Haven’t we had this stupid debate like 9000 times already? Yes, terrorists do bad things. No, those mostly aren’t things the faith they are theoretically fighting in the name of condones.
The latter. They were probably Muslim if they were from Pakistan. But the lack of a video or news release (as usually follows or precedes such an attack) from a Mujahideen organization is particularly telling. There’s typically a list of demands, some social or political statement and so forth, such as demands for the release of prisoners in Guatanamo Bay or Israeli political prisons.
In cases where there is torture, there’s never this bad and it’s always towards an end (e.g. torturing a soldier to a point where he denounces his government). To what kind of political end would you sexually torture and mutilate young women?
Contrast this situation to the female soldiers who were taken captive in Iraq by Al Qaeda militants, tourists in the Egyptian/Syrian border or the tourists in South East Asia who were kidnapped by Muslim insurgents from the Philippines. Apart from hunger and malnutrition, nothing particularly gruesome happened to the tourists. Some of the tourists died in the initial attacks, but none of them were tortured, raped and mutilated.
What’s happened in Mumbai is the work of fucked up people.
You really should work for the NSA with those crackerjack investigative skills.
Also this seems relevant:
John Hinderaker doesn’t think that the terrorist attacks in Mumbai could happen here:
I wondered earlier today how a mere ten terrorists could bring a city of 19 million to a standstill. Here in the U.S., I don't think it would happen. I think we have armed security guards who know how to use their weapons, supplemented by an unknown number of private citizens who are armed and capable of returning fire. The Indian experience shows it is vitally important that this continue to be the case. This is a matter of culture as much as, or more than, a matter of laws.
If only those weak willed Indians weren’t further hampered by a culture of self-destructive liberalism, these attacks would never have occurred. In the end, can we really blame the terrorists who carried out the attacks? They were simply responding to the inherent weakness present in Indian society.
This is a really strange and immature coping mechanism that manifests on the right in times of high profile tragedy. Rather than contemplate being a victim of a terrorist attack, the subject imagines him or herself as the star of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. I’d say it’s simple racism, but it really is fear masquerading as bravado, a cultural chauvanism that directs itself at other Americans as readily as it does at foreigners. It is the “short skirt” theory of violence. If it happened, you must have been asking for it.
For example, right after the Virginia Tech shootings, conservatives fell all over themselves insisting that the killings were not the result of a very disturbed person but a “culture of passivity,” as Mark Steyn put it. Neil Boortz added of the victims, “It seems that standing in terror waiting for your turn to be executed was the right thing to do … Surrender – comply – adjust. The doctrine of the left.” But of course, a college campus, like the country of more than a billion Hinderaker reduces to a band of sniveling cowards, is an environment crippled by bed-wetting liberalism, and therefore not reflective of the Stallone-like nature of Real Americans. If only VT had gotten rid of those black literature courses. As for the Indian victims of the attacks in Mumbai, Brad at Sadly, No! surmises that it must be the chicken tikka masala. Get those Indians some steaks and they’ll toughen right up. Either that or they could hire some right-wing pundits to protect them. From what I read on the Internet, those guys seem really tough.
Way to jump to conclusions on what I’m saying, Jason.
I’m not blaming ‘liberalism’ (whatever that is) for the shootings. Mumbai didn’t ask for it, but the police force is in such a poor state (a well known fact) that an unpreventable situation was allowed to escalate to far worse heights than it could have, had they reacted in a better manner.
Response times were slow, and their equipment inadequate, and their training negligible. It’s the fault of corrupt politicians and statesmen who aren’t doing their jobs well that the police force has been allowed to decay into such a state, if it was ever good to begin with.
Imagine if the same poor police force had been assigned to handle 9/11. The casualties could have numbered in the tens of thousands because such a police force wouldn’t have been able to coordinate evacuation efforts or keep the fires from spreading to the other buildings. Would such a police force have even gone into the burning buildings to give up their lives in order to save others? I do not know the answer to that.
Why, that certainly didn’t stop you in your other posts here.
Meanwhile, the actual news from Bombay gets more and more chilling. This is how people died:
Restaurant workers there ushered guests closest to the kitchen inside. The assailants jumped in front of another group that tried to run out the door. “Stop,” they shouted in Hindi. They corralled 16 diners and led them up to the 20th floor. One man in the group dialed his wife in London and told her he’d been taken hostage but was OK. “Everybody drop your phones,” one of the assailants shouted, apparently overhearing. Phones clattered to the floor as the three women and 13 men dug through their purses and pockets and obeyed.
On the 20th floor, the gunmen shoved the group out of the stairwell. They lined up the 13 men and three women and lifted their weapons. “Why are you doing this to us?” a man called out. “We haven’t done anything to you.”
“Remember Babri Masjid?” one of the gunmen shouted, referring to a 16th-century mosque built by India’s first Mughal Muslim emperor and destroyed by Hindu radicals in 1992.
“Remember Godhra?” the second attacker asked, a reference to the town in the Indian state of Gujarat where religious rioting that evolved into an anti-Muslim pogrom began in 2002.
“We are Turkish. We are Muslim,” someone in the group screamed. One of the gunmen motioned for two Turks in the group to step aside.
Then they pointed their weapons at the rest and squeezed the triggers.
A few minutes later they walked upstairs to the terrace. Unbeknownst to the terrorists, four of the men were still alive; one of the survivors later provided the account of the shooting to The Wall Street Journal.
I like the cheeful expressions of the interrogators in these illustrations. Check the dude with the iron:
You can almost hear him humming the theme from Green Acres!
At about 9:45 p.m., two gunmen, slender and in their mid-20s, ran up the circular driveway at the entrance to the Trident. They shot the security guard and two bellhops. The hotel had metal detectors, but none of its security personnel carried weapons because of the difficulties in obtaining gun permits from the Indian government, according to the hotel company’s chairman, P.R.S. Oberoi. The gunmen raced through the marble-floored lobby, past the grand piano into the adjoining Verandah restaurant, firing at the guests and shattering the windows.
Whoa, what’s the point of having security?
Yep. Definitely not a Muslim act. Clearly communalism had nothing to do with it!
Number of heavily armed maniacal terrorists charging the hotel prior to 11/2008: 0
Number of drunk tourists trying to sodomize furniture in the hotel lobby prior to 11/2008: more than 0
I like how from that long article, the one thing you take away from it is “lol security”.
News sites are now reporting that all the attackers were indeed from Pakistan. India is calling for strong action from Pakistan.
This is becoming more and more of a routine. Countries asking for Pakistan to fix the problem going on there. I just don’t see an easy solution for any of this, at least not something that will ease the pain that many Indians are feeling.
Honestly and unironically, I blame the mongols for the whole mess.
Let me see if I can go over this again, because you really seem to be having a hard time with this:
They were trained.
They were not WELL-trained or “professional”.
Paintball and Rambo movies is probably a pretty good description. They knew to cover each other while they reloaded, but other than that, they fired long bursts from the hip.
Seriously, the I’d like to see the pro-gun folks address this post first. The solution to an incompetent police force is to arm a populace prone to sectarian violence with guns?
The theory behind some of that is that violence is not increased by gun ownership itself, but rather by an imbalance of gun ownership. That is, criminals owning many and law abiding people few, or one sect being unarmed in the face of a rival group that isn’t. I don’t think that’s an accurate approach to what is going on in India at the moment, but I also would be surprised if any Indian population groups were exceptionally unfit for gun ownership from the perspective of maintaining the peace.
I don’t think anyone sees it as an either/or with improving the quality of police forces. It is, however, one relatively inexpensive and effective measure that can be adopted by a restive populace in the face of a systemically bad police force. Also, I just wanted to clarify that while I do understand that Indian police have that reputation, I don’t think the quality of their police force is the major issue in the face of an incident like this one.
Its hard to know exactly the level of competence (or incompetence) of patrolmen on the ground. But it does appear that some of their higher-ups had some warning.
In Washington, U.S. officials would not directly address a report that American intelligence may have passed along warnings about an impending attack. Two senior officials with access to sensitive intelligence files would neither confirm nor deny the claim, though one pointed out that local Indian officials have acknowledged being told to take precautions hours before the attackers struck.
“If any information had been received, we would have certainly passed it on,” said a counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In a televised interview, the chairman of the chain that includes the Taj hotel said his company had increased security after being warned of a possible attack. But security officials in Maharashtra state said at a news conference in Mumbai that they had received no specific warnings.
From the latest news (link posted earlier):
The sole surviving attacker, Ajmal Qasab, told police that his group trained over about six months in camps operated by Lashkar in Pakistan, learning close-combat techniques, hostage-taking, handling of explosives, satellite navigation, and high-seas survival skills, according to two Indian security officials familiar with the investigation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the details.
Whether or not they acted well on the training, it certainly existed, and betrays an infrastructure that India is about to be quite insistent be dealt with.
Firing full clips from the hip may well have been intentional. It wasn’t done “action movie style” while on the move, but stationary vs. crowds of fleeing people. My guess is it was with the intent to fill as much air with metal as possible, in lieu of aiming. It’s not like they were particularly short of ammo.
I see the reasoning behind that theory, but it doesn’t seem like it would fit India that well. For one, the imbalance in arms will probably be greater due the class divide in areas (ie. hindus vs dalit christians in Orissa) And while the the threat of guns might discourage some mob violence, wouldn’t it increase casualties in the clashes that do happen?
You know this how? Besides that fact that the news that’s been trickling out from the surviving attacker over the past two days seems to indicate you’re wrong, the point I was making earlier is that they were very effective at what they set out to do. They were an extraordinarily aggressive group of men and there is no reason to believe they would have been stopped, or even “thwarted”, by more lax gun control laws in India. Well, no reason other than the typical fantasies of gun ownership nuts like yourself.
-Tom
Have you seen videos of Al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, or Jaish al-Muhammed “Close-quarters battle” training? As I said, while I’m sure they were trained, I’ve seen footage (smuggled out of the camps) of the sort of training they do. They are a joke. Go ahead and do a search on liveleak or wherever for a laugh.
Come on… You’d still hit more people by firing long bursts, stationary, and at least doing SOME aiming. There is no good argument for shooting from the hip being a good idea. There’s no real-world scenario where you’re going to get better results firing from the hip than from the shoulder, even when your intent is to spray bullets into a packed crowd.
As I said before, no they were not successful.
They set out to:
-Capture high-profile Westerners and Indian VIPs
-Blow up the hotel
-Kill at least 5,000 people, most of them hopefully westerners.
They:
-Failed to capture VIPs and important westerners
-Failed to blow up the hotel
-Killed several hundred people (less than 10% of their goal), most of them Indians.
You can’t even say they’re going to achieve some sort of long-term strategic goal from this. If it was Lashkar-e-Taiba or a related group, their long term goal is probably for India to relinquish control over the bits of Kashmir they currently hold. I seriously doubt it’ll have much effect one way or the other.