Who is Responsible for Mumbai?

The chaos in India's commercial capital of Mumbai continues, and although reports say police are making progress against the terrorists, it's not over after three days of violence. Reports of casualties fluctuate as more are discovered. And the looming question on the minds of people across the globe is who bears responsibility for this carnage. The answer to that question could create an entirely new area of instability that President-Elect Obama's soon to be unveiled national security team may have to deal with as a first priority.

Maybe it should come as no surprise that US media has been speculating throughout this horror that the attacks were somehow linked to al-Qaeda. After all, it's the terrorist group we're most familiar with. Plus, it's easy for an analyst sitting in a New York studio to take the fact of the complexity of the attacks and spin that into a series of questions about al-Qaeda's involvement. It's certainly true that militant groups inside India have never pulled off the series of coordinated attacks on hotels, the main railway station, and a Jewish center before. Yet does this mean the well equipped and armed young men who did this were acting on orders of Osama bin Laden?

Right now, the correct answer is nobody knows. The Indian government has begun pointing the finger of blame at Pakistan. Media reports have some of the gunmen arriving on a ship from Karachi. If this is true, or if most Indians believe it is, a new and potentially dangerous round of tensions between these two countries could follow. There have been six decades of conflict between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

One thing is for sure. No matter where these gun men come from or what cause they espouse, they were extremely well organized and well trained. That they held Americans and Britons hostage, and attacked a Jewish community center must make intelligence agencies in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv more than a little nervous. However, if there's one lesson to be learned by media from this conflict that isn't over yet, it is this.

Don't oversimplify.

Is Keeping Gates Wrong?

He's a yes man and a panderer, who backed Bush when it suited his purpose and will do the same with Obama. He's on the same page as Obama on a number of broad policy issues, and is the best person to maintain continuity. Yes, both the previous sentences are talking about the same man, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Make that the once and future defense secretary. Gates will stay on in his current job, confirming numbers of earlier reports that this was what Team Obama wanted.

It's not, however, what many of his supporters on the left wanted. Some feel betrayed, not just by this decision, but by the seeming "business as usual" look to the team working for the man who promised change. In Gates' case, they point to his slavish advocacy of the surge in Iraq as proof his agenda isn't the same as that of the new commander in chief. Gates, while certainly not the polarizing figure his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld was, needs to clarify his stance on things like torture, eavesdropping on innocent Americans, and the like.

When word first leaked that Gates would stay on, the conventional wisdom was that Obama wanted to maintain good relations with Gen. David Petraeus. Why Petraeus rates such consideration is a good question, but no matter. Gates doesn't need to be reconfirmed, and unless media reports are totally messed up (and they have been lately), this is Obama's choice. Quite frankly, I don't think it was his best choice.

If Obama wanted both change at the Pentagon and to show he'd pick a Republican for a powerful job in his cabinet, the choice should have been Chuck Hagel. Unlike Gates, Hagel is as vocal an opponent of the Iraq war as Obama himself is. His knowledge of issues pertaining to the military is widely respected. He also obviously isn't afraid to take a stand at odds with his own party.

Barack Obama has with this decision, as the British put it, "put a foot wrong". Keeping Robert Gates on sends the wrong signal to those millions of Americans who bought into his mantra of change and hope. One doesn't have to feel betrayed to call this a mistake. What do you think?

Profiling Nixed?

A federal judge here in New York City has issued a ruling that's sure to be a topic of discussion in law enforcement and civil liberties circles. The ruling said the government can't use ethnicity as justification for detaining two Arab men questioned for four hours following a cross country flight. The pair sued the government, alleging the detention was unjustified. The judge apparently agreed.

Black people have understood for years the injustice of racial profiling. The term "driving while black" has become a cruel joke, one that unfortunately is all too real. The ruling in this case, which involves a pair of Egyptian born men, centers on the government's contention that they acted strangely during the flight from San Diego to New York. Uncle Sam's undoing, however, was in asserting that the men's ethnicity was a factor in deciding to detain them, and that it was an acceptable factor.

As it turns out, one of the men held was a former New York City police officer, the other employed by GE in Egypt. At no time during their detention were they charged with any crime. Civil libertarians are hoping this means the beginning of the end of the ethnic profiling that began in the wake of 9-11.

I wouldn't count on it. Besides the possibility of an appeal, the fact is that law enforcement has shown an amazing elasticity when it comes to profiling. The fall back position will likely be a simple denial that ethnicity has anything to do with the decision to detain someone.

That leads, of course, to the preferred rationale for stopping someone, black or Arab. It's the famous "acting suspiciously". Whether in a car or on foot, it works for cops in black communities. My guess is they'll tell counterterrorism agents to drop any verbalizing of ethnic profiling, and simply say a detainee was speaking in Arabic, or changing seats, both of which raised red flags in the case of the two Egyptian men.

The fact is, most Americans don't have a problem with ethnic profiling. We've been lead to believe it keeps us all safer. I don't think so. What do you think?

Too Big to Fail?

America wakes Monday morning to the news that one of it's biggest banks, Citigroup, is to be bailed out by the federal government. It's almost as if Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chair Bernanke are operating a pinball machine. First, Uncle Sam was going to buy troubled assets from banks. Then they began putting money directly into these financial institutions. It seems neither strategy has helped Citigroup, whose stock has declined from $30 a share one year ago to $3.77 this past Friday.




It's said this financial behemoth is too big and too international to be allowed to die. Maybe so. Yet the government is guaranteeing about $306 billion dollars worth of toxic loans Citigroup put on its books. A legitimate question might be, how did that happen? After all, Citigroup always marketed itself as a pillar of the American banking system. As was the case with the first two bailout efforts, the taxpayers underpinning this government largesse will learn little or nothing about how all this came to be.

It's ironic in a way that Citigroup's headquarters is right here in New York. While a consensus has been reached that a bank is too big to be allowed to fail, our city's transit system has been calling for help. Those call have fallen on deaf ears. So while government can underwrite $306 billion dollars for a bank, when it comes to plugging a $1.2 billion dollar budget gap for New York's transit system, there's no money.

Well, not really. In this case, the money will be coming from the city's taxpayers in the form of a fare increase (maybe two). New Yorkers will also have to put up with more crowded trains due to decreased service, and severe cuts in bus service, in many cases to already underserved neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

I'm sure there are financial experts who can explain why a bank gets so much sympathy while transit users in the nation's largest city are left to fend for themselves. To me, it's inexplicable.

And unacceptable. What do you think?