Obama & Extradition Of American Spy Headley To India

It is ironic that US President Barack Obama will today stay in the same hotel in Mumbai which was one of the targets scouted by American spy David Headley for the bloody Mumbai terror attacks in 2008, better known as India’s 26/11. According to Reuters: “Access to David Headley, who is in custody in the United States, and intelligence linked to his visits to India have emerged as thorny security issues between the two countries.”

“[Extradition] is an option, and as I said we will continue to pursue that option,” India’s Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told reporters, referring to Headley.” Now the question is will Prime Minister Manmohan Singh press this point during Obama’s current visit?See here…

(UPDATE: In a shocking revelation, a review being conducted for the director of national intelligence in the United States has found that US agencies had received at least four warnings- before the Mumbai terror siege incident- that David Coleman Headley, a central figure in the 2008 attacks, was training or working with Pakistani militants.) See here…

Here’s The Washington Post‘s today’s article “U.S. agencies forewarned about India bomb suspect.” See here…

The Economic Times reported how “Headley’s handlers used Indo-Pak match as cover…” See here…

Who is Headley and what is his connection with the US intelligence agencies as well as terror outfits in Pakistan? Headley, now in US custody, was a quadruple agent working for the USA’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). As a symbolic gesture, the US government imposed sanctions against LeT two days before Obama’s visit to India. See here…

Top Indian official sources said that there is a strong suspicion that US agency CIA knew about David Headley’s (real name Daood Gilani) link with the Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) one year before Mumbai attack but did not convey it (to Indian officials) when he was freely travelling across India.

It is reported that “twenty-one people plotted 26/11, including four serving officers of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and three ex-officers of the Pakistani Army.” This was stated by David Coleman Headley in a 109-page interrogation report prepared by the National Investigative Agency (NIA).

“Of the serving ISI officers Headley named, Major Sameer Ali and Major Iqbal were already cited in a dossier sent by India to Pakistan earlier this year. Headley has now named two more: Lt-Colonel Hamza and Colonel Shah.”

In June, Indian investigators questioned Headley for a week in the United States, noting that while he had provided significant amounts of information they still had further questions.

Mysteriously, the visa papers of Headley and Rana (his accomplice) have gone missing from the Indian Consulate in Chicago.

Headley, the 49-year old terror suspect, had visited India in March 2009 — four months after (an earlier) Mumbai attack carried out by LeT — but FBI still did not inform India that Headley is a LeT operative, apparently fearing he could be arrested in India.

Such allegations would give credence to the suspicions in the Indian subcontinent that the US intelligence networks themselves are responsible for encouraging terrorist networks to destabilize those governments in the region who are not subservient to the American interests/orders. For long Kashmir has been cited as one important case where geo-political (not just religious) reasons prompt terrorism from afar.

In the murky world of Washington power-politics, and the CIA at Langley, American policy-makers had been using many notorious people, including Lee Harvey Oswald and Saddam Hussein, as “double agents”. Let us also not forget America’s current most hunted man, Osama bin-Laden, who was earlier their favourite fighter against the former Soviet Union’s empire building ambitions in Afghanistan.

See my earlier post on David Headley here…

And here…

Cartoon above: “Only thing that scares US President Obama in India!” by Satish Acharya

My earlier post on security issues during Obama visit to Mumbai… See here…