Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update

Only one this time around, but it's a potential doozy. Apparently Tahawwur Hussain Rana will as part of his defense on a variety of terrorism-related charges accuse major elements of the Pakistani government of being directly involved in scouting missions he helped arrange, intelligence-gathering operations that led to 2008's Mumbai massacre. This not only brings an intensely ugly set of accusations to the surface once again -- and we're talking potentially mushroom cloud ugly here -- Rana's accusations would buttress claims made by one-time co-defendant David Coleman Headley in his testimony to intelligence officials after taking a plea. I'm not certain how this all squares with previous Rana claims buttressed by members of the community in which he worked as being completely unaware of any pernicious elements to the trips he helped arrange for Headley, or if it tries to line up with that public stance at all, really. My worry as always is that if these two men took seriously at any time their role in helping further destabilize the always-precarious relationship between India and Pakistan, taking them at their word now could meet those goals more effectively than a lifetime of urban scouting reports and vague plans to assault the Jyllands-Posten newspaper offices.
 
posted 10:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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