Pakistan. The Mumbai attack, by contrast, aimed to force a response from New Delhi by being so grievous that any Indian government showing only a muted reaction to it would fall.

India’s restrained response to Islamist attacks (even those originating in Pakistan) in recent years has come about because New Delhi has understood that, for a host of reasons, Islamabad has been unable to control radical Pakistani Islamist groups. India did not want war with Pakistan; it felt it had more important issues to deal with. New Delhi therefore accepted Islamabad’s assurances that Pakistan would do its best to curb terror attacks, and after suitable posturing, allowed tensions originating from Islamist attacks to pass.

This time, however, the attackers struck in such a way that New Delhi couldn’t allow the incident to pass. As one might expect, public opinion in India is shifting from stunned to furious. India’s Congress party-led government is politically weak and nearing the end of its life span. It lacks the political power to ignore the attack, even if it were inclined to do so. If it ignored the attack, it would fall, and a more intensely nationalist government would take its place. It is therefore very difficult to imagine circumstances under which the Indians could respond to this attack in the same manner they have to recent Islamist attacks.

What the Indians actually will do is not clear. In 2001-2002, New Delhi responded to the attack on the Indian parliament by moving forces close to the Pakistani border and the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, engaging in artillery duels along the front, and bringing its nuclear forces to a high level of alert. The Pakistanis made a similar response. Whether India ever actually intended to attack Pakistan remains unclear, but either way, New Delhi created an intense crisis in Pakistan.

The United States and the Indo-Pakistani crisis

The United States used this crisis for its own ends. Having just completed the first phase of its campaign in Afghanistan, Washington was intensely pressuring Pakistan’s then-Musharraf government to expand cooperation with the United States; purge its intelligence organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of radical Islamists; and crack down on al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Afghan-Pakistani border region. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had been reluctant to cooperate with Washington, as doing so inevitably would spark a massive domestic backlash against his government.

The crisis with India produced an opening for the United States. Eager to get India to stand down from the crisis, the Pakistanis looked to the Americans to mediate. And the price for US mediation was increased cooperation from Pakistan with the United States. The Indians, not eager for war, backed down from the crisis after guarantees that Islamabad would impose stronger controls on Islamist groups in Kashmir.

In 2001-2002, the Indo-Pakistani crisis played into American hands. In 2008, the new Indo-Pakistani crisis might play differently. The United States recently has demanded increased Pakistani cooperation along the Afghan border. Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama has stated his intention to focus on Afghanistan and pressure the Pakistanis.

Therefore, one of Islamabad’s first responses to the new Indo-Pakistani crisis was to announce that if the Indians increased their forces along Pakistan’s eastern border, Pakistan would be forced to withdraw 100,000 troops from its western border with Afghanistan. In other words, threats from India would cause Pakistan to dramatically reduce its cooperation with the United States in the Afghan war. The Indian foreign minister is flying to the United States to meet with Obama; obviously, this matter will be discussed among others.

We expect the United States to pressure India not to create a crisis, in order to avoid this outcome. As we have said, the problem is that it is unclear whether politically the Indians can afford restraint. At the very least, New Delhi must demand that the Pakistani government take steps to make the ISI and Pakistan’s other internal security apparatus more effective. Even if the Indians concede that there was no ISI involvement in the attack, they will argue that the ISI is incapable of stopping such attacks. They will demand a purge and reform of the ISI as a sign of Pakistani commitment. Barring that, New Delhi will move troops to the Indo-Pakistani frontier to intimidate Pakistan and placate Indian public opinion.

Dilemmas for Islamabad, New Delhi and Washington

At that point, Islamabad will have a serious problem. The Pakistani government is even weaker than the Indian government. Pakistan’s civilian regime does not control the Pakistani military, and therefore does not control the ISI. The civilians can’t decide to transform Pakistani security, and the military is not inclined to make this transformation. (Pakistan’s military has had ample opportunity to do so if it wished.)

Pakistan faces the challenge, just one among many, that its civilian and even military leadership lack the ability to reach deep into the ISI and security services to transform them. In some ways, these agencies operate under their own rules. Add to this the reality that the ISI and security forces — even if they are acting more assertively, as Islamabad claims — are demonstrably incapable of controlling radical Islamists in Pakistan. If they were capable, the attack on Mumbai would have been thwarted in Pakistan. The simple reality is that in Pakistan’s case, the will to make this transformation does not seem to be present, and even if it were, the ability to suppress terror attacks isn’t there.

The United States might well want to limit New Delhi’s response. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is on her way to India to discuss just this. But the politics of India’s situation make it unlikely that the Indians can do anything more than listen. It is more than simply a political issue for New Delhi; the Indians have no reason to believe that the Mumbai operation was one of a kind. Further operations like the Mumbai attack might well be planned. Unless the Pakistanis shift their posture inside Pakistan, India has no way of knowing whether other such attacks can be stymied. The Indians will be sympathetic to Washington’s plight in Afghanistan and the need to keep Pakistani troops at the Afghan border. But New Delhi will need something that the Americans --- and in fact the Pakistanis --- can’t deliver: a guarantee that there will be no more attacks like this one.

The Indian government cannot chance inaction. It probably would fall if it did. Moreover, in the event of inactivity and another attack, Indian public opinion probably will swing to an uncontrollable extreme. If an attack takes place but India has moved toward crisis posture with Pakistan, at least no one can argue that the Indian government remained passive in the face of threats to national security. Therefore, India is likely to refuse American requests for restraint.

It is possible that New Delhi will make a radical proposal to Rice, however. Given that the Pakistani government is incapable of exercising control in its own country, and given that Pakistan now represents a threat to both US and Indian national security, the Indians might suggest a joint operation with the Americans against Pakistan.

What that joint operation might entail is uncertain, but regardless, this is something that Rice would reject out of hand and that Obama would reject in January 2009. Pakistan has a huge population and nuclear weapons, and the last thing Bush or Obama wants is to practice nation-building in Pakistan. The Indians, of course, will anticipate this response. The truth is that New Delhi itself does not want to engage deep in Pakistan to strike at militant training camps and other Islamist sites. That would be a nightmare. But if Rice shows up with a request for Indian restraint and no concrete proposal --- or willingness to entertain a proposal --- for solving the Pakistani problem, India will be able to refuse on the grounds that the Americans are asking India to absorb a risk (more Mumbai-style attacks) without the United States’ willingness to share in the risk.

Setting the stage for a new Indo-Pakistani confrontation

That will set the stage for another Indo-Pakistani confrontation. India will push forces forward all along the Indo-Pakistani frontier, move its nuclear forces to an alert level, begin shelling Pakistan, and perhaps --- given the seriousness of the situation --- attack short distances into Pakistan and even carry out airstrikes deep in Pakistan. India will demand greater transparency for New Delhi in Pakistani intelligence operations. The Indians will not want to occupy Pakistan; they will want to occupy Pakistan’s security apparatus.

Naturally, the Pakistanis will refuse that. There is no way they can give India, their main adversary, insight into Pakistani intelligence operations. But without that access, India has no reason to trust Pakistan. This will leave the Indians in an odd position: They will be in a near-war posture, but will have made no demands of Pakistan that Islamabad can reasonably deliver and that would benefit India. In one sense, India will be gesturing. In another sense, India will be trapped by making a gesture on which Pakistan cannot deliver. The situation thus could get out of hand.

In the meantime, the Pakistanis certainly will withdraw forces from western Pakistan and deploy them in eastern Pakistan. That will mean that one leg of the Petraeus and Obama plans would collapse. Washington’s expectation of greater Pakistani cooperation along the Afghan border will disappear along with the troops. This will free the Taliban from whatever limits the Pakistani army had placed on it. The Taliban’s ability to fight would increase, while the motivation for any of the Taliban to enter talks --- as Afghan President Hamid Karzai has suggested --- would decline. US forces, already stretched to the limit, would face an increasingly difficult situation, while pressure on al Qaeda in the tribal areas would decrease.

Now, step back and consider the situation the Mumbai attackers have created. First, the Indian government faces an internal political crisis driving it toward a confrontation it didn’t plan on. Second, the minimum Pakistani response to a renewed Indo-Pakistani crisis will be withdrawing forces from western Pakistan, thereby strengthening the Taliban and securing al Qaeda. Third, sufficient pressure on Pakistan’s civilian government could cause it to collapse, opening the door to a military-Islamist government --- or it could see Pakistan collapse into chaos, giving Islamists security in various regions and an opportunity to reshape Pakistan. Finally, the United States’ situation in Afghanistan has now become enormously more complex.

By staging an attack the Indian government can’t ignore, the Mumbai attackers have set in motion an existential crisis for Pakistan. The reality of Pakistan cannot be transformed, trapped as the country is between the United States and India. Almost every evolution from this point forward benefits Islamists. Strategically, the attack on Mumbai was a precise blow struck to achieve uncertain but favorable political outcomes for the Islamists.

Rice’s trip to India now becomes the crucial next step. She wants Indian restraint. She does not want the western Pakistani border to collapse. But she cannot guarantee what India must have: assurance of no further terror attacks on India originating in Pakistan. Without that, India must do something. No Indian government could survive without some kind of action. So it is up to Rice, in one of her last acts as secretary of state, to come up with a miraculous solution to head off a final, catastrophic crisis for the Bush administration --- and a defining first crisis for the new Obama administration. Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once said that the enemy gets a vote. The Islamists cast their ballot in Mumbai.

Reason behind Jagjit Singh decision who the enemy was

Adnan Sami shocked by Jagjit Singh's criticism

Crooner Adnan Sami refuses to believe that Indian ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh criticised him by saying "he can't sing and should go back to Pakistan".

"I can't believe Jagjit saab would talk like this about me. He's always been so sweet to me. I'm his biggest fan. And why would he say I came to India to become an actor?"When I came here, I weighed three times more than what I am. And why would he accuse me of sending my money to Pakistan? I earn and pay taxes in Mumbai, I can show you my PAN card," says Adnan.In an earlier interview to starboxoffice.com, the senior ghazal singer had said that Sami “became a singer by mistake.”"He (Adnan) became a singer by mistake. He had come here to become an actor and by mistake he became a singer. He can't even sing. People like him should be sent back to work there (Pakistan) because they make money in India and send it to Pakistan," Singh had said to us last week.A source from the music industry who knows both the parties spilled the beans behind Jagjit Singh's rancorous outburst."There's more to Jagjit saab's outburst against Adnan than a spirit of patriotism. Recently, when Adnan was doing the score for Vikram Bhatt's '1920', he wanted all the stalwarts of the classical world to contribute a track. He approached Jagjit saab for the song. And he even had the tune ready. But a section of the film's production team vetoed Jagjit saab's presence in the album. And Kailash Kher sang the song meant for Jagjit Singh. That's when Jagjit Singh decided who the enemy was," said the source.Adnan doesn't deny the incident during the recording of the "1920" songs."I did approach Jagjit saab for a song in '1920'. He couldn't sing it for some reason. So what? I refuse to believe he'd act so petty. He has always said Mehdi Hassan was his greatest inspiration. Why would he now make these uncharitable remarks against all Pakistani artists?"

http://www.starboxoffice.com/newsDetails.aspx?xfile=2008/December/News_20081217_130

A novel way to tackle Pakistan

By Sreeram Chaulia  A new study entitled "World at Risk" by a bipartisan American Congressional commission reveals that if one were to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) today, then "all roads would intersect in Pakistan". It warns that the next attacks on America might originate from Pakistan and urges the US president to take steps on a priority basis "securing" Islamabad's biological and nuclear weapons. Paraphrasing the report, the New Yorker magazine commented that Pakistan as a "nation itself is a kind of WMD".  Coming on the heels of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, which were planned and organized by Pakistani fundamentalists, the American warnings reflect a major dilemma facing international   policymakers - how to make the world safe from Pakistan? The nature and extent of this challenge has been summed up by former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, "Pakistan has everything that gives you an international migraine. It has nuclear weapons, it has terrorism, extremists, corruption [and is] very poor ... "  What options does the world have to counter the multiple threats to international security and peace being posed by a dysfunctional and dangerously adrift country? Should a country that is itself a WMD be allowed to possess actual WMDs, which are not only liable to fall into the "wrong" hands but also be used by the "right" hands for emotional blackmail?  Irfan Hussain, a leading Pakistani newspaper columnist, recently bemoaned that "Pakistan was the only country in the world that negotiates with a gun to its own head. Our argument goes something like this: If you don't give us what we need, the government will collapse and this might result in anarchy, and a takeover by Islamic militants. Left unstated here is the global risk these elements would pose as they would have access to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal." A state which threatens to explode and destroy everyone else on the planet unless it is pampered is akin to a suicide bomberwhose message to his enemies is to change their policies "or else".  The issue to ponder for world leaders is whether an "international migraine" and "suicidal" state should be allowed to possess WMDs or, for that matter, be self-governing? Sovereignty, as an organizing principle of world affairs, is not merely a bestower of rights but also comes with certain responsibilities towards one's own people and to other sovereign countries. Pakistan's track record is one of waving the red flag and screaming SOS to assert its rights as a sovereign country, without fulfilling the corollary obligations.  While many developing countries may have failed to live up to the expectations of their populations to improve living standards and governance, Pakistan has the extra cachet of exporting terrorism and extremist religious values to other countries. The controversial call for "international humanitarian intervention" over the failure of a state to protect its own people from grave human rights abuses is premised on what is happening within a country. To be fair, Pakistan has not fared worse than many other developing countries on domestic human development indices. Albright's mention of corruption and poverty as causes for concern about Pakistan is not relevant as these are not unique failings.  What stands Pakistan apart, though, is its ability to breed terrorism, extremist ideology and nuclear fecklessness and project these outwards at the rest of the world. The correct international response to this should not a "humanitarian intervention" but one based on global collective will, represented by the United Nations. Given the sui generis mixture of threats presented by Pakistan, an equally novel response is warranted. Since Pakistani sovereignty has been misused to impair the sovereignty of its neighbors - Afghanistan to the west and India on the east - the first strategy of an international collective will should be to circumscribe the country's sovereignty and place it under custodianship.  After World War I, when a transfer of colonies occurred between the losing German and Turkishempires to the victorious European ones, a mechanism called "mandate" was introduced at theLeague of Nations. Mandated territories were deemed unfit for self-rule by the victors of the war and taken over as de facto colonies "until such time as they are able to stand alone". After World War II, successors of the League mandates were rechristened "Trust Territories" and passed on to the UN to be "prepared for independence and majority rule".  Although mandates were thinly disguised veneers for colonial aggrandizement, they contain the germs of an idea for application to the now universally acknowledged "Pakistan problem". Both mandates and trusts were believed by practitioners at the time to be temporary waiting phases before a land could earn the spurs of a fully sovereign state. Although the judgement of whether these wards had the attributes of sovereign states was left to imperialist calculations, the notion that an international legal agreement could decide when and whether a country should be allowed to be sovereign is informative.  For Pakistan to be rid of its WMDs, hate preachers, terrorists and their infrastructure, only a handover of its sovereignty to a UN-designated custodian authority will be effective. Since sovereignty is closely associated with nationalism, such a grand experiment will undoubtedly meet fierce resistance within the Pakistani establishment and society. But there is no other way for the country's Augean Stables to be cleaned. Washington's pressure and protestations from Kabul or New Delhi have come and gone in vain for years without any concrete change in Pakistan's behavior.  A spell of international custodianship over Pakistan is the only feasible means for long-term transformation of the sub-continent's problem child. Those representatives of the Pakistani state who wish to strengthen moderation will benefit from a handover of sovereignty to the UN because the move promises to enhance civilian power and demilitarize policymaking. For Pakistani civil society, which has been struggling to counter what Harvard University professor Jessica Stern called the "jihadculture", a decade or so of international custodianship would open the space needed to rebuild the country with the cement of civic consciousness and religious tolerance. Pakistani activists should welcome coming under a UN trust and ally with like-minded forces pressing for this solution.  Besides Pakistani nationalism, an international campaign to bring the country under UN custodianship is bound to run into two stumbling blocks. The 57-member Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) is likely to vote as a bloc in the UN General Assembly to stymie efforts to constrict the foreign and domestic powers of one of its members. Pakistan is no ordinary member of the OIC because of its possession of the so-called "Islamic bomb" and losing a nuclear-armed Muslim power will rankle with the OIC.  The other hurdle is China, for which the temporary loss of Pakistan's sovereignty will be a big blow to its strategic vision of dominating Asia by tying down India. The Chinese veto has been used sparingly in the UN Security Council, but it will definitely come down with a thump on the table if Pakistan is proposed to be delivered to international custodianship.  Can the OIC and China be convinced by a determined international movement to vest Pakistan's sovereignty in the UN's trust? Can Pakistan as a nation come around to accepting this bitter medicine as a necessary prelude to renaissance? These questions need to be answered soon for the sake of world peace. The longer the delay in legal takeover of Pakistan, the greater the chances are that the "WMD nation" will explode.  http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JL16Df05.html Sreeram Chaulia is a researcher on international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in Syracuse, New York.  (Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

16th of December 1971

SCENARIOS - Assessing risks of India, Pakistan confrontation

  
The diplomatic situation is still evolving two weeks after the Mumbai attack.

Domestic dynamics have to play out in both countries. 
    
With relations still fraught between rivals who have fought three wars, here is a look at some scenarios that could unfold: 
    
War 
    
-Highly improbable. No one, except the militants, would want it. India's foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee has said it is no solution.

The two countries went to the brink in 2002 after Pakistani jihadi groups attacked the Indian parliament in 2001, but ultimately the risk of nuclear conflict made it a crazy option.

Any kind of Indian military action is likely to provoke retaliation, either from jihadis or worse still the Pakistani military.

India's strength lies in its ability to garner international diplomatic support to pressure Pakistan to clean its house of jihadis. 
    
Peace process 
    
A hiatus in the dialogue they began in 2004 is inevitable; India has already said it is in jeopardy.

To move on, India needs Pakistan to seriously crack down on groups analysts say have been favoured by its Inter-Services Intelligence agency. 
    
A sham crackdown like one by then military ruler General Pervez Musharraf in 2002 will satisfy neither New Delhi nor Washington. 
    
That said President-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration is expected to encourage settlement of the Kashmir dispute, a step it also sees as part of the equation to stabilise Afghanistan. 
    
India probably realises it's better to engage Pakistan than ignore it in the long run, and it would like to help civilian leaders establish authority over the generals. 
    
US pressure to move more swiftly in peace talks won't cut much ice with India, so long as it feels uncomfortable about the durability of Pakistan's democracy.

In the short run the Indian government has an election to fight, and will need to show its public results before it re-starts the peace process. 
    
No war, no peace 
    
- If, analysts say, the Pakistani military refuses to abandon old jihadi assets, there will be no war and no peace. Instead there's a real danger both sides could use non-state proxies to destabilise each others' borders.

It would be a return to the pre-2002 era, and the world will be haunted by periodic crises between the nuclear-armed neighbours. 
    
- That, in turn, will complicate the West's efforts to stabilise Afghanistan. Some jihadi groups that had been fighting Indian rule in Kashmir have built ties with al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistani tribal areas, where the Pakistan army is struggling to gain control. 
    
- If these groups are allowed to thrive they will continue to provide gateways for alienated young Muslims in the West to join a global jihad against their own governments 
    
Repercussions for India 
    
With general elections early next year, the government faces widespread voter anger at the security and intelligence failures that led to Mumbai.

The opposition BJP has made it a major campaign issue. 
    
Many analysts expect a backlash against the ruling Congress party in those elections.

But recent state poll wins by Congress, as well as the high-profile appointment of former finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram as the new home minister, have helped take the wind out of the opposition's sails. 
    
The BJP has also been criticised in some quarters as too opportunist in working to make terrorism an election issue so soon after the Mumbai attack. 
    
While the government may be limited in actions over Pakistan, there may be pressure for tougher policies at home, such as an anti-terrorism law that gives security forces more powers to detain and monitor suspects. 
    
So far, the attacks have not sparked communal strife between India's majority Hindus and minority Muslims. India's Muslim community has gone out of its way to criticise the militants. 
    
Repercussions for Pakistan 
    
- Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's offer on November 28 to send the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency to New Delhi following a request from Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went down badly in some quarters of the military.

But since then there has been no indication the civilian government and military leadership are out of step, even if they hold different opinions over whether the jihadis should be protected or dumped.
    
- If the crisis worsened, it might bring any differences into the open, which could be risky for a civilian government less than nine months old and dependent on army support for Pakistan's transition to democracy. 
    
- Pakistan already reels from an Islamist insurgency in the northwest. There are security alerts in its cities. The suicide truck bomb attack that killed at least 55 people at Islamabad's Marriott hotel in September was the kind of spectacular attack not seen before in Pakistan, and raised fears of more. 
    
- A crackdown on militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad based in the central province of Punjab could end up driving more of their fighters into the arms of al Qaeda and the Taliban in the northwest tribal lands. That would reinforce the insurgency in Afghanistan and pose more dangers for Pakistani security forces and cities. 
    
- It is doubtful whether Lashkar or Jaish commanders who haven't gone rogue would order revenge attacks inside Pakistan, as they would still like to preserve relationships with the security agencies, and such action would be counter-productive for them at a time when Pakistani and Indian tensions were high. Source: Reuters

Our Man in Bananastan

by Jeff Huber

Truth is truly stranger than fiction. Graham Greene's 1958 spy novel Our Man in Havana told a tragicomic tale of false intelligence crafted to suit the needs of a political agenda. John le Carre's 1996 The Tailor of Panama repeated the theme.

Ahmed Chalabi was Dick Cheney's real life man of the hour when it came time to shake and bake the intelligence on Iraq, and the Dark Lord and his neocon chamberlains are still trying to fabricate a casus belli for Iran. The Persian Ploy may be running up against a term limit, but there's all the time in the world left to slip on the Bananastan peel. Heck, western superpowers have been flinging themselves down that slope for centuries.

At this point in the American experiment, U.S. intelligence is to intelligence what Kenny G is to jazz. After nearly a decade of getting gang-buggered over the kitchen table by the minions of the Office of the Vice President, our spy agencies have no more credibility than our sacked and pillaged mainstream press. In fact, the lines between intelligence and news and popular entertainment have virtually vanished. As evidence of this, witness Exhibit A: "Plans of Attack," by intelligence analyst, counterterrorism expert, news commentator and novelist Richard A. Clarke.

Thriller
The bare bones reality of the terrorist attack on Mumbai, India was incredible to begin with: 10 kids in their twenties managed to hold the law enforcement and military establishment of a nuclear power at bay for days. The Indians have their own Hindu terrorist cells, but it would be embarrassing to admit they got their pants pulled down by a gang of homegrown yahooligans, so they immediately accused Pakistani yahooligans. If it turns out they blamed Muslim evildoers for doing evil that Hindu evildoers did, that's okay. They did the same thing in September and got away with it.

America's newspaper of record, the New York Times, did everything it could to prop up India's accusations. A December 8 story said that unnamed Pakistani authorities, under pressure from unspecified sources in India and the U.S., raided a camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group suspected of carrying out the Mumbai attack, and arrested Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who "masterminded the attack." This information came from an unnamed State Department official in Washington, who was repeating what unnamed American and Pakistani authorities had apparently told him. But, the unnamed State official said, unnamed American Embassy officials wouldn't verify the story, nor would unnamed Pakistani officials in Islamabad, who were presumably different unnamed Pakistani officials from the unnamed Pakistani authorities who told the story to the unnamed State official in the first place.

On December 9, the NYT noted that "Mr. Lakhvi has been described as the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks," but didn't say who has described him as the mastermind or why. NYT also said that unnamed American counterterrorism officials in Washington "wanted to see proof that Mr. Lakhvi was actually in custody," but it made no mention of American officials wanting to see any proof that Mr. Lakhvi actually had anything to do with the Mumbai attacks.

Bollywood

I had to look to the BBC to discover the source of the accusations against Pakistan: "Indian authorities." Mumbai police are the ones who say the attackers were Lashkar-e-Taiba, but "They did not say how this was known.

"One of the attackers survived and was questioned. "Some media reports have suggested that truth serum may be used as part of his interrogation," the BBC said. It sounds like ventriloquism might have been part of the interrogation too; photographs of the dead bodies of the other nine guys were "too graphic to show." The guy they took the rubber hose to must have been in lovely shape.

So, the "news" story we got from the NYT was a double secret anonymous hearsay rumor based on alleged testimony taken from a coerced deathbed confession that may or may not have been post dated. Don't get mad at the NYT though. Their scum baggage was nothing compared to the stunt the Washington Post pulled.

The Hunt for Red Herring

WaPo had the good grace to put Clarke's "analysis" of the Mumbai massacre in the opinion section, but it belonged in the book section plainly labeled as bad fiction. It was screed of incontinent narrative interrupted by tumescent dialogue that sounded like something out of a badly dubbed foreign film. I kept expecting one of the characters to strike a belligerent pose and bark, "Our kung fu is stronger than your tai chi!"

"The network" of terrorists groups, Clarke warns, "is approaching 2009 with a specific agenda. So, too, is the incoming leadership of the network's chief enemy, the United States." To understand how the two sides think, we must "imagine two hypothetical meetings in which each side plots its terrorism agenda for 2009.

"Jesus, Larry and Curly; to understand what's really going on, we have to make stuff up?

"A half-dozen bearded and robed men are sitting on rugs in a circle," Clarke writes. "As the titular leader of the movement, Osama bin Laden opens the meeting.

" Aha! I wondered how long it would take before al Qaeda became the culprit in the Mumbai incident.

"'I recall well how you often met with me in Afghanistan during the war against the godless Soviets,' bin Laden says. 'I remember how you helped us set up our training camps there in the 1990s, and how you provided us with safe haven here in Pakistan when we left Afghanistan after our 'planes operation' brought down the towers in 2001.

'"Ahmed, your son, the doctor who became a terrorist after the infidels dropped bombs on his wedding, is at the door.

It goes on like that, and Muhammad Omar of the Taliban is at the meeting, and Hakimullah Mehsud of the other Taliban is there too, as is a representative from Pakistani intelligence, and bin Laden's "short, squat" (as opposed to "tall, squat") lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, who says, "Soon, the Pakistani army will leave the Afghan border. Thanks be to God, and to Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"Great. Caesar's. Ghost.

The scenario Clarke paints in the situation room of the West Wing is equally purple. High-level hobnobgoblins sit around and go hamana hamana until somebody from the National Counterterrorism Center says: "We could see al-Qaeda attacks in 2009 on the Arabian Peninsula, in Europe, even here at home. But of course, we have no actionable intelligence pointing to a specific plot.

" We could see flying pigs repair the Hubble telescope in 2009. We could see a lot of things, but the thing we won't likely see is any coherent intelligence analysis on the terrorists. Sure, Clarke is the biggest flake in the cereal bowl, but keep in mind that he was one of the top guys in his field for decades. He's retired now, but think how many of the folks still at the wheel are just like him.

There's a chance that Clarke and the rumor mill press are right about the Mumbai incident and its probable fall out, but so what? Jeane Dixon predicted thousands of things every year; the odds were certain that one them would come true.

Soothsaying is fine as a checkout line amusement, but it's a heck of a thing to shape foreign policy around. Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Indian fundraiser emerges as key event in Illinois probe

Several eminent Indian Americans are linked to the corruption scandal involving Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's attempt to sell the Senate seat vacated by president-elect Barack Obama.

Questions are being raised about last Saturday's event for Blagojevich because Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.'s brother, Jonathan, was among those attending. The Indian community has a long history of supporting the Jackson family's political aspirations, and the congressman has been clear about his interest in succeeding Obama.

Rep. Jackson, however, flatly denied that he or his brother were involved in a scheme for Blagojevich to peddle the Senate seat in return for up to $1.5 million in political contributions.

The congressman also said neither his brother nor his father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, served as any kind of emissary for discussions with the governor.

"Clearly, a scheme had been hatched in the mind of the governor," Jackson said.

The Chicago Tribune reported Friday that some of the businessmen who gathered at the Dec. 6 fundraiser discussed the prospect of raising at least $1 million for the governor in return for Jackson getting the Senate seat.

The daily identified one such Indian American as Raghuveer Nayak or Raghu. He owns a series of surgery centres in Chicago.

"Raghu (Nayak) said he needed to raise a million for Rod to make sure Jesse got the seat," a businessman who attended one of the meetings where requests were made for the fundraiser was quoted as saying by The Chicago Tribune.

"He said, 'I can raise half of it, $500,000.'," added the businessman, also an Indian American.

Nayak, who the report said is a major Blagojevich fundraiser, also has ties with the Jackson family.

Nayak and Jesse Jackson Jr's brother Jonathan have known each other for a long time and even went into business together some years ago.

Among other Indian Americans named in the report are pharmacist Harish Bhatt and brothers Rajinder Bedi and Jatinder Bedi.

Rajinder is managing director for the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity's Office of Trade and Investment, overseeing nine foreign trade offices around the world, from China to Israel. Jatinder is editor of the Chicago-based ethnic Indian newspaper, Indian Reporter.

Quoting two unidentified businessmen who attended the fundraiser meetings, the report said Nayak and Rajinder privately told many of the more than two dozen attendees that the fundraising effort was aimed at supporting Jackson's bid for the Senate.

One such fundraiser was held a few days before the arrest of the Illinois governor. It was co-sponsored by Nayak and attended by Jonathan Jackson as well as Blagojevich, according to several people who were there.

Iftekhar Shareef, former president of the Federation of Indian Associations and a prominent businessman, said he attended the fundraiser and sat at the same table as the governor, Jonathan Jackson and at least two prominent Indian businessmen.

Nobody discussed the Senate seat at the table, Shareef said.

"Honestly, I never saw if there was any talk about Jesse Jr.'s Senate seat or anything," Shareef said. "Who knows? It might be among themselves."

Blagojevich was arrested at his home Tuesday, one day after he met with Jackson for 90 minutes to discuss Jackson's interest in the seat. The congressman has been identified as "Senate Candidate 5" in the federal complaint against Blagojevich.

Jackson said Blagojevich never promised him the Senate seat. "Far from it," he told The Associated Press. "It was clear from the reading of the complaint, my candidacy never had a chance under his process."

Any scheme to win Jackson the appointment may have been hatched shortly before Oct. 31, according to the complaint.

During a recorded conversation that day, the governor recalled "an earlier approach" by an associate of Senate Candidate 5: "We were approached 'pay to play.' That, you know, he'd raise me 500 grand. An emissary came. Then the other guy would raise a million, if I made him a senator."

The Tribune reported that Blagojevich made an appearance at an Oct. 31 luncheon at the India House restaurant in suburban Schaumburg, an event sponsored by businessman Raghuveer Nayak.

Ravi Rawat, manager of the India House restaurant, said there were 35 participants at the luncheon and that Nayak paid the bill. He said he was unaware of what was discussed at the closed-door session, though Shareef said it was held to plan last week's Blagojevich fundraiser.

According to state campaign finance reports, Nayak and his company, Rogers Park One Day Surgi-Center, gave $117,000 to Blagojevich's campaign fund from 2001 through November 2006.

Raghuveer and Anita Nayak also contributed $20,300 to Jackson's campaigns from 2000 to 2008, Federal Election Commission documents indicate.

At least two other businessmen and a Blagojevich aide identified as being part of Saturday's fundraiser have donated to Blagojevich and Jackson, sometimes with their wives.

Harish and Renuka Bhatt have given $86,000 to Blagojevich, including $4,000 from the Association of Indian Pharmacists, which lists the same address as Bhatt.

Blagojevich has also received $18,500 from Babu Patel or his firm, Patel Realty, from 2000 through June. Patel gave $1,000 to Jackson in 2007. Blagojevich aide Rajinder Bedi gave Jackson $500 between 2005 and 2008.

According to Shareef, both Nayak and Bedi sat with the governor and Jonathan Jackson during the fundraiser.

Messages left with Nayak, the Bhatts, Patel and Bedi were not returned Friday.

On Dec. 4, two days before the fundraiser, prosecutors say Blagojevich told someone identified only as "Adviser B" that he was giving Jackson greater consideration for the seat because, "among other reasons," he would raise money for a Blagojevich re-election run and might even provide some cash upfront.

In another taped call, Blagojevich said he was elevating Jackson on his list of candidates because he "might be able to cut a deal" that could give the governor "something tangible up front."

"Blagojevich noted he was going to meet with 'Senate Candidate 5' in the next few days," the complaint says.

In fact, the governor and Jackson met to discuss the Senate seat four days later, on Monday. Blagojevich was arrested at his home the next morning.

Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not our 9/11

The author on the Mumbai terror attacks and India's response

• Arundhati Roy
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 December 2008 20.21 GMT
• Article history

Azam Amir Kasab, the face of the Mumbai attacks. Photograph: Reuters

We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11". Like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that if it didn't act fast to arrest the "Bad Guys" he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.

But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

It's odd how in the last week of November thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India's richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara – one of Kashmir's most ravaged districts.

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad,Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something's going very badly wrong in this country.

If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish centre.

We're told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company I think) said "Hungry, kya?" (Hungry eh?). It then, with the best of intentions I'm sure, informed its readers that on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia. But of course this isn't that war. That one's still being fought in the Dalit bastis of our villages, on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Lalgarh in West Bengal and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities.

That war isn't on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.

There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially "Islamist" terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.

Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.

The sayings of Hafiz Saeed, who founded the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolsters the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide bombing, hates Jews, Shias and Democracy and believes that jihad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the world. Among the things he said are: "There cannot be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy."

And: "India has shown us this path. We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir."

But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide and has said (on camera): "We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire … we hacked, burned, set on fire … we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it … I have just one last wish … let me be sentenced to death … I don't care if I'm hanged ... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs [seven or eight hundred thousand] of these people stay ... I will finish them off … let a few more of them die ... at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die."

And where, in Side A's scheme of things, would we place the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh bible, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined by MS Golwalkar, who became head of the RSS in 1944. It says: "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening."
Or: "To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here ... a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by."

(Of course Muslims are not the only people in the gun sights of the Hindu right. Dalits have been consistently targeted. Recently in Kandhamal in Orissa, Christians were the target of two and a half months of violence which left more than 40 dead. Forty thousand people have been driven from their homes, half of who now live in refugee camps.)

All these years Hafiz Saeed has lived the life of a respectable man in Lahore as the head of the Jamaat-ud Daawa, which many believe is a front organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He continues to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jehad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11 the UN imposed sanctions on the Jammat-ud-Daawa. The Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure and put Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and lives the life of a respectable man in Gujarat. A couple of years after the genocide he left the VHP to join the Shiv Sena. Narendra Modi, Bajrangi's former mentor, is still the chief minister of Gujarat. So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India's biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata.

Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, recently said: "Modi is God." The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted. The RSS has 45,000 branches, its own range of charities and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister AB Vajpayee, current leader of the opposition LK Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats and police and intelligence officers.

If that's not enough to complicate our picture of secular democracy, we should place on record that there are plenty of Muslim organisations within India preaching their own narrow bigotry.

So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I'd pick Side B. We need context. Always.

In this nuclear subcontinent that context is partition. The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us. Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Each of those people carries and passes down a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives. Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic Republic, and then, very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths. India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi's predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India's bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born.

By 1990 they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992 Hindu mobs exhorted by LK Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it. By 1998 the BJP was in power at the centre. The US war on terror put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy. This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed.

This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism in the subcontinent and of the Mumbai attacks. It shouldn't surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba is from Shimla (India) and LK Advani of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh is from Sindh(Pakistan).

In much the same way as it did after the 2001 parliament attack, the 2002 burning of the Sabarmati Express and the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the government of India announced that it has "incontrovertible" evidence that the Lashkar-e-Taiba backed by Pakistan's ISI was behind the Mumbai strikes. The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies the Lashkar operates in India through an organisation called the Indian Mujahideen. Two Indian nationals, Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a Special Police Officer working for the Jammu and Kashmirpolice, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Kolkata in West Bengal, have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks.

So already the neat accusation against Pakistan is getting a little messy. Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously. In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.

In circumstances like these, air strikes to "take out" terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not "take out" the terrorists. Neither will war. (Also, in our bid for the moral high ground, let's try not to forget that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE of neighbouring Sri Lanka, one of the world's most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.)

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening towards civil war. As recruiting agents for America's jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to.

Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in heart of the Homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade. Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders. Nobody, least of all the Pakistan government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more than it does on India.

If at this point India decides to go to war perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before. If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of "non-state actors" with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbours. It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.

On the plus side, the advantage of going to war is that it's the best way for India to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front. The Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones. TV anchors in their studios and journalists at "ground zero" kept up an endless stream of excited commentary. Over three days and three nights we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men armed with guns and gadgets exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite National Security Guard and the marine commandos of this supposedly mighty, nuclear-powered nation.

While they did this they indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations, hospitals and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion or nationality. (Part of the helplessness of the security forces had to do with having to worry about hostages. In other situations, in Kashmir for example, their tactics are not so sensitive. Whole buildings are blown up. Human shields are used. The U.S and Israeli armies don't hesitate to send cruise missiles into buildings and drop daisy cutters on wedding parties in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.) But this was different. And it was on TV.

The boy-terrorists' nonchalant willingness to kill – and be killed – mesmerised their international audience. They delivered something different from the usual diet of suicide bombings and missile attacks that people have grown inured to on the news. Here was something new. Die Hard 25. The gruesome performance went on and on. TV ratings soared. Ask any television magnate or corporate advertiser who measures broadcast time in seconds, not minutes, what that's worth.

Eventually the killers died and died hard, all but one. (Perhaps, in the chaos, some escaped. We may never know.) Throughout the standoff the terrorists made no demands and expressed no desire to negotiate. Their purpose was to kill people and inflict as much damage as they could before they were killed themselves. They left us completely bewildered. When we say "nothing can justify terrorism", what most of us mean is that nothing can justify the taking of human life. We say this because we respect life, because we think it's precious. So what are we to make of those who care nothing for life, not even their own? The truth is that we have no idea what to make of them, because we can sense that even before they've died, they've journeyed to another world where we cannot reach them.

One TV channel (India TV) broadcast a phone conversation with one of the attackers, who called himself Imran Babar. I cannot vouch for the veracity of the conversation, but the things he talked about were the things contained in the "terror emails" that were sent out before several other bomb attacks in India. Things we don't want to talk about any more: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the brutal repression in Kashmir. "You're surrounded," the anchor told him. "You are definitely going to die. Why don't you surrender?"

"We die every day," he replied in a strange, mechanical way. "It's better to live one day as a lion and then die this way." He didn't seem to want to change the world. He just seemed to want to take it down with him.

If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn't it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for? Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don't figure in their calculations except as collateral damage. It has always been a part of and often even the aim of terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden faultlines. The blood of "martyrs" irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project. A single act of terrorism is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best it is meant to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is theatre, spectacle and symbolism, and today, the stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV. Even as the attack was being condemned by TV anchors, the effectiveness of the terror strikes were being magnified a thousandfold by TV broadcasts.

Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Instead we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed (is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?). We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation. We had the death of former prime minster VP Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes and villain of Upper caste Hindus pass without a mention.

We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, give us his version of George Bush's famous "Why they hate us" speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim hate Mumbai: "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness." His prescription: "The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever." Didn't George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can't seem to get away from.

Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and leftwing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army and virtually asking for a police state. It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of "pickings" is long gone. We're now in the era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.

Dangerous, stupid television flashcards like the Police are Good Politicians are Bad/Chief Executives are Good Chief Ministers are Bad/Army is Good Government is Bad/ India is Good Pakistan is Bad are being bandied about by TV channels that have already whipped their viewers into a state of almost uncontrollable hysteria.

Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy comes at a time when people in India were beginning to see that in the business of terrorism, victims and perpetrators sometimes exchange roles. It's an understanding that the people of Kashmir, given their dreadful experiences of the last 20 years, have honed to an exquisite art. On the mainland we're still learning. (If Kashmir won't willingly integrate into India, it's beginning to look as though India will integrate/disintegrate into Kashmir.)

It was after the 2001 parliament attack that the first serious questions began to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers and activists exposed how innocent people had been framed by the police and the press, how evidence was fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due process had been criminally violated at every stage of the investigation. Eventually the courts acquitted two out of the four accused, including SAR Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third, Showkat Guru, was acquitted of all the charges brought against him but was then convicted for a fresh, comparatively minor offence. The supreme court upheld the death sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad Afzal. In its judgment the court acknowledged there was no proof that Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite shockingly, "The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender." Even today we don't really know who the terrorists that attacked the Indian parliament were and who they worked for.

More recently, on September 19 this year, we had the controversial "encounter" at Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, where the Special Cell of the Delhi police gunned down two Muslim students in their rented flat under seriously questionable circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in 2008. An assistant commissioner of Police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the parliament attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India's many "encounter specialists" known and rewarded for having summarily executed several "terrorists". There was an outcry against the Special Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging from eyewitnesses in the local community to senior Congress Party leaders, students, journalists, lawyers, academics and activists all of whom demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. In response, the BJP and LK Advani lauded Mohan Chand Sharma as a "Braveheart" and launched a concerted campaign in which they targeted those who had dared to question the integrity of the police, saying it was "suicidal" and calling them "anti-national". Of course there has been no inquiry.

Only days after the Batla House event, another story about "terrorists" surfaced in the news. In a report submitted to a sessions court, the CBI said that a team from Delhi's Special Cell (the same team that led the Batla House encounter, including Mohan Chand Sharma) had abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005, planted 2kg of RDX and two pistols on them and then arrested them as "terrorists" who belonged to Al Badr (which operates out of Kashmir). Ali and Qamar who have spent years in jail, are only two examples out of hundreds of Muslims who have been similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on false charges.

This pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) that was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts arrested a Hindu preacher Sadhvi Pragya, a self-styled God man Swami Dayanand Pande and Lt Col Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian Army. All the arrested belong to Hindu Nationalist organizations including a Hindu Supremacist group called Abhinav Bharat. The Shiv Sena, the BJP and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra ATS, and vilified its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a political conspiracy and declaring that "Hindus could not be terrorists". LK Advani changed his mind about his policy on the police and made rabble rousing speeches to huge gatherings in which he denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy men and women.

On the November 25 newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the high profile VHP Chief Pravin Togadia's possible role in the Malegaon blasts. The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Hemant Karkare was killed in the Mumbai Attacks. The chances are that the new chief whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure that is bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation.

While the Sangh Parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police, Arnab Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television, has stepped up to the plate. He has taken to naming, demonising and openly heckling people who have dared to question the integrity of the police and armed forces. My name and the name of the well-known lawyer Prashant Bhushan have come up several times. At one point, while interviewing a former police officer, Arnab Goswami turned to camera: "Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan," he said, "I hope you are watching this. We think you are disgusting." For a TV anchor to do this in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the one that prevails today, amounts to incitement as well as threat, and would probably in different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.

All India Students Association (Aisa) and Revolutionary Youth Association (RYA) — had come from impoverished regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The rally was almost completely ignored by Indian TV channels.

So according to a man aspiring to be the next prime minister of India, and another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens have no right to raise questions about the police. This in a country with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake "encounters". This in a country that boasts of the highest number of custodial deaths in the world and yet refuses to ratify the International Covenant on Torture. A country where the ones who make it to torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least they've escaped being "encountered" by our Encounter Specialists. A country where the line between the Underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist.

How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them? There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse. If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The US army is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire. (Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?) Hundreds of thousands people including thousands of American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist strikes on U.S allies/agents (including India) and U.S interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically since 9/11. George Bush, the man who led the US response to 9/11 is a despised figure not just internationally, but also by his own people. Who can possibly claim that the United States is winning the war on terror?

Homeland Security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It's not that kind of homeland. We have a hostile nuclear weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbour, we have a military occupation in Kashmir and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than 150 million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalise, end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world. If ten men can hold off the NSG commandos, and the police for three days, and if it takes half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?

Nor for that matter will any other quick fix. Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they're for people that governments don't like. That's why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%. They're just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go. Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they want.

What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.

The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy

Next Steps in the Indo-Pakistani Crisis

In an interview published this Sunday in The New York Times, we laid out a potential scenario for the current Indo-Pakistani crisis. We began with an Indian strike on Pakistan, precipitating a withdrawal of Pakistani troops from the Afghan border, resulting in intensified Taliban activity along the border and a deterioration in the U.S. position in Afghanistan, all culminating in an emboldened Iran. The scenario is not unlikely, assuming India chooses to strike.

Our argument that India is likely to strike focused, among other points, on the weakness of the current Indian government and how it is likely to fall under pressure from the opposition and the public if it does not act decisively. An unnamed Turkish diplomat involved in trying to mediate the dispute has argued that saving a government is not a good reason to go to war. That is a good argument, except that in this case, not saving the government is unlikely to prevent a war, either.

If India’s Congress party government were to fall, its replacement would be even more likely to strike at Pakistan. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress’ Hindu nationalist rival, has long charged that Congress is insufficiently aggressive in combating terrorism. The BJP will argue that the Mumbai attack in part resulted from this failing. Therefore, if the Congress government does not strike, and is subsequently forced out or loses India’s upcoming elections, the new government is even more likely to strike.

It is therefore difficult to see a path that avoids Indian retaliation, and thus the emergence of at least a variation on the scenario we laid out. But the problem is not simply political: India must also do something to prevent more Mumbais. This is an issue of Indian national security, and the pressure on India’s government to do something comes from several directions.

Three Indian Views of Pakistan

The question is what an Indian strike against Pakistan, beyond placating domestic public opinion, would achieve. There are three views on this in India.

The first view holds that Pakistani officials aid and abet terrorism — in particular the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which serves as Pakistan’s main intelligence service. In this view, the terrorist attacks are the work of Pakistani government officials — perhaps not all of the government, but enough officials of sufficient power that the rest of the government cannot block them, and therefore the entire Pakistani government can be held accountable.

The second view holds that terrorist attacks are being carried out by Kashmiri groups that have long been fostered by the ISI but have grown increasingly autonomous since 2002 — and that the Pakistani government has deliberately failed to suppress anti-Indian operations by these groups. In this view, the ISI and related groups are either aware of these activities or willfully ignorant of them, even if ISI is not in direct control. Under this thinking, the ISI and the Pakistanis are responsible by omission, if not by commission.

The third view holds that the Pakistani government is so fragmented and weak that it has essentially lost control of Pakistan to the extent that it cannot suppress these anti-Indian groups. This view says that the army has lost control of the situation to the point where many from within the military-intelligence establishment are running rogue operations, and groups in various parts of the country simply do what they want. If this argument is pushed to its logical conclusion, Pakistan should be regarded as a state on the verge of failure, and an attack by India might precipitate further weakening, freeing radical Islamist groups from what little control there is.

The first two analyses are essentially the same. They posit that Pakistan could stop attacks on India, but chooses not to. The third is the tricky one. It rests on the premise that the Pakistani government (and in this we include the Pakistani army) is placing some restraint on the attackers. Thus, the government’s collapse would make enough difference that India should restrain itself, especially as any Indian attack would so destabilize Pakistan that it would unleash our scenario and worse. In this view, Pakistan’s civilian government has only as much power in these matters as the army is willing to allow.

The argument against attacking Pakistan therefore rests on a very thin layer of analysis. It requires the belief that Pakistan is not responsible for the attacks, that it is nonetheless restraining radical Islamists to some degree, and that an Indian attack would cause even these modest restraints to disappear. Further, it assumes that these restraints, while modest, are substantial enough to make a difference.

There is a debate in India, and in Washington, as to whether this is the case. This is why New Delhi has demanded that Pakistan turn over 20 individuals wanted by India in connection with attacks. The list doesn’t merely include Islamists, but also Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of the ISI who has long been suspected of close ties with Islamists. (The United States apparently added Gul to the list.) Turning those individuals over would be enormously difficult politically for Pakistan. It would create a direct confrontation between Pakistan’s government and the Pakistani Islamist movement, likely sparking violence in Pakistan. Indeed, turning any Pakistani over to India, regardless of ideology, would create a massive crisis in Pakistan.

The Indian government chose to make this demand precisely because complying with it is enormously difficult for Pakistan. New Delhi is not so much demanding the 20 individuals, but rather that Pakistan take steps that will create conflict in Pakistan. If the Pakistani government is in control of the country, it should be able to weather the storm. If it can’t weather the storm, then the government is not in control of Pakistan. And if it could weather the storm but chooses not to incur the costs, then India can reasonably claim that Pakistan is prepared to export terrorism rather than endure it at home. In either event, the demand reveals things about the Pakistani reality.

The View from Islamabad

Pakistan’s evaluation, of course, is different. Islamabad does not regard itself as failed because it cannot control all radical Islamists or the Taliban. The official explanation is that the Pakistanis are doing the best they can. From the Pakistani point of view, while the Islamists ultimately might represent a threat, the threat to Pakistan and its government that would arise from a direct assault on the Islamists is a great danger not only to Pakistan, but also to the region. It is thus better for all to let the matter rest. The Islamist issue aside, Pakistan sees itself as continuing to govern the country effectively, albeit with substantial social and economic problems (as one might expect). The costs of confronting the Islamists, relative to the benefits, are therefore high.

The Pakistanis see themselves as having several effective counters against an Indian attack. The most important of these is the United States. The very first thing Islamabad said after the Mumbai attack was that a buildup of Indian forces along the Pakistani border would force Pakistan to withdraw 100,000 troops from its Afghan border. Events over the weekend, such as the attack on a NATO convoy, showed the vulnerability of NATO’s supply line across Pakistan to Afghanistan.

The Americans are fighting a difficult holding action against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The United States needs the militant base camps in Pakistan and the militants’ lines of supply cut off, but the Americans lack the force to do this themselves. A withdrawal of Pakistani forces from the Afghan border would pose a direct threat to American forces. Therefore, the Pakistanis expect Washington to intervene on their behalf to prevent an Indian attack. They do not believe a major Indian troop buildup will take place, and if it does, the Pakistanis do not think it will lead to substantial conflict.

There has been some talk of an Indian naval blockade against Pakistan, blocking the approaches to Pakistan’s main port of Karachi. This is an attractive strategy for India, as it plays to New Delhi’s relative naval strength. Again, the Pakistanis do not believe the Indians will do this, given that it would cut off the flow of supplies to American troops in Afghanistan. (Karachi is the main port serving U.S. forces in Afghanistan.) The line of supply in Afghanistan runs through Pakistan, and the Americans, the Pakistanis calculate, do not want anything to threaten that.

From the Pakistani point of view, the only potential military action India could take that would not meet U.S. opposition would be airstrikes. There has been talk that the Indians might launch airstrikes against Islamist training camps and bases in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. In Pakistan’s view, this is not a serious problem. Mounting airstrikes against training camps is harder than it might seem. The only way to achieve anything in such a facility is with area destruction weapons — for instance, using B-52s to drop ordnance over very large areas. The targets are not amenable to strike aircraft, because the payload of such aircraft is too small. It would be tough for the Indians, who don’t have strategic bombers, to hit very much. Numerous camps exist, and the Islamists can afford to lose some. As an attack, it would be more symbolic than effective.

Moreover, if the Indians did kill large numbers of radical Islamists, this would hardly pose a problem to the Pakistani government. It might even solve some of Islamabad’s problems, depending on which analysis you accept. Airstrikes would generate massive support among Pakistanis for their government so long as Islamabad remained defiant of India. Pakistan thus might even welcome Indian airstrikes against Islamist training camps.

Islamabad also views the crisis with India with an eye to the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Any attack by India that might destabilize the Pakistani government opens at least the possibility of a Pakistani nuclear strike or, in the event of state disintegration, of Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of factional elements. If India presses too hard, New Delhi faces the unknown of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal — unless, of course, the Indians are preparing a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Pakistan, something the Pakistanis find unlikely.

All of this, of course, depends upon two unknowns. First, what is the current status of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal? Is it sufficiently reliable for Pakistan to count on? Second, to what extent do the Americans monitor Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities? Ever since the crisis of 2002, when American fears that Pakistani nuclear weapons could fall into al Qaeda’s hands were high, we have assumed that American calm about Pakistan’s nuclear facilities was based on Washington’s having achieved a level of transparency on their status. This might limit Pakistan’s freedom of action with regard to — and hence ability to rely on — its nuclear arsenal.

Notably, much of Pakistan’s analysis of the situation rests on a core assumption — namely, that the United States will choose to limit Indian options, and just as important, that the Indians would listen to Washington. India does not have the same relationship or dependence on the United States as, for example, Israel does. India historically was allied with the Soviet Union; New Delhi moved into a strategic relationship with the United States only in recent years. There is a commonality of interest between India and the United States, but not a dependency. India would not necessarily be blocked from action simply because the Americans didn’t want it to act.

As for the Americans, Pakistan’s assumption that the United States would want to limit India is unclear. Islamabad’s threat to shift 100,000 troops from the Afghan border will not easily be carried out. Pakistan’s logistical capabilities are limited. Moreover, the American objection to Pakistan’s position is that the vast majority of these troops are not engaged in controlling the border anyway, but are actually carefully staying out of the battle. Given that the Americans feel that the Pakistanis are ineffective in controlling the Afghan-Pakistani border, the shift from virtually to utterly ineffective might not constitute a serious deterioration from the United States’ point of view. Indeed, it might open the door for more aggressive operations on — and over — the Afghan-Pakistani border by American forces, perhaps by troops rapidly transferred from Iraq.

The situation of the port of Karachi is more serious, both in the ground and naval scenarios. The United States needs Karachi; it is not in a position to seize the port and the road system out of Karachi. That is a new war the United States can’t fight. At the same time, the United States has been shifting some of its logistical dependency from Pakistan to Central Asia. But this requires a degree of Russian support, which would cost Washington dearly and take time to activate. In short, India’s closing the port of Karachi by blockade, or Pakistan’s doing so as retaliation for Indian action, would hurt the United States badly.

Supply lines aside, Islamabad should not assume that the United States is eager to ensure that the Pakistani state survives. Pakistan also should not assume that the United States is impressed by the absence or presence of Pakistani troops on the Afghan border. Washington has developed severe doubts about Pakistan’s commitment and effectiveness in the Afghan-Pakistani border region, and therefore about Pakistan’s value as an ally.

Pakistan’s strongest card with the United States is the threat to block the port of Karachi. But here, too, there is a counter to Pakistan: If Pakistan closes Karachi to American shipping, either the Indian or American navy also could close it to Pakistani shipping. Karachi is Pakistan’s main export facility, and Pakistan is heavily dependent on it. If Karachi were blocked, particularly while Pakistan is undergoing a massive financial crisis, Pakistan would face disaster. Karachi is thus a double-edged sword. As long as Pakistan keeps it open to the Americans, India probably won’t block it. But should Pakistan ever close the port in response to U.S. action in the Afghan-Pakistani borderland, then Pakistan should not assume that the port will be available for its own use.

India’s Military Challenge

India faces difficulties in all of its military options. Attacks on training camps sound more effective than they are. Concentrating troops on the border is impressive only if India is prepared for a massive land war, and a naval blockade has multiple complications.

India needs a military option that demonstrates will and capability and decisively hurts the Pakistani government, all without drawing India into a nuclear exchange or costly ground war. And its response must rise above the symbolic.

We have no idea what India is thinking, but one obvious option is airstrikes directed not against training camps, but against key government installations in Islamabad. The Indian air force increasingly has been regarded as professional and capable by American pilots at Red Flag exercises in Nevada. India has modern Russian fighter jets and probably has the capability, with some losses, to penetrate deep into Pakistani territory.

India also has acquired radar and electronic warfare equipment from Israel and might have obtained some early precision-guided munitions from Russia and/or Israel. While this capability is nascent, untested and very limited, it is nonetheless likely to exist in some form.

The Indians might opt for a drawn-out diplomatic process under the theory that all military action is either ineffective or excessively risky. If it chooses the military route, New Delhi could opt for a buildup of ground troops and some limited artillery exchanges and tactical ground attacks. It also could choose airstrikes against training facilities. Each of these military options would achieve the goal of some substantial action, but none would threaten fundamental Pakistani interests. The naval blockade has complexities that could not be managed. That leaves, as a possible scenario, a significant escalation by India against targets in Pakistan’s capital.

The Indians have made it clear that the ISI is their enemy. The ISI has a building, and buildings can be destroyed, along with files and personnel. Such an aerial attack also would serve to shock the Pakistanis by representing a serious escalation. And Pakistan might find retaliation difficult, given the relative strength of its air force. India has few good choices for retaliation, and while this option is not a likely one, it is undoubtedly one that has to be considered.

It seems to us that India can avoid attacks on Pakistan only if Islamabad makes political concessions that it would find difficult to make. The cost to Pakistan of these concessions might well be greater than the benefit of avoiding conflict with India. All of India’s options are either ineffective or dangerous, but inactivity is politically and strategically the least satisfactory route for New Delhi. This circumstance is the most dangerous aspect of the current situation. In our opinion, the relative quiet at present should not be confused with the final outcome, unless Pakistan makes surprising concessions.

What if Lashkar-e-Taiba Is a Scapegoat?

Courtesy New America Media, Yoichi Shimatsu

Editor’s Note: The dirty tactics used against civilians in the Mumbai massacres last month are more typical of the Mumbai underworld than of the Islamic militant Lashkar jihadists who fought the Indian army to a standstill in Kashmir. By blaming Lashkar, the Indian right hopes to forestall any Obama initiative to resolve Kashmir. Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times, has reported from South Asia for New America Media and Pacific News Service for over a decade.

On India’s “most-wanted” list of 20 suspects believed to have planned the recent Mumbai attacks is the name of fugitive crime boss Dawood Ibrahim, who ordered an earlier wave of bombings 15 years ago. Among those chief suspects, only Dawood has sufficient local knowledge, an entrenched organization — known as D-Company — and the deep pockets for such a complex operation in a world city.

The bold raid by young gunmen, who apparently came by sea, was preceded by extensive preparations by city insiders – mapping and targeting were specific and explosives were stocked inside hotel rooms rented before the attack. Most telling was an early police report that indicated one of Dawood’s lieutenants inside the Mumbai Customs House organized the transfer of guns and ammunition from warehouses on Sassoon Dock onto the speedboats used in the landing.

The assault was a made-in-Mumbai production much like the Bollywood crime movies about D-Company’s many bloody gang wars. A Hindu breakaway gang, in concert with conservative politicians and police officers, revived the turf wars in 2007 with a spike in shootings and arrests, along with gaining Pakistani approval for Dawood’s deportation. Then D-Company, with a few lowly recruits from Pakistan, struck back.

Why then is New Delhi and Washington insisting that Islamic militants in Pakistan are primarily responsible for the attack while downplaying Dawood’s larger role?

Lashkar-e-Taiba is the convenient solution for the politicians who are trying to cement an Indo-American “civilian” nuclear pact and military alliance, and every such arranged marriage demands a common enemy.

Blaming the Lahore-based Lashkar is all-too easy since the outfit was once the West Point of the Kashmir insurgency. The Army of the Righteous, as it is known in English, was a paramilitary force par excellence that routinely mauled the Indian Army along the Himalayan ridge that forms the Line of Control of divided Kashmir. In an attack on the strategic town of Kargil in late spring 1999, Lashkar broke through India’s alpine defense line and came close to forcing New Delhi to the negotiating table.

Along the sawtooth LoC, Lashkar is respected by professional soldiers on both side. A Pakistani hero who fought on the Baltistan heights, Corporal Ahmed, told me of his admiration for the stoicism of these jihadis, who wore sandals to battle in the snow. At a checkpoint in Indian-controlled Kargil, an army captain wearing a Sikh turban said frankly that nobody in the Indian Army could fight man-to-man against Lashkar.

Lashkar earned its reputation in clean-fought mountain warfare, pitting lightly armed guerrillas against Indian armor and superior firepower.

In its finest hours, these fighters would never consider the dirty tactics used against civilians in Mumbai, for example, the gangland-style executions using a shot to the back of a kneeling captive’s head. That is more typical of the Mumbai underworld.

Like many of the misguided decisions in the war on terror, the banning of Lashkar by Pakistan in 2002 did more harm than good. Without central discipline and a unifying cause, splinter groups broke off and many a cadet went solo. During his residency in Karachi, Dawood is known to have sent his young recruits for training by former Lashkar instructors. The moralistic cause had degenerated into a school for hitmen.

Conservative politicians in New Delhi have seized on the brutal Mumbai attack to discredit the nationalist revolt in Kashmir and undermine the five U.N. Security Council resolutions (1948-1965) that call for a plebiscite on the status of the once-independent country. By linking Lashkar to Mumbai, the Indian right hope to deter President-elect Barack Obama from his oft-stated policy of bringing the Kashmir issue to the fore.

These same politicians hope to repeat their successful handling of Bill Clinton, who reversed the American policy of sanctions for India’s nuclear bomb tests in 1998 within two short years by proposing nuclear cooperation with New Delhi. The Enron gas-fired electricity plant outside Mumbai played a major role in that about-face.

So did the Battle of Kargil. A greater international leader would have seen that the Islamic tactical victory was the key for dislodging New Delhi’s institutional inertia against Kashmir talks.

Clinton intervened in the Kargil battle by pressuring Pakistani President Nawaz Sharif to order a pullback, and the Indian artillery in violation of the truce opened fire on the retreating guerrillas.

The Kashmiris again lost their right of self-determination, the U.N. resolution remained unresolved, and America got nothing out of the deal.

Worse yet, this policy failure shattered any lingering hopes among Islamic militants for American evenhandedness. The inevitable consequence of the Kargil betrayal was 911, and the rise not of Laskar-e-Taiba but of Al Qaeda.

President-elect Obama should not submit to the hysteria being whipped up over the Mumbai atrocities. Mumbai was a criminal event that India’s elite cannot face up to, for Dawood’s D-Company was and still is their procurer of starlets, smuggled gold, drugs, loans for gambling debts and urban land for their new hotels and office blocks.
Don’t mix up the healthy oranges for the rotten apples Kashmir is a historic judgment awaiting the verdict of a popular referendum.

Yoichi Shimatsu. Former editor of The Japan Times in Tokyo and journalism lecturer at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Shimatsu has covered the Kashmir crisis and Afghan War.

HOW RISKY IS INDIA

With Steve Hamm in New York, Mehul Srivastava reports for BusinessWeek from New Delhi. Nandini Lakshman covers India business for BusinessWeek

New Delhi/Mumbai - Until Nov. 26 the strongest force pushing India forward was a mix of good fundamentals and that intangible something that industry calls "sentiment." Forged in the years of 9% growth, this euphoria inspired Indians to economic greatness and lured outside investors eager to be part of the Indian miracle.

Then the shooting started in south Mumbai. The three horrendous days that followed laid bare the gaps between India's image and reality, sparking a nationwide introspection about the nation's future. The fear is that India's mounting problems could drag the country back to its pitiful past. Its governments, despite a manufactured public image, have always been unwieldy; its economy, despite the plenty of the boom years, is premised mostly on future potential; and its much-flaunted stability is no such thing.

India's fragility is revealed by a pattern of diffused violence—a bomb here, a killing there—that goes unnoticed even in India. Most outsiders (and most investors) don't realize how dangerous a place India can be. Since 1993, when 13 bomb blasts in one day killed 257 in Mumbai, just over 29,000 people have died in terrorist attacks, including insurgencies in Kashmir and the Northeast, according to aBusinessWeek analysis of data from the Home Affairs Ministry. Thousands more have died in anti-Muslim riots. At least another 4,500 have perished since 2002 in a Maoist rebellion that simmers, and sometimes boils over, in the mineral-rich region of Chattisgarh, where foreign companies plan to invest heavily.Just after the Mumbai attacks, three people were killed in a train blast in Assam, a northeastern state that produces more than $2 billion worth of tea each year, most of it exported. "It is not just this one unprecedented attack in Mumbai," says Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry, India's most influential trade lobby. "Across the country we see...violence."

These strengths still attract investors. But foreign companies are not immune from the violence.  In Orissa on the east coast, where billions in foreign investment lie tied up, Korean companies like steelmaker Posco have had executives kidnapped and land promised to them but never delivered: Protesters wield slogans and weapons to keep earthmovers at bay. In New Delhi, the Indian CEO of an Italian company's subsidiary was killed by a mob of employees angry over layoffs. And Patrick Cescau, CEO of consumer-products giant Unilever (UN), narrowly escaped death in the massacre at the Taj Mahal hotel where he was dining with colleagues.

 

SEEKING PROTECTION—FAST

If south Mumbai is visited by violence again, the 110-plus multinationals with regional offices there could be targets. Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC), ABN Amro, HSBC (HBC), Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), JPMorgan Chase (JPM)—all have offices there. "The targets identified demonstrate that the intention is to create panic and shatter the confidence of investors in India and global investors coming to India," says Habil Khorakiwala, managing director of Indian drugmaker Wockhardt. The private equity arms of Morgan Stanley, and Englefield Capital, which have offices in the Oberoi Trident Hotel, are looking for new premises in the city, according to an investment banker.

No wonder Raghu Raman's phone has been ringing nonstop. An ex-Indian Army man, Raman is CEO of Mahindra Special Services Group, which offers security to blue-chip clients like Hindustan Unilever, Merrill Lynch (MER), ABN Amro, HSBC, and others, many of whom want to beef up their security. Prospective clients also want protection fast. Raman says some multinationals have temporarily flown their top expat execs out of India.

And the tentacles of the global credit crunch have spread into India's relatively well-capitalized banks, slowing economic growth to 7.6% this quarter from more than 9% earlier. Exports dropped 12.1% in October, vs. a 51% jump in the same month last year. "It's a crisis situation," says Ananthasubramaniam Prasanna, chief economist at brokerage ICICI Securities. But he adds: "The focus now is on internal security and not fiscal policy." Worse, the prospect of a national election in April has reduced the government to lame-duck status.

LOYAL TECH CLIENTS

In the northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, nearly 500 million people endure in an economic wasteland created by political turmoil, extreme corruption, India's highest crime rate, and its lowest per-capita income. Industry, local and foreign, has fled those states, or never dared venture there. Economic growth is less than half the national average. The people are among India's most illiterate, with a life expectancy worse than that of sub-Saharan Africans.

An Indian soldier in front of Mumbai'sTaj Mahal hotel during the siege; owner Ratan Tata of the powerful Tata Group vows to rebuild the ravaged landmark David Guttenfelder/AP Photo

Not long ago, almost all of India resembled these two states. Even when reforms opened up much of the economy in 1991, real, measurable growth was held back for years as coalition governments collapsed, a border conflict with Pakistan threatened to spread, and scandals eroded faith in the financial markets. Only in 2001, when a stable government focused on the economy with a brand message called "India Shining," did things take off.

Which India will prevail—the India that nurtures global industries and rising affluence or the India of stalled hopes and endemic violence? A year ago the answer was clear: The new India would win. That is probably still true, but India now faces a struggle.

We can't forget

Text of the Document

INSTRUMENT OF SURRENDER

        The PAKISTAN Eastern Command agree to surender all PAKISTAN
Armed Forces in BANGLA DESH to Lieutenant-General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA,
General Officer Commanding in Chief of the Indian and Bangladesh forces 
in the Eastern Theatre. This surrender includes all PAKISTAN land, air 
and naval forces as also all para-military forces and civil armed forces. 
These forces will lay down their arms and surrender at the places where 
they are currently located to the nearest regular troops under the 
command of Lieutenant-General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA.

        The PAKISTAN Eastern Command shall come under the orders of 
Lieutenant-General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA as soon as the instrument has 
been signed. Disobedience of orders will be regarded as a breach of 
the surrender terms and will be dealt with in accordance with the 
accepted laws and usages of war. The decision of Lieutenant-General 
JAGJIT SINGH AURORA will be final, should any doubt arise as to the 
meaning of interpretation of the surender terms.

        Lieutenant JAGJIT SINGH AURORA goves a solemn assurance 
that personnel who surrender shall be treated with dignity and respect 
that soldiers are entitled to in accordance with provisions of the 
GENEVA Convention and guarantees the safety and well-being of all 
PAKISTAN military and para-military forces who surrender. Protection 
will be provided to foreign nationals, ethnic minorities and personnel 
of WEST PAKISTANI origin by the forces under the command of Lieutenant-
General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA.



                                       

        (JAGJIT SINGH AURORA)                (AMIR ABDULLAH KHAN NIAZI)
          Lieutenant-General                      Leiutenant-General
   General Officer Commanding in Chief   Martial Law Administrator Zone B and
   India and Bangladesh Forces in the    Commander Eastern Command
             Eastern Theatre                      (Pakistan)
             16 December 1971                  16 December 1971

       16 December 1971                           16 December 1971

 

India sets sights on Pakistani camps

By Siddharth Srivastava 

NEW DELHI - Following the Mumbai attacks last week, it is emerging that India intends to take the "war on terror" to the next level - specifically, by taking out militant training camps that India believes dot Pakistan-administered Kashmir. 

A senior official in India's Home Ministry told Asia Times Online that a decision had been made at the highest levels that India will be directly involved in "annihilating" some of the terror infrastructure and personnel based in Pakistan. 

Although fraught with risk, "hot pursuit" has been debated in India for some time. The Mumbai strikes, which claimed the lives of

   

nearly 200 people, may have supplied the impetus needed for action. 

According to the official, who declined to be named, these operations will essentially be covert to prevent an all-out war between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. Officially, India may continue to deny such actions, all the while taking the battle to the terrorists. 

Elite armed naval, air and army forces, backed by intelligence agencies, will be involved. The operation could eventually cover border areas along Punjab such as Multan, where some of the Mumbai attackers are believed to have been recruited. 

The coastal belt along Karachi to Gwadar will also be under active Indian surveillance. 

Bangladesh, another fertile ground of al-Qaeda activities, will also be within the ambit of such actions, according to the official. 

The latest moves by India were conveyed to United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Ricewhen she was in New Delhi this week. 

Washington, it appears, does not have a problem with India's intentions as long as it is ensured that there will be no full-fledged conflagration between India and Pakistan. The US also wants to make sure Pakistan's army maintains its presence, even if limited, on the western frontier with Afghanistan. 

It seems, at least for now, that India will keep the US informed about any armed operations. Still, it is not necessary that all military actions be conveyed to Washington. 

New Delhi, too, is averse to any escalated war with Pakistan. Such a scenario would play into the hands of terrorists and would shatter the peace process which until now has been met with broad support in both countries. 

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made it clear that open war with Pakistan would set India's emerging economy back by at least two decades. 

According to official sources, Indian security agencies facing the flak after the Mumbai carnage have impressed on leaders that the only way to repulse repeated militant attacks is to strike at the roots of terror in Pakistan. The alternative, sources say, would be remaining a "sitting duck". 

Officials have said that a vast country such as India, with porous coastal and land borders, simply does not have the security apparatus, funds or personnel to guard against the meticulous jihadi terror machine. 

Further, it is thought that anti-terror strikes will "bleed" militants, forcing them to protect their immediate interests rather than plotting more attacks. This could mean that Indian operations in Pakistan will be a long-drawn affair. 

New Delhi has already set up a anti-terror federal agency with independent funding and personnel drawn from diverse security agencies. 

India's new Home Minister, P Chidambaram, is known for his tough approach. New Delhi also ensured that National Security Advisor M K Narayanan managed to retain his job amid calls for his sacking after the Mumbai attacks. 

Narayanan, who enjoys the confidence of Manmohan and Chidambaram, is well versed with Indian security structures and is expected to provide bureaucratic leadership. 

India will also seek out Israel to help implement secret sorties into Pakistan. It is hoped that Israel will also assist in setting up an elaborate intelligence network specifically aimed at neutralizing terror activities. 

New Delhi considers Tel Aviv to be a partner in the fight against terrorism, and the latter has been more than willing to lend a helping hand, including past undercover security operations in Indian-administered Kashmir. 

So far, most intelligence-gathering from Pakistan has been aimed at monitoring the activities of the armed forces. 

Pakistani armed forces, at the instance of the US, are focused on the western tribal fronts and the Taliban. New Delhi is of the opinion that a well-organized terror network in Pakistan has trained its resources on India. 

Over time, India has managed to collect information - including maps, topography and details