The preliminary list of charges

Wow! After one whole week, she figures it out! Somini Sengupta and Jane Perlez now have the list of evidence that we already know of. But rather strangely, they attribute to an unnamed "Western intelligence official" and another unnamed "retired DoD official" some of the facts that were given out by the Mumbai police commissioner Maria in an interview 3 days back! Anyway, the NYT is slowly waking up to the truth. Let us hope they don't go back to their bullshit about how "some security experts insist" the "militants" are "likely to be Indian muslims". I hope they apologize to Indian muslims but I am not holding my breath. Mind you, the article is not without its signature Sominism - she quotes a worthy, upstanding LeT terrorist to let us know what a bad, bad, bad country India is!

But the article - titled Mumbai Attack Is Test of Pakistan’s Ability to Curb Militants - is quite detailed and informative about the LeT-ISI-Mumbai attack link and is certainly worth a read. It lists the mounting evidence against Pakistan and calls out the Zardari government. Here's a snippet:

LAHORE, Pakistan — Mounting evidence of links between the Mumbai terrorist attacks and a Pakistani militant group is posing the stiffest test so far of Pakistan’s new government, raising questions whether it can — or wants to — rein in militancy here.

President Asif Ali Zardari  says his government has no concrete evidence of Pakistani involvement in the attacks, and American officials have not established a direct link to the government. But as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice landed in Pakistan on Thursday, pressure was building on the government to confront the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which Indian and American officials say carried out the Mumbai attacks.

Though officially banned, the group has hidden in plain sight for years. It has had a long history of ties to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. The evidence of its hand in the Mumbai attacks is accumulating from around the globe:

¶A former Defense Department official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that American intelligence analysts suspect that former officers of Pakistan’s powerful spy agency and its army helped train the Mumbai attackers.

¶According to the Indian police, the one gunman who survived the terrorist attacks, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, told interrogators that he trained during a year and half in at least four camps in Pakistan and at one met with Mohammad Hafeez Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader.

¶And according to a Western official familiar with the investigation in Mumbai, another Lashkar leader, Yusuf Muzammil, whom the surviving gunman named as the plot’s organizer, fielded phone calls in Lahore from the attackers.

That is a damning indictment of Pakistan. The ball is now in their court. The article has lots of details about the LeT but doesn't really get to the bottom of this nefarious group. More on that later.

About the Pakistani connection and media reports

Here's what we know so far:

1. The lone suriviving terrorist has confessed he is from Pakistan and that he belongs to the LeT. "There were 24 of us who took one-year training in camps organised by Laskar-e-Taiba (LeT) at Mansera and Muzzarafabad in Punjab province of Pakistan. Ten of us were later handpicked for the Mumbai operation,'' said Ajmal Amir Kasab during interrogations.
2. WSJ reports some hard pieces of evidence recovered so far: Most of what Mr. Kasab has said so far has proven accurate, the commissioner said in the interview. After his capture, the young man had become resigned to helping the Indian police, Commissioner Maria said: "He knows the game is up for him." The key piece of evidence he provided is information about the hijacked fishing vessel that ferried terrorists from near Pakistan to waters off Mumbai. On the fishing trawler, investigators discovered -- just as Mr. Kasab said they would -- the slain lead crewman who had been thrown into the engine room, a satellite phone, and a global positioning device for navigating. Another GPS unit recovered in Mumbai suggested that the terrorists planned to return to the vessel if they survived the attacks, Commissioner Maria said.
3. A senior US State Department official has also said "the perpetrators were "wholly or partially" a group based in Pakistan". A number of US media reports have cited US intelligence and counter-terrorism officials now, pointing to Pakistan. 

So, we have the terrorist confessing that he is from Pakistan, that he was trained in Pakistan along with many others by a ex-soldier, that ten members of his group were then handpicked, and that they hijacked a fishing boat to get to Mumbai from Karachi. The Indian navy found the boat and recovered satellite phones and a GPS. The phones also show that a number of calls were made to Pakistan. US officials are also confirming the Pakistan link (this is the second time since the Indian embassy bombing in Afghanistan that the US has independently confirmed the Pakistani link - see here for a detailed account). 

And yet, there have been a number of articles in the international media that have dismissed - with no justification whatsoever - the Pakistani links mentioned by Indian officials. Here is what New York Times "reported":

But some security experts insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims, with a domestic agenda.

This article, co-authored by one SOUAD MEKHENNET, of course doesn't say who these "security experts" are. This was published on Nov 27th even as people were dying. The NYT did not spare a moment in unleashing its anti-India, blame-the-victim crusade.

Some of you may be familiar with the name Somini Sengupta, a self-hating Indian who does almost-comical hit pieces periodically to please her Manhattan bosses. She just could not wait till the blood letting was all done to blame India for this carnage. Under the somewhat gleeful headline India Faces Reckoning as Terror Toll Eclipses 170 she goes on to insinuate that "the attackers had collaborators already in the city" and that "Indian security forces" were too weak because it took them "more than three days" to fight "just 10 gunmen". There is no mention in the article of the ammunition stocked in room 630 at the Taj, the chinese grenades, booby-trapped bodies (NSG was not sure if these were corpses or just wounded people), the 565 rooms that had to be checked, more than a hundred people who were stuck on 7 floors, and all manner of complexities faced by the commandos. Some Psychology experts (who will not be named, of course) insist that such a degree of complexity is too much for Sengupta and the NYT to grasp. But I don't think that is the reason for this work of impeccable journalism from Ms Sengupta. As some of you may already know, Sengupta has a long history of getting all things Indian completely wrong. You'll find some hilarious commentary here and here.