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The constitutional quandary arises from a clause that forbids members of the Senate from being appointed to civil office, such as the secretary of state, if the "emoluments," or salary and benefits, of the office were increased during the senator's term.
The second clause of Article 1, Section 6, of the Constitution reads, "No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office."
During Clinton's current term in the Senate, the salary for Cabinet officers was increased from $186,600 to $191,300. Since the salary is scheduled to again be raised in January 2009, not only Clinton but all sitting Senate members could be considered constitutionally ineligible to serve in Obama's Cabinet.
James Madison's notes on the debates that formed the Constitution explain the reason for the clause. Madison himself argued against "the evils" of corrupt governments where legislators created salaried positions – or increased the salary of positions – and then secured appointments to the cushy jobs they just created. Others agreed that such tactics were evident in Colonial and British government, and they wrote Article 1, Section 6 to prevent the practice.
Presidents in the past, however, have found a sometimes controversial way to skirt the clause and nonetheless fill their cabinet with constitutionally ineligible legislators.
In 1973, President Richard Nixon was able to appoint Sen. William B. Saxbe as his attorney general, despite the fact Saxbe was part of a Senate that nearly doubled Cabinet pay in 1969. Nixon convinced Congress to reduce Saxbe's pay as attorney general to its pre-1969 levels.
The sidestep, since known as the "Saxbe fix," was also used by President Taft in 1909, President Carter and President George H. W. Bush, who actually implemented the fix to enable Sen. Lloyd Bentsen to serve as treasury secretary for President Clinton's incoming administration.
The so-called "fix," however, has been criticized as perhaps honoring the spirit of the law but violating a clearly written statute of the Constitution.
In the 1973 case, the Washington Post reports, 10 senators, all Democrats, voted against Saxbe's appointment on constitutional grounds. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., the only one of them who remains in the Senate, said at the time that the Constitution was explicit, and "we should not delude the American people into thinking a way can be found around the constitutional obstacle."
"The content of the rule here is broader than its purpose," Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, a constitutional law expert at St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, told MSNBC. "And the rule is the rule; the purpose is not the rule."
"A 'fix' can rescind the salary," Paulsen added, "but it cannot repeal historical events. The emoluments of the office had been increased. The rule specified in the text still controls."
And at least one administration, that of President Ronald Reagan, chose to avoid the controversy of the Saxbe fix by striking Sen. Orrin Hatch from a short list of potential Supreme Court nominees because of Hatch's ineligibility under Article 1, Section 6.
While questions remain about the constitutionality of the Saxbe fix in Clinton's case, some bloggers – such as Professor Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law and Jack M. Balkin, professor of constitutional law at Yale – have pointed out that during her term of office, Clinton did not actually vote on an increase of Cabinet salaries. A 2008 executive order from President Bush created the increase, based on cost of living adjustments, leading some to argue that appointing Clinton doesn't violate the spirit of the law in Article 1, Section 6.
Andrew Malcolm, whose blog is featured by the Los Angeles Times, however, believes the Constitution needs to be strictly followed.
"We're not lawyers. But we do speak English," Malcolm writes. "And to our eyes that constitutional clause doesn't say anything about getting around the provision by reducing or not benefiting from the increase of said 'Emoluments.'"
Malcolm continues, "It flat-out prohibits taking the civil office if the pay has been increased during the would-be appointee's elected term. Period. Which it has."
The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.
The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.
There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.
But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response -- a nearly sevenfold increase in five years -- "would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable," Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the realization that civilian authorities may be overwhelmed in a catastrophe prompted "a fundamental change in military culture," he said.
The Pentagon's plan calls for three rapid-reaction forces to be ready for emergency response by September 2011. The first 4,700-person unit, built around an active-duty combat brigade based at Fort Stewart, Ga., was available as of Oct. 1, said Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command.
If funding continues, two additional teams will join nearly 80 smaller National Guard and reserve units made up of about 6,000 troops in supporting local and state officials nationwide. All would be trained to respond to a domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive attack, or CBRNE event, as the military calls it.
Military preparations for a domestic weapon-of-mass-destruction attack have been underway since at least 1996, when the Marine Corps activated a 350-member chemical and biological incident response force and later based it in Indian Head, Md., a Washington suburb. Such efforts accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, and at the time Iraq was invaded in 2003, a Pentagon joint task force drew on 3,000 civil support personnel across the United States.
In 2005, a new Pentagon homeland defense strategy emphasized "preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents." National security threats were not limited to adversaries who seek to grind down U.S. combat forces abroad, McHale said, but also include those who "want to inflict such brutality on our society that we give up the fight," such as by detonating a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city.
In late 2007, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed a directive approving more than $556 million over five years to set up the three response teams, known as CBRNE Consequence Management Response Forces. Planners assume an incident could lead to thousands of casualties, more than 1 million evacuees and contamination of as many as 3,000 square miles, about the scope of damage Hurricane Katrina caused in 2005.
Last month, McHale said, authorities agreed to begin a $1.8 million pilot project funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through which civilian authorities in five states could tap military planners to develop disaster response plans. Hawaii, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Washington and West Virginia will each focus on a particular threat -- pandemic flu, a terrorist attack, hurricane, earthquake and catastrophic chemical release, respectively -- speeding up federal and state emergency planning begun in 2003.
Last Monday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates ordered defense officials to review whether the military, Guard and reserves can respond adequately to domestic disasters.
Gates gave commanders 25 days to propose changes and cost estimates. He cited the work of a congressionally chartered commission, which concluded in January that the Guard and reserve forces are not ready and that they lack equipment and training.
Bert B. Tussing, director of homeland defense and security issues at the U.S. Army War College's Center for Strategic Leadership, said the new Pentagon approach "breaks the mold" by assigning an active-duty combat brigade to the Northern Command for the first time. Until now, the military required the command to rely on troops requested from other sources.
"This is a genuine recognition that this [job] isn't something that you want to have a pickup team responsible for," said Tussing, who has assessed the military's homeland security strategies.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Cato Institute are troubled by what they consider an expansion of executive authority.
Domestic emergency deployment may be "just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority," or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU's National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of "a creeping militarization" of homeland security.
"There's a notion that whenever there's an important problem, that the thing to do is to call in the boys in green," Healy said, "and that's at odds with our long-standing tradition of being wary of the use of standing armies to keep the peace."
McHale stressed that the response units will be subject to the act, that only 8 percent of their personnel will be responsible for security and that their duties will be to protect the force, not other law enforcement. For decades, the military has assigned larger units to respond to civil disturbances, such as during the Los Angeles riot in 1992.
U.S. forces are already under heavy strain, however. The first reaction force is built around the Army's 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, which returned in April after 15 months in Iraq. The team includes operations, aviation and medical task forces that are to be ready to deploy at home or overseas within 48 hours, with units specializing in chemical decontamination, bomb disposal, emergency care and logistics.
The one-year domestic mission, however, does not replace the brigade's next scheduled combat deployment in 2010. The brigade may get additional time in the United States to rest and regroup, compared with other combat units, but it may also face more training and operational requirements depending on its homeland security assignments.
Renuart said the Pentagon is accounting for the strain of fighting two wars, and the need for troops to spend time with their families. "We want to make sure the parameters are right for Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. The 1st Brigade's soldiers "will have some very aggressive training, but will also be home for much of that."
Although some Pentagon leaders initially expected to build the next two response units around combat teams, they are likely to be drawn mainly from reserves and the National Guard, such as the 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade from South Carolina, which returned in May after more than a year in Afghanistan.
Now that Pentagon strategy gives new priority to homeland security and calls for heavier reliance on the Guard and reserves, McHale said, Washington has to figure out how to pay for it.
"It's one thing to decide upon a course of action, and it's something else to make it happen," he said. "It's time to put our money where our mouth is."
from MailOnline.com
A banned Islamic terrorist group funded with cash raised in British mosques is believed to be behind the Mumbai attacks.
Kashmiri separatists Lashkar-e-Taiba, ‘The Army of the Righteous’, which has strong links to Al Qaeda, is accused of previous terrorist outrages in India.
And intercepted telephone and radio communications before and during the latest attacks apparently suggest a link.
Indian officials say at least one of the gunmen captured after the attacks is part of a Lashkar network.
The group last week denied any responsibility and the unknown group Deccan Mujahideen said it was behind the atrocity.
But earlier this year another group, the Indian Mujahideen, which has links to Lashkar-e-Taiba, sent an email to Indian police warning it was planning an attack in Mumbai.
The message read: ‘We are keeping a close eye on you and just waiting for the right time to execute your bloodshed...Let the Indian Mujahideen warn all the people of Mumbai...You are already on our hit list and this time very, very seriously.’
Lashkar-e-Taiba has been blamed for violence throughout India, including the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi and a strike at an amusement park in Hyderabad in 2007.
It is accused of being behind a series of train bombings in Mumbai in 2006, which claimed almost 200 lives.
While we remain almost totally immersed in domestic concerns, others are busy monitoring major trends that are rapidly reconfiguring the world as we know it. Among the global futurists is the United States (US) National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates analysis from all US intelligence agencies. The Guardian newspaper in Britain devoted its page one lead story and another couple of pages on November 21 to the latest four-yearly report of the NIC, 'Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World'.
This is something one is not likely to see in Jamaican media, although The Gleaner must be commended for carrying excerpts of the Chinese policy for Latin America and the Caribbean. The full NIC report can be found at www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html
"We prepared Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World," the NIC said, "to stimulate strategic thinking about the future by identifying key trends, the factors that drive them, where they seem to be headed, and how they might interact. (The report) uses scenarios to illustrate some of the many ways in which the drivers examined in the study (e.g., globalisation, demography, the rise of new powers, the decay of international institutions, climate change, and the geopolitics of energy) may interact to generate challenges and opportunities for future decision-makers. The study as a whole is more a description of the factors likely to shape events than a prediction of what will actually happen."
And what do they see? Drawing from The Guardian summary, the widely consultative report is warning that the world is entering an unstable and unpredictable period in which the advance of Western-style democracy cannot be taken for granted and the US will no longer be able to 'call the shots' alone as its power begins to wane. This view is not, of course, beyond challenge. The 2004 report for 2020 had confidently predicted continued US dominance, with most major powers forsaking the idea of balancing the US.
broken global financial system
The NIC is now seeing emerging big economies, such as China, India and Brazil, growing in influence, and doing so at America's expense. These countries, and others of 'influence', were participants in the G20 meeting in Washington two weekends ago, which was called by the US to fix the broken global financial system.
The European Union (EU) will be "losing clout", the report is predicting, and a 'democracy gap' separating Brussels from voters will help to make the EU a "hobbled giant" unable to translate its economic power into global influence.
"China," the report predicts, "is poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country," with the second-biggest economy, as the largest importer of natural resources and the biggest polluter, and as a leading military power having vast capacity for cyber warfare.
The world of 2025, a mere 17 years away, through the visioning eyes of the NIC, will be a fragmented world in which conflicts over scarce resources are on the rise and poorly contained by "ramshackle" international institutions, while nuclear proliferation, parti-cularly in the Middle East, and even nuclear conflict, grow more likely. But these, in my view, are precisely the conditions in which a world hungry for peace and safety above everything else will be desperately hunting for a superleader and a superstate. Global Obamamania is a sign of things to come.
The report, from its strong American angle of vision, is warning that the spread of Western democratic capitalism cannot be taken for gran-ted as it was by President George Bush and America's neo-conservatives. "The Western model of economic liberalism, democracy and secularism which many assumed to be inevitable, may lose its lustre - at least in the medium term." But, it is not just a failure of expansion of Western liberal democracy and capitalism that the world is now facing; it is its contraction - everywhere.
capitalist economies
The current financial crisis has seen a sudden and massive expansion of state intervention in and ownership of the commanding heights of capitalist economies and deepening public distrust of capitalism. And the world has been looking to America for leadership out of the crisis. So much for the decline of American power! "Today," the report says, "wealth is concentrating more under state control. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the state's role in the economy may be gaining more appeal in the world."
The earlier and ongoing 'War on Terrorism', plus fighting increasing internal lawlessness, had seen a progressive constriction of civil liberties in Western democracies. The citizens of Britain, for example, the home of modern parliamentary democracy and a liberty leader, are now the most watched in the world. Closed-circuit television is everywhere, a situation unmatched by any of the few remaining totalitarian states, and all in the interest of security and public order.
Of particular interest to Jamaica, the NIC report is predicting more failed and lawless states, like Somalia, by 2025. There will be a shift in some places from the state to non-state actors, such as corporations, tribes, religious groups and criminal gangs. "Several countries could even be taken over and run by criminal networks. While the eyes of the NIC are focused on 'backward' Africa and South Asia for this kind of meltdown of the state, they may be reminded that the disintegration of the state has played out in recent times in the Balkans in Europe and America itself, and much of the rest of Europe is facing 'fragmentation' into conflicting factions of various sorts. The solution will be more and more draconian anti-liberty measures for cohesion and order."
The world of 2025, just around the corner, will see conflicts over scarce resources, from oil to water. Scarcity of land, water, oil, food and 'airspace' for carbon emissions, with a global population of eight billion, will be the hallmarks of the times.
multi-polar world
The NIC's 2025 report fails to reconcile its predictions of weak international institutions like the United Nations being unable to handle the mega-problems of the planet and the declining power of the US, with a multi-polar world emerging. Where is that going to come from? "While the NIC's conclusions are in accord with President-elect Obama's stated preference for multilateralism," The Guardian says, "they suggest that it could become harder for Washington to put together 'coalitions of the willing' to pursue its agenda."
A far likelier scenario for 2025 is that the USA and the EU, with their shared histories, culture, ideo-logy - and old religions - and their new problems in a decaying and chaotic world, will form a North Atlantic axis of power aimed at driving a new world order whose primary goals will be peace and order.
from The Wall Street Journal
MUMBAI -- As waiters started setting dinner buffets in Mumbai's luxurious hotels, the killings that would ravage this Indian metropolis began out of sight, in the muddy waters of the Arabian Sea.
In the dusk hours of Wednesday, fisherman Chandrakant Tare was sailing his boat about 100 yards from a fishing trawler when he spotted young men killing a sailor on board. He says he saw them toss the body into the engine room. Assuming he had stumbled upon pirates, Mr. Tare says, he sped away.
Hours later, at least 10 terrorists, having arrived by small craft on the shores of Mumbai, began to sow death and destruction at will across India's financial capital.
AFTERMATH: Cafe Leopold was the first scene of trouble.
Pieced together from interviews with dozens of witnesses and officials, this account of the three days of the battle for Mumbai shows just how a small but ruthless group of skilled militants, attacking multiple targets in quick succession, managed to bring one of the world's largest cities to its knees. The human toll -- currently at 174 fatalities, including nine terrorists -- was exacerbated by the Indian authorities' lack of preparedness for such a major attack. But the chain of events also points to just how vulnerable any major city can be to this type of urban warfare.
Authorities are still questioning the one captured terrorist, a 21-year-old Pakistani named Ajmal Qasab, who they say has confessed to training with outlawed Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. The investigation remains in its very early stages, and the identities of the killed militants remain unclear.
Around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, one dinghy with half a dozen young men landed at a trash-strewn fishing harbor near the southern tip of the Mumbai peninsula, witnesses say; a second arrived nearby shortly after. Mostly in their early- to mid-20s, the men came ashore wearing dark clothes and hauling heavy bags and backpacks, according to fisherman Ajay Mestry, who saw one of the landings. The group he saw split up and raced toward the shimmering city.
Arriving by boat, a small team of terrorists spread out across Mumbai, instilling terror in India's largest city for three days.
When one young man with a bulging bag jogged up from the beach, Anita Rajendra Udayaar, the keeper of a roadside stall full of recycled plastic bottles, asked where he was heading. "Mind your own business!" he shouted back, she recalls.
Mumbai's attention that night was focused on one of the country's favorite sports: cricket. India was playing against England, and beating its old colonial master. In the open-air Cafe Leopold, a popular people-watching spot near the landing site, customers -- many of them foreign backpackers -- were watching the match.
At about 9:30 p.m., two gunmen with assault rifles appeared on the sidewalk, witnesses said. One stood at the entrance, the second to his left. Then they started firing.
Minutes later, they walked away, leaving more than a dozen casualties behind amid upturned, bloodied tables.
A shopkeeper near the Chabad House, a Jewish center attacked by the militants, cleans up.
At about the same time, two other gunmen arrived at a Bharat Petroleum gas station at the corner of a small alley that leads to Chabad House, also known as Nariman House, the local headquarters of the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish movement.
With its small, faded sign, the five-story Chabad House -- which served as a guesthouse and source of kosher food for the many Israeli backpackers who travel through India -- is so hard to find that most visitors ask for directions at the gas station. But the militants knew their way, a station attendant says: Without stopping, they threw a hand grenade into the gas station, and walked into the alley.
Alarmed by the explosion, Chabad House's rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, called the Israeli consulate. The two gunmen burst into his building, taking a number of Israelis, a young Mexican Jewish woman, and the rabbi and his family hostage. It appears that they quickly shot dead one of the guests, an Israeli kosher ritual inspector, whose body would be found badly decomposed at the end of the siege.
The explosion and gunfire attracted the attention of neighbors. Some young men started throwing stones toward the building. Manush Goheil, a 25-year-old tailor, stepped outside the family's shop to get a better view. His brother Harish watched from the shop as a gunman shot him dead with a well-aimed bullet fired from the Chabad House's top floor.
Inside the center, terrorists executed hostages.
Around the same time about one mile north at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai's monumental colonial-era train station, two gunmen in dark T-shirts and hauling heavy backpacks walked down Platform 13, which opens into a large hall fringed by Re-Fresh Food Plaza, a fast-food outlet.
Throwing a hand grenade into the crowd of travelers, they unloaded volleys of gunfire. Bullets flew through the window where the station's manager, D.P. Chaudhari, observed the hall; he ducked down and survived. A colleague, S.K. Sharma, was cut down as he crossed the concourse. One bullet lodged in the stomach of Re-Fresh Plaza manager Mukesh Aggarwal. The gunmen peppered a bookstand at the back of the hall with bullets, shattering the glass next to a copy of "Complete Wellbeing" magazine, according to vendor Sarman Lal, who quivered on the floor saying his last prayers.
The two gunmen moved along two separate paths toward the station's main entrance, firing as they walked. They met virtually no resistance, even though several dozen police officers are usually deployed at the station. "They were killing the public, and the police just ran away," says Ram Vir, a coffee vendor whose stand is near Platform 8.
B.S. Sidhu, head of the Railway Protection Force for the Mumbai region, says that while some officers tried to fight back, there was little his force could do. Most police officers at the station -- as they are throughout India -- were unarmed or carried only bamboo sticks known as lathis. More than 40 people, including three police officers, were killed in just a few minutes, authorities said. The wounded survivors screamed for help amid acrid smoke, piles of slumped, bloodied bodies and spilling suitcases.
By then, shooting had begun in two other spots: Mumbai's most luxurious hotels, symbols of the city's prosperity that were packed with tourists, visiting executives, and the local elite out for dinner. The historic Taj Mahal Palace & Tower and a complex housing both the Oberoi and Trident hotels rise high above the sea on opposite sides of the southern tip of Mumbai.
At about 9:45 p.m., two gunmen, slender and in their mid-20s, ran up the circular driveway at the entrance to the Trident. They shot the security guard and two bellhops. The hotel had metal detectors, but none of its security personnel carried weapons because of the difficulties in obtaining gun permits from the Indian government, according to the hotel company's chairman, P.R.S. Oberoi. The gunmen raced through the marble-floored lobby, past the grand piano into the adjoining Verandah restaurant, firing at the guests and shattering the windows.
At the end of the lobby, they burst into a bar called the Opium Den, shooting dead a hotel staff member. Then they ran after a group of guests who tried to escape through a rear service area. They killed them, too.
The gunmen returned to the Verandah, climbed a staircase, dashed down a corridor lined with jewelry and clothes shops, and stopped in front of the glass doors of Tiffin Restaurant, a swanky restaurant with a sushi bar in the Oberoi hotel.
They killed four of six friends who live in south Mumbai and had just settled down at a table near the front door. One member of the group, a mother of two, threw herself to the ground and shut her eyes, pretending to be dead. The men circled the restaurant, firing at point blank range into anyone who moved before rushing upstairs to an Indian restaurant called Kandahar.
Restaurant workers there ushered guests closest to the kitchen inside. The assailants jumped in front of another group that tried to run out the door. "Stop," they shouted in Hindi. They corralled 16 diners and led them up to the 20th floor. One man in the group dialed his wife in London and told her he'd been taken hostage but was OK. "Everybody drop your phones," one of the assailants shouted, apparently overhearing. Phones clattered to the floor as the three women and 13 men dug through their purses and pockets and obeyed.
On the 20th floor, the gunmen shoved the group out of the stairwell. They lined up the 13 men and three women and lifted their weapons. "Why are you doing this to us?" a man called out. "We haven't done anything to you."
"Remember Babri Masjid?" one of the gunmen shouted, referring to a 16th-century mosque built by India's first Mughal Muslim emperor and destroyed by Hindu radicals in 1992.
"Remember Godhra?" the second attacker asked, a reference to the town in the Indian state of Gujarat where religious rioting that evolved into an anti-Muslim pogrom began in 2002.
Gunfire was reported at luxury hotels, a restaurant, police headquarters and a train station.
![[Mumbai attacks]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-CS908_mumb_D_20081126171710.jpg)
"We are Turkish. We are Muslim," someone in the group screamed. One of the gunmen motioned for two Turks in the group to step aside.
Then they pointed their weapons at the rest and squeezed the triggers.
A few minutes later they walked upstairs to the terrace. Unbeknownst to the terrorists, four of the men were still alive; one of the survivors later provided the account of the shooting to The Wall Street Journal.
At the vaunted Taj hotel across the peninsula, two terrorists arrived from their attack on Cafe Leopold by about 9:45 p.m., broke down a side door and entered the building, according to a police officer investigating the attacks.
Two others entered the hotel's modern lobby, opened fire and threw grenades. As guests dashed for cover, the two pairs united. They would keep Indian police and commandos at bay for another 60 hours as they rampaged through the building.
Uptown, the two gunmen who had attacked the train station -- recorded by the station's surveillance cameras -- reached the nearby Cama Hospital for women and children, authorities said, shooting dead two unarmed guards at the entrance and racing up the stairs. By then, news of the attacks had spread in the neighborhood. A number of policemen ran into the hospital as nurses herded expectant mothers into one room and locked themselves inside, a duty doctor says.
(88...
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44 .... The number in India is 
(0091) 1124192288.On the top floor, the terrorists and the police traded fire near a poster that reads "Mother's Milk is Best for Babies." The policemen were badly outgunned. The gunmen killed one officer and escaped down the stairs, into a narrow alley that separates Cama Hospital from another hospital called GT.
In the alley, the state of Maharashtra's antiterrorism chief, Hemant Karkare, sat in a police SUV packed with fellow officers, trying to coordinate a response to the mayhem engulfing the city. Creeping up, the two militants sprayed the vehicle with gunfire.
The officers appear to have died before any of them had a chance to fire back. The wall and metal blinds behind the van's spot are riddled with bullets. Not a single bullet mark could be seen by a reporter in the area from which the terrorists fired.
Dumping three of the officers' bodies on the ground and taking the others with them, the two militants jumped into the SUV and sped towards the Metro Big Cinemas multiplex. As they passed a crowd of journalists and onlookers, the SUV slowed down, a gun barrel emerged from the window, and bullets started to fly. Then, the vehicle sped on, with another police vehicle in hot pursuit. At one point, the gunmen ditched the SUV and hijacked a Skoda, police said, cruising through southern Mumbai -- possibly looking for an escape route. Two hours later, they ran into a large police roadblock erected on a key road leading out of south Mumbai, at Chowpatty Beach.
Skidding to a halt 30 feet away from the roadblock, the Skoda's driver blinded the police with high beams and, flipping wipers, began spraying fluid on the windshield so that officers couldn't see into the car, said sub-inspector Bhaskar Kadam, one of the officers manning the roadblock.
The three policemen armed with guns drew them. The nine others waved their bamboo sticks. Revving the engine, the car tried to U-turn but got stuck on the median. The man in the passenger seat rolled out and started shooting, killing one officer and wounding another. The surviving baton-wielding officers jumped on him, knocking him unconscious. Policemen with guns shot the driver dead.
This pair's killing spree was over. Police later identified the gunman taken alive as Mr. Qasab, from the Punjab region of Pakistan, who they say is providing details of the plot.
Back at the Taj Mahal Palace, staff members had been calling room after room, advising hundreds of guests to lock the doors, switch off all the lights, and hide, guests and staff said.
At about 11 p.m., K.R. Ramamoorthy, the 69-year-old nonexecutive chairman of ING Visya Bank, heard men in the corridor knock on his sixth-floor room, he says. "Room service," one of them called out in English.
Silence.
"Shoe polish," the same voice called out.
Mr. Ramamoorthy moved to the bathroom, accidentally banging the door. The two gunmen blasted the room door's lock open and entered. They tied Mr. Ramamoorthy's hands and feet, he says, using his long Indian top known as a kurta, and his pajama bottoms. Then they ordered him to kneel on the ground. "I'm 69 years old. I have high-blood pressure. Please let me go," he recalls begging.
"We'll leave you, we'll let you go," one of the men replied, he says. They turned him over so he lay face down on the floor.
Over the next hour or two, the two men spoke on their mobile phones in his room, seeming relaxed and happy, Mr. Ramamoorthy says. He couldn't tell much of what they said but made out the word "grenade" several times, he says. They ate some snacks from the minibar. Then, two more gunmen showed up in the room, dragging four other hostages -- all uniformed hotel staff.
"What are your names and occupations?" the men asked the five hostages.
"I am Ramamoorthy from Bangalore," Mr. Ramamoorthy says he replied.
"What is your work?" one of the assailants asked in Hindi.
"I am a teacher," he replied.
"No way can a teacher afford to stay here," shouted the gunman, he recalls. "You better tell us the truth."
"I work for a bank," Mr. Ramamoorthy admitted.
The assailants were distracted by calls on their mobile phones. Minutes later, pushing the five hostages in front of them, the gunmen descended the staircase to a fifth-floor room. They shoved the hostages inside, laid them face down on the floor, and left.
Mr. Ramamoorthy says he managed to free his hands and untied the others. By now, a fire possibly started by a grenade explosion was spreading through the sixth floor of the Taj hotel. As the choking smoke from the blazing fire enveloped the room, one of the four hotel staffers ripped off curtains and bedsheets, creating an improvised rope. The staffers used the rope to shimmy down the balcony outside to the third-floor ledge.
Certain he didn't have the physical strength to follow suit, Mr. Ramamoorthy backtracked and descended via the smoke-filled staircase to the third floor. Some time later, he noticed the glare of searchlights. He opened the window and waved and shouted. Firefighters saw him and lifted a ladder to the window. "You are safe," he says they told him. He looked at his watch. It was 6 a.m. Thursday.
As the fires set by the militants burned through the hotel during the night, the general manager, Karimbir Kang, was busy shepherding hotel residents like Mr. Ramamoorthy to safety. Mr. Kang didn't manage to rescue his own wife, Neeti, and two young children: They died in the blaze.
In the other hotel complex taken over by the militants, the Oberoi-Trident, gunmen returned to the 20th floor at around 6 a.m. Thursday. They pulled out their mobile phones and filmed the sprawled bodies of executed diners. The four injured men who survived the firing line there -- one squashed under two bodies -- were still playing dead, trying not to move.
"We'll booby-trap the bodies with bombs," one of the gunmen said into the phone. As soon as the two terrorists left, the four injured men crept out to a terrace and hid behind a cooling tower, says one of the men. For more than 24 hours, they didn't move from their hiding place, drinking small amounts of red liquid inside the cooling system to soothe their thirst, the man says.
Authorities had asked the Mumbai-based Marine Commandos to help at the Taj in the first hours after the takeover of the hotels. But the so-called MarCos struggled to figure out the entrances and exits in the hotel and found it hard to match the gunmen who moved with ease through the building and seemed to know the structure inside out. The gunmen also were accustomed to operating in darkness, a commander on the force said.
At 6.30 a.m. Thursday, commandos from India's National Security Guard finally arrived -- after they first waited for hours while authorities located a plane to pick them up at New Delhi, then waited for transportation from Mumbai's airport to the hotels under attack. The NSG commandos had proper equipment and training. They surrounded both the Taj and the Oberoi complex and a prolonged siege began.
The terrorists moved frequently through both buildings to confuse their pursuers and create the impression of greater numbers. Still, two of them found time on Thursday to call a local TV station to rant about India's mistreatment of Muslims.
As the fighting went on, new fires broke out at both the Taj and the Oberoi in the evening, sending plumes of smoke into the sky. "Every time the terrorists were in a corner and under stress...they set fire to the curtains," said J.K. Dutt, director general of the NSG.
By Friday morning, the NSG began to achieve real progress. At roughly 9 a.m. that day, Bill Bakshi heard a knock on his 19th-floor room in the annex section of the Taj. A diabetic who was running low on insulin, he peeked through the eyehole in hope of rescue and saw three uniformed men with assault rifles, he says. "They wouldn't say who they were," says Mr. Bakshi, a 63-year-old who owns a textile company. "They were scared, too -- they didn't know who was inside, either."
Mr. Bakshi opened the door. The next thing he knew, he says, he had three gun barrels thrust in his face. It took a couple minutes to convince the NSG men that he was not a terrorist, he says.
By late Friday morning, the NSG cleared out the annex section of the Taj, freeing hostages there. It also succeeded in storming the Oberoi, killing one gunman in a corridor and another in a bedroom. As they combed the hotel room by room, bringing out to safety the four injured men hiding behind the cooling system, the commandos found 32 other bodies inside.
At the Taj and the besieged Chabad House, the fighting continued. Two militants holed up inside the Jewish center had blown off the doors of the elevator on every floor, and used the shaft to hide whenever NSG commandos fired back.
It appears that they executed their hostages one by one as the commandos closed in. Two young women guests, their wrists tied with white plastic rope, lay on the same bed, bullet holes in their heads, according to a photograph taken later at the scene. The terrorists shot Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, who fell next to each other. As darkness fell, NSG commandos blasted a wall with explosives and finally penetrated the building. They killed the gunmen.
At the Taj, the battle raged into Friday night, with one of the gunmen opening fire from a window and shooting at the hundreds of journalists who gathered to cover the siege on the plaza outside. None were hit.
By Saturday morning, however, the commandos had taken over most of the building. They set a fire to smoke out three surviving terrorists, cornered in a restaurant called Wasabi, up a spiral staircase from the lobby. Two of the gunmen were shot dead. The third was hit with bullets as he tumbled backwards out of a window and onto the plaza outside. "After that," said Mr. Dutt, the NSG chief, "There was no more shooting."
—Niraj Sheth in Mumbai and Krishna Pokharel in New Delhi contributed to this article.Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com, Geeta Anand at geeta.anand@wsj.com, Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com and Matthew Rosenberg at matthew.rosenberg@wsj.com
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