Via the Hindu. New Delhi: India has proof of the involvement of Pakistan?s Inter-Services Intelligence agency in last week?s terrorist attacks in Mumbai but will not level a public accusation because the ensuing tension in bilateral relations would play into the hands of those responsible for the incidents, authoritative sources claimed here on Thursday.

Asked for the sort of proof linking the ISI to the attacks, the sources said investigators had ?the names of the handlers and trainers, the locations where the training was held, and some of their communication through Voice over Internet Protocol have addresses that have been used by known ISI people before.?

The sources also clarified that contrary to media reports in India and Pakistan, the demarche which was handed over to the Pakistani side earlier this week did not contain the list of 20 most wanted terrorists that had first been given to Islamabad in 2000. Once the media started saying India was demanding the immediate handing over of the 20 fugitives, of course, the Government could hardly contradict these reports since their return has been a long-standing Indian demand, the sources added.

The demarche made only a pro forma reference to the return of unnamed fugitives but was otherwise exclusively focused on the Lashkar-e-Taiba and its leader Hafiz Saeed, whom New Delhi regards as the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror strikes.

The sources said that India did not believe the civilian government in Pakistan was involved in the incidents. Asked about the Pakistani Army chief?s potential role, they said it would be surprising if the ISI were able to operate without the military leadership?s knowledge.

Describing Pakistan as a country with a fragmented power structure, the sources said India?s response to what has happened in Mumbai could not be the same as in December 2001, when a terrorist attack on Parliament triggered the offensive deployment of troops on the border and the suspension or downgrading of transport and diplomatic links. ?Then, we were dealing with one Pakistan. There was Musharraf and that was it. Today, the situation is different.?

The Pakistani Army would very much like a military crisis on the border with India because that would relieve the pressures it was facing on the Afghan front. ?Our dilemma is that we don?t want to play their game ? we want them to continue being engaged in the fight against terrorism in the west because that?s also our war. But we can?t give them a pass either. The perpetrators have to be fixed.?

It was because of this complexity, the sources added, that India?s public response has been very limited.

The sources said that on September 24, the CIA provided further details in response to a request from the RAW. In this second warning, the U.S. agency expressly stated that the Lashkar was planning an attack on targets where large numbers of foreigners were present, including the Taj Mahal hotel.

Both warnings corroborate the testimony of the arrested Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist, Mohammad Ajmal Amir Iman. He told the Mumbai police that the original plan was to despatch the 10-man squad from Karachi to Mumbai on September 27. He also told the police interrogators that he did not know why the operation was deferred.

The warnings also corroborated the information generated by the Intelligence Bureau that suggested that the Lashkar had conducted reconnaissance operations in Mumbai.

A senior government official said the delay raised the possibility that the CIA had quietly exerted pressure on Pakistan?s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate to terminate the Lashkar operation.

In the alternative, he surmised, elements in the ISI may have leaked information that the CIA was monitoring the operation. ?No intelligence agency discloses all it knows even to allies. So it is probable the CIA knows more than it told us in September. We hope more information will be forthcoming,? the official said.
Phone call trail

India is also hoping for assistance in accessing electronic evidence on phone calls made and received by the terrorists during the attack ? which provided what one police described to The?Hindu as a ?running commentary? on the operation.

Forensic experts at the RAW have determined that the calls were routed through voice-over-internet service providers based in New Jersey and Vienna. VOIP services allow subscribers to create a virtual phone number, from which cheap international calls can be made and received.

According to a source within the investigation, tracing the calls to their final destination posed ?a formidable technical challenge.?

Mumbai police officials listening in to the conversation heard the terrorists inside the Taj Mahal hotel tell their controller that their operation had scored a ?bonus? with the killing of the ?Police Commissioner.?

The investigators believe that the terrorists inside the hotel had most likely seen television reports on the killing of Anti-Terrorism Squad chief and Joint Commissioner of Police Hemant Karkare.

As first reported in this newspaper, the terrorists used at least six mobile phones fitted with SIM cards purchased three weeks before the strike from Kolkata and New Delhi.

Kolkata police investigators have determined that three of the SIM cards used by the terrorists were part of a set of 10 Aircel and Vodaphone prepaid numbers purchased four weeks ago.

A city resident whose identification was used to buy the cards has been detained for questioning.

Delhi police officials also told The?Hindu that efforts were on to discover who had purchased three other SIM cards.

This is a f'ing blow out. With 80% reported Chamblis is up by a third of a million votes. So, what's the take-away? The O/B team were so cluefull that they didn't risk their shadow in Georgia, so they didn't loose, just some local guy who came within a MoE in the general?

At 8:30pm with 35% reporting, Chamblis has 408,949, Martin has 248,262.
At 8:00pm with 13% reporting, Chamblis has 183,999, Martin has 91,945.
At 7:30pm with 2% reporting, Chamblis has 73,557, Martin has 34,705.

And how many times did "The Show" stop in Georgia in the last 30 days?

How many times has President-elect Barak Obama come to Georgia in the past four weeks? Is there really anything more important than having a filibuster-free Senate and a majority in the House? Isn't that where "change" comes from? Does the Transition Team really need micro-management? Are these weeks really better ones to be "down weeks" than the weeks following?

I can't find a good reason for the campaign to have sent 200 campaign staffers and volunteers, who can help with the execution of the GOTV, but not have sent the face, the orater, the head of the Party, the President-Elect, to bring out the base, the ne plus ultra of any run-off.

Are 60 Dems "too many" and 59 Dems "just right"?

We've a year to get a new global climate-change treaty ? one that picks up where Kyoto leaves off ? and that year begins today, in Poznan, Poland, with talks for the next 12 days. How much to cut GHG and who pays.

I came across Ardeshir Cowasjee oped piece in Dawn a few days ago, the part of the paper not eaten by the Mumbai mass-murder suicide operation by a Lashkar-e-Taiba group, In self-destruct mode? He draws the link from Pakistan (and India's) increase in coal use, to China, and the cost of coal-fired energy.

Some weeks ago, Sepa held an EIA public hearing for two allied projects at Sonda-Jherruck in Thatta district, some 160 km from Karachi: a coal (dirty/poor quality) mine with a production of 1.8 million tons per annum, and a 405 MW mine-mouth steam power plant to be established by a Chinese firm, Global Energy Development (Pvt) Ltd, a subsidiary of China National Machinery Import & Export Corporation (CMC).

Coal is a dirty fuel and is used extensively in China with terrible environmental consequences. For example, Linfen, in the heart of China?s coal/industrial belt, is one of the most polluted places on earth. The World Bank situates 16 out of 20 of the world?s worst polluted cities in China. Worldwide, the extraction and combustion of coal has severe health and environmental impacts. In the United States, 47 workers were killed in coal mine accidents in 2006, while China?s State Work Safety Supervision Administration reported a staggering 4,746 deaths. Pollution emitted by coal-burning power plants and factories affects the health of millions of people. A recent World Bank study identified coal combustion as China?s largest source of outdoor air pollution, to which it attributed 350,000 to 400,000 premature annual deaths.

Inadequate details were provided in the EIA reports, with the proponents promising to do whatever was necessary to mitigate any adverse affects of the mining (rehabilitation of land, acid mine drainage, control of dust and noise pollution, etc) or the power plant (control of oxides of sulphur SOx and nitrogen NOx, reduction of greenhouse gases CO2 and methane, decrease in fly-ash and particulates, etc). Also presented were features of a previous showcase project undertaken in Bangladesh, at Barapukuria.

President-elect Obama has recently pledged to reduce US greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by an additional 80 percent by 2050. Kick the can down the road and leave the leadership for the next president. Politics as usual, free of meaningful change. The Kyoto Protocol calls for emissions among industrial countries to fall an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, so whether the Bush/Cheney Regime or the Obama/Biden Administration is dictating US carbon policy, neither is meeting the goal set at Kyoto. This probably explains why there are no Cabinet positions which require Al Gore to make climate and energy policy consistent with the climate and energy policy of the outgoing Bush/Cheney Regime and its climate and energy policy continuation, the Obama/Biden Administration.

Not Transportation. Not Interior. Not Energy. Not even freaking Education.

via the Hindu

BJP general secretary Gopinath Munde today said that his party would not allow any official of the Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency to "step into Mumbai".

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had earlier asked the Pakistani authorities to send the ISI chief to India to aid the probe of Mumbai terror attacks.

"We do not agree to ISI chief or any other official of that agency coming to India for probe. We will not let anybody from ISI to step into Mumbai," the BJP leader said in a statement.

The statement said that ISI had hand not only in the 1993 Mumbai blasts but also in 90 per cent of the blasts across the country.

"Inviting ISI for probe is like handing over treasury keys to the thief," Munde said.

To Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil's resignation, Munde said that it was 'too late' and Patil should have quit after the Delhi blasts in September last.

The 'Vindhyagiri' (F42), a Leander class frigate, and helicopters from the Naval Air Station, Kunjali were involved in pursuit of the merchant vessel. The MV Alpha, a Vietnamese registered vessel in route to Panama, was intercepted, boarded and searched. The crew were questioned and the ship's papers checked and the vessel released.

There are elections in the very near future in India, and the BJP is doing media buys using the Mumbai mass-murder suicides to attack Congress for "surrendering to terror and accusing it of being "unable and unwilling to deal with terrorism." Basically, running the RNC playbook from the 2002 mid-term and the 2004 general. For its part Congress is toying with blaming "foreign interests", sacking Home Minister Shivraj V Patil and moving Minister P Chidambaram from Finance to Home. Just as the BJP forced Congress into a "unity" government after the 2001 attack on the Parliment, Congress may force the BJP into some "unity" arrangement to limit the use of the mass-murder suicides in electoral politics.

The Obama/Biden Transition Team have an opportunity, not to make "there's only one president at a time but you have our sympathies" calls, but to detail what went wrong with the US response to mass-murder suicides seven years ago, and what India should not do, which is what Bush/Cheney did do.

Juan Cole thought about this too overnight and has a post worth reading twice, India: Please Don't Go Down the Bush- Cheney Road.

There are really important issues here. What do American voters hope Indian voters will choose at the ballot box? It wasn't a non-issue for non-American voters what American voters did just four short weeks ago. What do American voters hope Pakistani voters chose? Yet another failed intra-dictator period of pathetic "democracy"? What do American voters hope Iranian voters will choose at the ballot box? Do American voters prefer bellicosity or cooperation? It shouldn't be too hard for the next President, the next Vice President, the next Secretary of State, to suggest trust and hope are better choices than anger and fear, and war is a genie that never goes willingly back into the bottle, and a million lives were lost because Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld exercised poor judgement as the elected leaders of a highly armed, temporarily failed, democracy, which we all hope to change.

"Pakistan will divert troops to its border with India and away from fighting militants on the Afghan frontier, if tensions erupt in the wake of the attacks on Mumbai, a senior Pakistani security official said on Saturday."

Yes. That's why. I've been trying to explain this and this quote just fell into my lap. via Dawn.

BBC (Urdu) has reported that the Pakistani cabinet meeting today has decided that no personnel from the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) will be sent to India "until solid proof of Pakistan's alleged involvement in the Mumbai attacks is provided".

The ISI are world famous as bad actors, and if their senior leaders aren't available for forensics, there will be doubt. From Afghanistan to Kashmir to Baluchistan, India and Pakistan have been fencing, and this just isn't good.

Vittorio de Filippis edited Libération for five months earlier this year, and Friday moring at 6:40am he was woken by a knock on his door.

It gets ugly fast. A petty defamation claim is the origin.

To read: Journal d'un avocat.

I've spent at least half my waking hours since mid-afternoon of the 17th, when the proposal to ban any but one of the Latin, Arabic-Indic, and Eastern Arabic-Indic digits in any DNS label was made to the IETF's IDNAbis WG, on Arabic Script and Arabic Script Typography.

I'd seen mixed Latin and Arabic-Indic in Cairo. I learned to read Arabic digits reading license plates which are (on plates only a few years old) dual texts. The "never ever" scope of the proposal seemed to misstate to my credulous peers (the definition of "internationalization expert" in most ASCII-centric computing corporations is the first Asian coder at hand) a couple of conflated issues.

Here's something anyone with bandwidth and an interest in literacy, anybody's literacy, should sit through. An Evening of Arabic Typography.

As one of my correspondents from Tehran noted after scores of frequently more difficult than necessary interactions on two overlapping lists:

There seems to be a divide in list between Arab and Persian view points on various matters which really has nothing to do with being Arab or Persian. The point is that all our Arab colleagues are governmental people (mostly coming from the regulatory body); they're used to ordering people around and telling the customers what they can register. In our case, being non-governmental, we have to serve the customers and are perhaps more sensitive to their needs.

As it that weren't enough fun, Google has an effort underway for Emoji (???), or "picture characters", the graphical versions of :-) and its friends, are widely used and especially popular among Japanese cell phone users.

Uses of Arabic Script, ranging from spray paint on junk cars to high-end arabic typography, and what characters we allow in domain names is non-trivial, and our choices are authority (excluding things like Emoji) and its non-adherents. Perhaps authority and its non-celebrants.

At least my eyes aren't bleeding. When I reviewed Siksika (hi mom!), the Crees (note the plural, you don't want to know about the w-dot and dot-w boundary in Cree, let alone the Eastern Cree Syllabics -- Th-Cree, n-dialect, ... and Western Cree Syllabics -- Y-Cree boundary, which isn't in the same place), Carrier/Dené, and Inuktitut my eyes were definitely bleeding.