by Oui
Tue Jan 8th, 2019 at 07:57:12 PM EST
David Coleman Headley is an American citizen serving both DEA/CIA and the Pakistan ISI since his arrest in 1998 for smuggling heroin. Headley had a handler from the DEA and was protected by this US Agency. Whenever foreign intelligence service signaled an alarm to have Headley watched or arrested, his master from the DEA intervened: "He is our man." While working intelligence in Pakistan, Afghanistan and in India, Headley was send as a scout for the terror group LeT. What followed was the 26/11 Mumbai massacre, attack [NYT] on Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper and a bomb attack in Germany. Only recently has the US taken this man off the streets at the direction of president Obama.
Today I watched a documentary on DW that was quite revealing. I couldn't find a link yet, the title was "A Trail of Terror". The term terror can be exchanged for "Blood". [See update below] After the fists of "Shock and Awe" released by the Bush/Cheney administration in 2001, the world has seen an sharp rise in terror attacks across the globe and tens of thousands victims each year. The global intelligence communities bear a great responsibility because they operate outside international law and beyond control of democratic nations. The IC has become a joint venture with the MIC and has been on a war footing ever since. This has got to be reversed. Political leaders need to take on this responsibility.
More below the fold ...
US under fire for deal with Mumbai attackers | DW - Oct. 2011 |
A controversial deal cut with a key figure in the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks saved lives and provided key intelligence about Pakistani terrorist groups, a top US prosecutor said Thursday.
The United States has come under fire in India for a plea deal reached with David Coleman Headley, who used his western appearance and US passport as a cover while carrying out surveillance ahead of the 2008 siege in which 166 people were killed.
But US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who cut the deal with Headley after his October 2009 arrest at a Chicago airport, said it was well worth it to take the death penalty off the table and agree not to allow him to be extradited to either India, Pakistan or Denmark to face related charges. "We had to because it's too important that we do everything we can to save lives," Fitzgerald told reporters. "We would have been crazy if we would have said 'you know what, it's all about Mr. Headley and we want to put him in jail' and sat around and let attacks happen."
○ ISI orchestrated 26/11 Mumbai terror attack: David Coleman Headley
DCH Neither In Chicago Nor In Hospital, Says His Lawyer | India Times - July 25, 2018 |
David Coleman Headley has been sentenced to 35 years in prison by a US court for the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai that killed more than 160 people.
DCH is neither in Chicago nor in hospital, his lawyer said today, dismissing reports that the LeT terrorist in the 2008 Mumbai terror attack case was battling for his life in the US city after being beaten by inmates at a detention centre.
"Although I cannot disclose his location, he is neither in Chicago nor in a hospital," John Theis, Headley's lawyer, told news agency PTI.
[...]
US authorities refused to comment on the reports.
"We are not able to locate information about this individual," the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago said in a brief email response to news agency PTI when asked about the reported prison incident.
○ The Menace that Is Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) | Carnegie Endowment - 2012 |
○ Why China loves Pakistan and India is the 'Kabab mein haddi'
CIA-GOV Library
NEW DELHI: It's a plot that could be straight out of the bluff-and-double-bluff worlds created by John le Carre and Frederick Forsyth. Only, it seems to have played out in real life, to the tragic misfortune of hundreds of innocent people. The tantalising possibility that David Coleman Headley may have been a US undercover agent who turned rogue is vexing many here as American authorities keep the US-based Lashkar jihadi out of the reach of Indian investigators.
To make the tale even more dramatic, Headley may just have provided American intelligence agencies information that prevented a Lashkar attack on Mumbai in September. The theory -- and it's still a theory -- is that Headley was used to infiltrate the Lashkar, but gradually went astray under the influence of the very terrorists he was supposed to be spying upon Torn between conflicting loyalties, he may have continued to give information to his American handlers, and a tip-off by him may even have helped avert a Lashkar attack originally planned for September. But he seems to have committed fully to Lashkar shortly after that, which could be one reason why American agencies were caught napping by 26/11.
During his interactions in India, Headley frequently introduced himself as a CIA agent. But suspicions that he's a rogue agent stem more from the just-released information that Headley, a man with one green and one brown eye, could straddle America and Pakistan with ease despite a run-in with the law in the US.
A recent profile in the New York Times said that in 1998, Headley (born Daood Sayed Gilani) was convicted of conspiring to smuggle heroin into US from Pakistan. "Court records show that after his arrest, he provided so much information about his own involvement with drug trafficking which stretched back more than a decade and about his Pakistani suppliers that he was sentenced to less than two years in jail and later went to Pakistan to conduct undercover surveillance operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)," the NYT report said.
This suggests that Headley had a deal with authorities in the US who allowed him to get away with mild punishment in exchange for a promise of cooperation.
○ Shock at Chicago Man Charged in Mumbai Attacks | The Atlantic - Dec. 2009 |
An American in Mumbai | The Indian Express - May 2015 |
Headley went to Pakistan in July 2001 and visited the Qadisiya mosque, then the headquarters of the LeT and now of the renamed Jamaat-ud-Dawa, in Lahore, meeting its head, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, to reveal his interest in covert jihad. He was the son of a senior Pakistani bureaucrat, Salim Gilani, and a well-off American mother, Serrill, an office secretary at the Pakistan embassy in Washington. Headley was born in 1960, just before the couple left for Pakistan. Serrill couldn't adapt and returned to the US, leaving her son, Daood, and daughter, Syeda, with their father. Gilani lost no time in marrying again and begetting more children. David's step-brother, Danyal Gilani, was to prosper as a civil servant and become former Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani's spokesman before going as an attaché to the Pakistan embassy in Beijing.
David, brown in one eye and blue in the other, was brought up on a strong diet of Pakistani nationalism, attending the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, a boys' military prep-school, and forming lasting friendships with schoolmates, some of whom were to become prominent officers in the Pakistan army.
ADDENDUM
Twelve Essays on Terrorism - A VIF Analysis (India)
Terrorism in India has its roots in Pakistan's existential pinning on anti-Indian ideology that has found radical religious moorings during the past decade. It is so that Pakistan's policy of terror export has found powerful underwriters in the form of 'all-weather' and fundamentalist endorsers. Agreeably, distractive inclinations of our polity has permitted these India-inimical forces to perpetrate their trade.
Though the situations in other areas are well under control, the situation in Kashmir continues to remain somewhat disturbed, due to complicity of our Western neighbours. Added to this matter of strategic concern is the spread of indigenous anti-nationals who fall victim to various forms of poisonous incitements from external propagators and their internal collaborators.
Today terrorism, per se is counted as one of the three major danger issues in the world. Even the new President of US has mentioned it in his recent remark. For India, it has been a problem born with the partition of the country
We, the strategic fraternity of the Vivekananda International Foundation, are seized of this growing menace. Accordingly, it has been our endeavour to analyse the phenomenon of terrorism and propagate appropriate considerations in defeating this poisonous hydra.
CONTENTS
I. Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Its South Asian Connection: an Indian Perspective by Alvite Singh Ningthoujam
[...]
THE SCOURGE OF TERROR UNDER DISGUISE OF FREEDOM FIGHTERS!
Why does the United States, Great Britain, France and even a tiny nation The Netherlands grant terror suspects asylum and a haven to continue their lives in anonymity?
○ After 35 Years, Iran Liquidates MKO Terrorist near Amsterdam
○ Iran: Terror Strikes IRGC Forces In Parade
The two persons liquidated in The Netherlands were either involved in terror attacks or belonged to the leadership of a terror group.
Further reading ...
○ The CIA from James Angleton to James Clapper
○ John Brennan: A Lone Man's 'Righteous' Campaign
○ U.S. Intelligence: Lying Liars and Warmongers
UPDATE MUMBAI ATTACK
Trail of Blood | DW – 7 hrs ago |
David Coleman Headley became an Islamist double agent before the eyes of western secret services. While working as an informant for several security agencies, Headley actually helped develop a dangerous new form of terrorism.
In November 2008, gunmen from the Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba struck numerous targets in Mumbai. The simultaneous attacks left more than 170 people dead. American-born David Coleman Headley had played a key role in plotting the siege. In 2009, Headley travelled to Denmark to scout possible targets for the same terrorist group.
Troubling evidence suggests that during this period Lashkar-e-Taiba was actually in contact with the Pakistani secret service ISI, which in turn was cooperating with western intelligence agencies in the fight against terrorism. The documentary "Trail of Terror" questions the role that secret services, including Germany’s BND, have played in the fight against Islamist terrorism, and asks whether they may have actually contributed to the emergence of the terrorist cells that would later strike in Brussels and Paris.
Interviews with eyewitnesses and intelligence officials, as well as videos and court records, show that western intelligence agencies have made several fatal errors.
○ India marks 10 years since Mumbai terror attacks | DW |