You are ignoring reality Sandip Roy. Something I'm getting more and more used to when anyone writes an article on 'terrorism'. Leave aside the fact that the biggest terrorists in the world today are the United States of America, its secret service and the Pentagon and only consider your flawed conclusion that the attacks in Mumbai happened because of 'intelligence failures'. You seem to have no understanding at all of the nature of what we call terrorism and how and why it succeeds. No one and nothing can protect against a genuine terrorist attack. That is the nature of asymetrical warfare. 12 men with back packs full of dried fruit and lots and lots of bullets can get off some rubber speed boats and go on a killing spree. Is it possible to guard against it? No, it isn't. Even if you turn your country into an armed camp and a police state that will only make it less likely. It won't make it impossible. And the costs in terms of freedom and democracy make it a fool's bargain. But I can tell you one thing: when America is occupying two Muslim countries and has murdered a million Muslims in Iraq and driven another five million from their homes into destitution and suffering in countries where they live in terrible circumstances and their children can't go to school, terrorism of some kind, carried out somewhere is more or less guaranteed. In exactly the same way that the behaviour of Israel towards the Palestinians guarantees that suicide bombings and rocket attacks will continue.

Any mention of the Patriot Act should, in a rational world, lead to a discussion of the anthrax attacks, carried out by the Bush administration against its own people, which led to that disgraceful and disgusting act becoming law. Needless to say you don't mention this. To do so would be to face the unpalatable fact that the Bush administration has been a terrorist government, capable of attacking its own people in pursuit of an ultra right political agenda. Your discussion of the use of the 'other' should also have explored the Bush administration's use of the boogie man bin Laden and the boogie man Saddam Hussein - both armed and funded by the United States at one time or another. In some way you want to blame the Indians for these attacks in Mumbai because what these attacks have exposed is the complete and utter futility of the 'war on terror' - a war no one could ever possibly win. The war on terror is a mare's nest. It serves various purposes: to further enrich the arms industry, keep the brown people down, implement a far right political agenda, kill Muslims in the service of Israel and to divide people against each other to weaken resistance to the new world order. What it doesn't do is contribute anything at all to the progress of human society in any part of the world. I don't see any mention of this fact in your article. It would have been good too if you had quoted the person who said that George W. Bush as President has been 'a blind man in a room full of deaf people'. There's your problem. If you want to solve terrorism solve that; and it might help if America gets its troops and bases out of Muslim countries and all the other numerous countries where it has military bases and stops sending drones and missiles into Pakistan. Just for starters. Remember how Bush said Saddam had to be taken out because he was a 'threat to the peace of the world'? Well, I can only laugh very bitterly at that.

It's the REAL thing...

This was a thoughtful examination of what happened, and while others may be braying for a Patriot Act for India or keeping Gitmo open of all the stupidest things in the world, I hope that cooler heads will prevail. What happened after 9/11 in the U.S. was that people were driven out of their intellects by the so-called political leadership which neglected to mention to the public that there were intelligence failures, to say nothing of who trained Bin Laden and the Mujadeen on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

And this is not justifying or excuses the senseless massacre that occured. Not at all. It's just pointing out the limits of hysteria as a response.

"Each one of these guys AND their promotors should be renditioned to Gitmo and the waterboarded 8 times a day. At the end of 5 years they should be castrated while conscious."

And this time, it needs to be done on network TV. If PBS were to carry it, I would even start contributing to Public Television.

Murderous insanities and terror calamities should always beget TV torture dungeons to amp up the inhumanities...

"Instead these motherfuckers chose to gun down hundreds of innocents with absolute no regard to who they killed or not."

Yes. That's the part that truly galls. These people were nihilists. Or they were brainwashed into thinking these attacks were a way to stand up to Colonialism, Imperialism, Consumerism ... whatever.

Sure, they got some rich "fat cats" shelling out insane amounts of money to stay at a grossly overpriced fantasy hotel. But, they also killed dozens of "regular" Indians (and non-Indians) who happened to be standing in the way. That's the trouble with idealistic revenge fantasies and machine guns. It's hard to not become a complete parody of yourself.

The "why" is pretty easy to answer: to scare people, to hurt people, and to get on TV.

So, the questions should be: who pulled the puppet strings? Who financed the mules? Who bought the weapons, and the knock-off Versace?

Dear advocates of violent retaliation against any and all Muslims: Congratulations. You're doing exactly what the terrorists want you to do.

The architects of the attacks want to topple the current government and put in one more hateful, more violent, more repressive to the Muslim minority. Why? Because the more the Indian Muslims are repressed -- the less chance they have to be treated and viewed as equal partners in Indian life -- then the more likely they will be to rise up against the Hindu majority, and the more likely they will be to become radicalized.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's Osama bin Laden's strategy, as described by Doug Muder (writing as "Pericles" at the DailyKos.com website) in his famous essay "Terrorist Strategy 101: A Quiz". Muder explains that George W. Bush's massive and wrongheaded reaction to 9/11 made a lot of enemies for the US and a lot of allies for Bin Laden. Bush couldn't have helped Bin Laden any more if he'd actually been under his direct mental control.