The U.S. warned India, perhaps even twice, about impending attacks on Mumbai from Pakistan, according to anonymous senior officials.

But what about Pakistan?  If the reports are correct, did U.S. intelligence warn the Pakistan government that terrorists were about to launch the Mumbai assault from its territory?

If not, why not?

And if so, what did Pakistan do about it?

That seems to be the most obvious element missing from the story so far, that terrorists launched their assault from Pakistan.

The effect of saying that India was warned in advance is to portray its security officials as incompetent, if not derelict. (Some have already resigned.) 

In other words, it tends to spread at least some of the blame for the attacks to Indian officials, at least temporarily, and away from the growing conclusion that Pakistan is to blame for the tragedy.

I have no reason to doubt that a "senior U.S. official" - probably Condoleezza Rice, en route to India -- told the Associated Press that the "Bush administration warned India before last week's brutal attacks in Mumbai that terrorists appeared to be plotting a mostly waterborne assault on its financial capital."

Other unnamed officials, including "a senior counterterrorism official" and Pakstani intelligence sources, chimed in along the same lines, adding details to the allegation that at least some of the terrorists came by sea.

Some news organizations had already found Pakistanis who said they saw suspicious looking men come ashore.

"Waterborne" can only mean from Karachi, the sprawling Pakistani port teeming with al Qaeda-linked terrorists and groups backing armed assaults on India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Were Pakistani security forces provided with the alleged U.S. warning as well, so they could hunt down the plotters?

Or did the U.S. withhold it, on grounds that Pakistani military, intelligence and security units, riddled with extremist Muslim spies, cannot be trusted?

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, aboard Air Force one with President Bush en route to North Carolina, declined to answer any questions about the affair.

"I'm not able to talk about any of our intelligence community -- any of their cooperation with any other country," she told reporters, according to the White House transcript.  "It would not be appropriate for me to do so, so I have to decline to comment on that."

Likewise, a CIA spokesman declined comment, saying the agency "does not, as a rule, publicly discuss exchanges with other intelligence services."

The National Intelligence Directorate did not immediately respond to e-mail inquiries.

A Pakistani spokesman said he would need more time to provide a definitive answer to the question.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, interviewed Tuesday by CNN's Larry King, said his government was "in no way responsible" for Mumbai.

"Even the White House and the American CIA have said that today," he asserted -- falsely -- according to an advance transcript.  "The state of Pakistan is of course not involved. We're part of the victims, Larry."

Zaradi also said he "would not know" if Lashkar-e-Toiba, the militant, Pakistan-based group fighting to end Indian dominance of Kashmir, was involved with the Mumbai suicide-massacre.
 

"If indeed they are involved, we would not know," he said.

"Again, they are people who operate outside the system. They operate like -- al Qaeda, for instance, is not state-oriented. They operate something on that mechanism, and we would love to -- I've already offered to India full cooperation on this incident, and we intend to do that."

Zadari also suggested no one found to be involved would be turned over to India.

"If we had the proof, we would try them in our courts, we would try them in our land and we would sentence them," he said.


(For more on this, see tonite's PBS show, WorldFocus.)

The Bush administration's plan for a quick resumption of relations with oil-rich Libya spent another day in limbo Thursday, idled by Muammar el-Qaddafi's failure to pony up the nearly $2 billion he still owes to the American victims of his terrorist plots in the 1980s.

The erratic dictator promised to pay the money in exchange for the resumption of full diplomatic relations in a deal negotiated last month with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Because of Qadaffi's failure to make deposit this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday refused to consider the nomination of State Department official Gene A. Cretz to be ambassador to Libya, the first U.S. envoy there since diplomatic relations were broken in 1980.

Italy's former spy chief, on trial for participating with the CIA in the abduction of a Muslim cleric, says he wants Condoleezza Rice to testify in the case.

Niccolo Pollari, former head of the Italian military intelligence service SISMI, and eight other Italians participated in the 2003 "extraordinary rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar, prosecutors allege. They say Pollari worked with U.S. agents to snatch Omar, whose real name is Hassan Mustafa Omar Nasr, off a Milan street and whisk him to Egypt for interrogation.

Pollari says he wants Rice, the current U.S. secretary of state and U.S. national security adviser in 2003, to testify for him as a defense witness, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Wednesday.

Despite all the warm fuzzies between Condoleezza Rice and Muammar el-Qaddafi in Tripoli  last week, there can be little optimism that Libya will make final payments to relatives of the hundreds of Americans killed in the PanAm 103 and LaBelle discotheque terrorist attacks anytime soon.

 

The Bush administration has said repeatedly that Libya's bizarre dictator must finish making promised payments to the families before normal relations can resume.

 

The Comprehensive Claims Settlement Agreement that Secretary of State Rice negotiated with the erstwhile rogue obligates Libya to put up $1 billion in compensation to the families in return for the normalization of relations with Washington.

 

But the agreement has no timetable or deadline. And none of the funds, which Libya originally promised to pay in 2003, have shown up.

 

There's little reason to be optimistic they will anytime soon. Qaddafi has a history of discarding his promises once he gets what he wants.

 

And now he's laughing about it.

 

After he renounced his nuclear weapons program in 2006 -- which a number of experts say was going nowhere anyway -- the Bush administration announced it was removing Libya from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Qaddafi promptly ditched a near-agreement with a lawyer for families of the LaBelle discotheque bombing for final payments.

 

When the State Department moved last summer to exempt Libya from suits filed by victims of its terrorist attacks, critics cried that the Bush administration was systematically removing incentives for Qaddafi to pay up.  

 

Meanwhile, even before Rice and Qaddafi were televised beaming at each other last week, the dictator's son, a powerful official in his own right, was denying any responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103, which was blasted out of the air over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1989, killing all 270 aboard, including 180 Americans.

 

Saif al-Islam Qaddafi said Libya had accepted responsibility for the attack -- but only to get international sanctions lifted.

 

"It doesn't mean that we did it, in fact," he told the BBC in a little-noted program broadcast Aug. 31, calling the victims' families "very greedy" for pursuing their claims.

 

"They were asking for more money and more money and more money," said Junior, who is expected to succeed his father on the throne someday.

 

Only months earlier Muammar Qaddafi himself had bragged publicly that he'd squeezed  as much money out of American oil companies for the rights to drill in Libya as he'd paid out in claims.

 

"We have paid off the compensations to the victims' families but the US oil companies, which wanted to enter our country had to pay such fees that they brought this money back to Libya," he said in a speech. "So, what we gave with the right hand was later taken with the left."

 

A State Department spokeswoman, Ann Somerset, told me Monday that the department remains "optimistic" that Qaddafi will pay up, emphasizing that the normalization of relations with Libya, with all its commercial and political benefits, will not go forward "until the entire amount" has been paid.