According to investigators and police, the heavily armed terrorists who set out for Mumbai by sea last week navigated with Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment,. They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Goolge Earth maps and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track. As reported by Emily Wax of Washington Post Foreign Service, terrorists spoke by satellite telephone. And as television channels broadcast live coverage of the young men carrying out the terrorist attack, TV sets were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the gunmen, eyewitnesses recalled.
This is terrorism in the digital age. Emerging details about the 60-hour siege of Mumbai suggest that the attackers had made sophisticated use of high technology in planning and carrying out the assault that killed at least 174 people and wounded more than 300. The flood of information about the attacks on TV, cellphones, the Internet seized the attention of a terrified city, but it also was exploited by the assailants to direct their fire and cover their origins.
“Both sides used technology. The terrorists would not have been able to carry out these attacks had it not been for technology. They were not sailors, but they were able to use sophisticated GPS navigation tools and detailed maps to sail from Karachi [in Pakistan] to Mumbai,” said G. Parthasarathy, an internal security expert at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “Our new reality of modern life is that the public also sent text messages to relatives trapped in hotels and used the Internet to try and fight back.”
During the attacks, an organization calling itself Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility in an e-mail to news outlets that was traced to a computer server in Moscow, said Praveen Swami, a terrorism expert and media commentator. The message, it was later discovered, originated in Lahore, Pakistan. Investigators have said the e-mail was produced using Urdu-language voice-recognition software to ‘anonymatize’ regional spellings and accents so police would be unable to identify their ethnic or geographic origins.
When the gunmen communicated with their leaders, they used satellite telephones and called voice-over-Internet-protocol phone numbers, making them harder to trace, Swami said. Then, once on the scene, they snatched cellphones from hostages and used those to stay in contact with one another.
At every point, Swami said, the gunmen used technology to gain a tactical advantage. "This was technologically a pretty sophisticated group. They navigated their way to Mumbai using a state-of-the-art GPS system. Most of their rehearsals to familiarize themselves with Mumbai were done on high-resolution satellite maps, so they would have a good feel for the city’s streets and buildings where they were going,” Swami said, adding that the CDs containing maps and videos were found in some of the hotel rooms the gunmen had occupied during the siege.
The lone captured gunman, Azam Amir Kasab, told police that he was shown video footage of the targets and the satellite images before the attacks, said Deven Bharti, a Deputy Commissioner in the Crime Branch of the Mumbai Police.
Mumbai Police Chief Hassan Gafoor, offering the first official details of how the siege was conducted, said at a news conference on Tuesday: “Technology is advancing every day. We try to keep pace with it.”
But several Indian analysts pointed out that the country’s police are still equipped with World War-II-era rifles, lagging behind the technology curve when it comes to cyber-criminals and Internet-savvy gunmen. And although there are closed-circuit TVs in the luxury hotels, some office buildings, banks, airports and rail stations, they are not nearly as pervasive as in the United States. There has been criticism that, like metal detectors, many closed-circuit cameras don’t work or go unmonitored.
Security experts also say the attacks represented an alarm bell for India’s intelligence agencies, which in the past have complained that Google Earth images contained too much detail about military sites and other defense installations.
“Where in the rule book does it say that terrorists are not allowed to use technology that is readily available to almost anyone?" said Ajay Sahni, Executive Director of New Delhi’s Institute for Conflict Management. "The only people out of the loop seem to be the Indian security forces. They are a generation behind in understanding the technology that the terrorists used.”
The security forces on the ground, including the country’s elite special forces unit popularly known as the Black Cats, had little access to night-vision goggles or thermal-imaging capability to help pinpoint where people were located in the two hotels under siege, he said. The elite 7,400-member National Security Guard, whose commandos arrived in Mumbai at least eight hours after the attackers struck to dislodge them from the hotels, does not have its own aircraft, Sahni said.
“When they finally got there, they had no floor layouts of the hotel, let alone high-tech devices,” he added.
Investigators and eyewitnesses have reported that the assailants had TVs on, tuned to live broadcasts of the assault, as the commandos prepared to storm the hotels.
When TV stations showed every twist and turn of the masked Black Cat Commandos sliding down ropes from helicopters to rooftops near a Jewish center called the Chabad House, the Mumbai Government shut down news channels, taking live coverage off the air for 45 minutes, fearing that the attackers were monitoring the screens, ruining the commandos’ crucial element of surprise.
Several TV stations, including the national news station Times Now, told their anchors to stop reporting on the positions of Commandos. “The fact is, there was a live encounter going on,” said Arnab Goswami, Chief Editor of Times Now. “If there was even a slight possibility that these terrorists could use television to get play-by-play news of the enemy, then we have to stand down. There should not be a scoop mentality when the nation is on the edge.”
When the coverage was cut, residents panicked. Goswami said, he received a thousand text messages within that period to get the news back on the air, forcing him to decide whether providing information to the public would jeopardize the lives of the security forces.
"I was immediately on the phone speaking to a lot of senior politicians in Delhi. The public needed it put back on. But we also had to be restrained,” Goswami said, adding that his station refused to show photographs of bodies being brought out at captured sites, which could have boosted the morale of the terrorists. He will participate in a summit of television stations Thursday to study their role in the crisis.
The Mumbai attacks also lit up the blogosphere and web sites such as YouTube and Twitter kept the data going without interruptions or blackouts. Some of the young backpackers living near the Chabad House, also known as Nariman House, said they used Twitter to send minute-by-minute updates of what was happening to relatives and friends. Across the globe, in Brooklyn, N.Y, some Hasidic Jews used Twitter to track the fate of a rabbi held hostage in the building.
For residents of Mumbai, TV coverage was riveting. Madhuri Raghuveer said her family could not get enough of it. “We practically felt like TV was our air. We couldn’t breathe without it,” she said. “But it also terrified us.” They watched the siege as a family. Raghuveer’s son, 6 and daughter, 9 were told to stay inside, where they tended to gravitate toward the images constantly flickering on the screen.
On Sunday, Raghuveer took them to see the Oberoi Trident hotel, site of one of the attacks, to show them the siege was over. Outside the hotel, the windows of a Jimmy Choo shoe store were pierced with bullet holes. But work crews had begun to tape up the cracked glass. “I wanted to show them that now everything is safe,” she said, pulling her pigtailed daughter to her side. “They have been sleeping in our bed since this happened. They said, “Mama, I can’t go to the bathroom without you. I am afraid.”
Days later, with news stations repeatedly replaying scenes from the attacks, her husband, who goes by the initials H.R., cut off the cable. He said it just got to be too much.
It will be relevant to mention here what Tom Gross has written for Wall Street Journal Europe). He wrote last week, everyone witnessed as clear a case of carefully planned mass terrorism as we are ever likely to see. The seven-venue atrocity was coordinated in a highly sophisticated way. The terrorists used BlackBerrys to stay in touch with each other during their three-and-half-day rampage, outwitting the authorities by monitoring international reaction to the attacks on British, Urdu and Arabic websites. They followed news updates and live TV streams, using them to their advantage so as to maximize causalities.
It was a meticulously organized operation aimed exclusively at civilian targets: two hospitals, a train station, two hotels, a leading tourist restaurant, and a Jewish center. There was nothing remotely random about it. This was no hostage standoff. The terrorists didn’t want to negotiate. They wanted to murder as many innocent people as they could, and in as spectacular a manner as possible. In the Jewish center, some of the female victims even appear to have been tortured before being killed. So why are so many prominent western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists? Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain’s most respected TV journalists, use the word "practitioners" when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors? Why did Britain’s highly regarded Channel-4 News state that the ‘militants’ showed a ‘wanton disregard for race or creed’ when exactly the opposite was true: Targets and victims were very carefully selected. Why did the ‘experts’ invited to discuss the Mumbai attacks in one show on the state-funded Radio France Internationale, the Voice of France around the world, harp on about Baruch Goldstein (who carried out the Hebron shootings in 1994), virtually the sole case of a Jewish terrorist in living memory? Unfortunately in recent years we have become used to leftist media burying their heads in the sand about the threat that Islamic fundamentalism poses, in much the same way as they once refused to report accurately on communist atrocities. But now even conservative media may be doing it too.
What is the motivation of journalists in trying to mangle language such as going out of their way to refer to terrorists as ‘militants,’ as one Mumbai story on yesterday’s Times of London Web site seemed to do? Do they somehow wish to express sympathy for these murderers, or perhaps make their crimes seem almost acceptable? How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can’t even identify them as such? But then the terrorists in Mumbai didn’t need to make any public announcements. They knew that many deluded western journalists and academics will do that job for them, explaining that the West is to blame, especially the Zionists.
We have started seeing this already on the BBC, the world’s largest TV and radio network, which broadcasts in dozens of different languages around the world and is lavishly funded by the British taxpayer. You would be hard pressed to find any talk of radical Islam on the BBC in recent days, or mention of the fact that Islamists think India should be a Muslim country. Instead the BBC continues to try to persuade its massive global audience that ‘it is a local Indian problem,’ that ‘the subcontinent has a history of unrest,’ and so on. Even the Pakistani angle has been presented as some kind of local Pakistan-India dispute rather than as a problem with radical Islam, this despite the fact that according to numerous reports the Mumbai terrorists themselves were screaming "Allah Akbar" (Allah is the Greatest) as they murdered "the Jews and the infidels" in line with bin Ladenist ideology. For some time, many have argued that an element of anti-Semitism has distorted the way the BBC covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But now, following the Mumbai events, we can perhaps see that anti-Semitism may even be at work in the way the BBC covers foreign news in general. For much of the Mumbai siege, the BBC went out of its way to avoid reporting that the Jewish community center was one of the seven targets. At one point viewers were told that ‘an office building’ had been targeted (referring to the Jewish center as such). Then on Friday morning, TV pictures of Indian commandos storming the besieged Jewish center were broadcast by networks around the world. Heavily armed commandos, their faces covered by balaclavas, rappelled from helicopters onto the roof while Indian sharpshooters in buildings opposite opened fire and a helicopter circled overhead. Huge crowds of onlookers could be seen looking aghast as they watched from nearby streets. While Sky News and other channels were gripped by these dramatic pictures, BBC World was not, almost pretending there was no siege at the Jewish center, even though by then it was one of only two sites that remained under attack in Mumbai. Had the terrorists chosen to besiege a church or mosque instead, can you imagine the BBC ignoring it this way? Meanwhile, perhaps even more disgracefully — a New York Times report on the last day of the siege stated: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene." Has the New York Times learned anything since the Holocaust, when, even after the war ended in the spring of 1945, the paper infamously refused to report that the Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans and so on killed in the camps had been Jews, and killed as Jews?
Dozens of eyewitness accounts by local Indians said the gunmen shouted “Allah Akbar” from the Jewish center. It is housed in a nondescript block and is not obviously marked from the outside as a Jewish center. It is the one Jewish building in a densely crowded city of millions. And the Times, the self-proclaimed paper of record, wants to let readers think it might have been an accidental target? Even the Times’s British equivalent, the Guardian, began its news story: "The inclusion of the headquarters of an ultra-orthodox Jewish group was obviously intended to send its own message." Does the New York Times think that the seeking out and murder by Muslim terrorists of the only New York rabbi in Mumbai and his wife was ‘an accidental target’? There was nothing accidental about any of the seven sites that the terrorists attacked. And it was no accident that Mumbai was hit. It is the most multireligious city in India, with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees and Jews living in relative harmony.