President Barack Obama with Chinese President Hu Jintao

Fareed Zakaria | BIO
CNN Anchor

President Obama landed in South Korea Wednesday for the last stop on his 10-day trip to Asia. The president made earlier visits to China, Singapore and Japan, in his first Asian journey as president.

In Japan, he made reference to his birth in Hawaii and his childhood spent partly in Indonesia, calling himself "America's first Pacific president." But as the trip winds down, analysts are seeking to answer the question of what Obama accomplished.

Fareed Zakaria, author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria: GPS" spoke to CNN Tuesday about the president's trip and about a grim anniversary that's about to be marked in Asia. It's been one year since 10 Pakistani gunmen put India's commercial capital, Mumbai, through an ordeal of terror that killed 170 people. [Zakaria is the narrator of a documentary on the Mumbai attacks premiering on HBO on Friday.]

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The coordinated attacks on hotels, hospitals and railway stations in Mumbai killed more than 170 people.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

It’s been nearly one year since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. At least 170 people died in the attack and 300 people were wounded. It was one of the worst acts of violence on Indian soil in decades. Experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provided insight on the possible motivation of the terrorist, what the attacks revealed about India’s security and the implications for relations between India, Pakistan and the U.S.

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A trial for Osama bin Laden would be a media circus, says Paul Cruickshank, but would be good for the United States.

Paul Cruickshank
Special to CNN

The announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of the 9/11 attacks will soon be moved to New York to face trial in a federal court will be welcomed by some Americans as finally starting the process of bringing the perpetrators of these attacks to justice.

To date, not one person has been convicted for the attacks. But it also will be a reminder that their boss, the man most responsible for killing 3,000 civilians - the majority of them Americans but many from all around the world - is still at large.

President Obama has stated that it is vitally important for the country to put some of the controversial policies of the last eight years behind it. While the forthcoming trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several figures allegedly involved in plotting the 9/11 attacks in New York will be helpful, nothing would help more than if Osama bin Laden were captured, afforded full due process and put on trial.

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The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is 'perhaps the biggest challenge in the history of federal law enforcement'

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

The federal courts face an unprecedented challenge in trying accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo detainees for the terrorist attacks that took 3,000 lives, says CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

Mohammed, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and four other Guantanamo detainees are being transferred to New York to face trial in a civilian court for the September 11 attacks, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday.

They will face trial in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York - a short distance from the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed in the September 11 attacks. Holder said he expects the government to seek the death penalty in the cases.

Mohammed is the confessed organizer of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. But his confession could be called into question during trial. A 2005 Justice Department memo - released by the Obama administration - revealed he had been waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, a technique that President Obama has called torture.

CNN spoke with Toobin on Friday morning. A former assistant U.S. attorney, Toobin is a senior analyst for CNN and author of "The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court."

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Robert Lacey
Author

I chose these words to open my new book Inside the Kingdom, because I needed to understand the tragedy of 9/11 and the nation that produced no less than fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on those planes. Saudi Arabia has never been a spot that wins much favor in the west. How can you love a country that charges you $70 or more for a product that costs less than $10 to get out of the ground – and then gives you terrorists as well?

But I wanted to go beyond that – to find out how the culture and religion of a society could go so wrong as to produce such a poisonous boiling-over of intolerance and hatred. In theory Saudi Arabia should not exist – its survival defies the laws of logic and history. Look at its princely rulers, dressed in funny clothes, trusting in God rather than man, and running their government on principles that most of the world has abandoned with relief. Shops closed for prayer five times a day, executions in the street – and let us not even get started on the status of women. For many the Kingdom remains one of the planet’s enduring – and, for some, quite offensive – enigmas.

But in these notorious distinctions lies an answer that I would urge you to consider – for when you look harder, the differences are not quite as great as they seem. It was not so long ago in the west, certainly in the memory of our parents and grandparents, that women were second class citizens denied the right to vote; most respectable people were devout and rather intolerant believers, scared and suspicious of other races and faiths: capital punishment was considered a necessity – with public lynchings of non-whites in the south; books and plays were censored (our movies still are); people dressed in stiff and formal clothes – a sort of uniform; father knew best, and ‘nice’ girls remained virgins until marriage. For centuries western life was lived within the comfort of those structures and strictures, and it is only in the last 90 years (one modern lifetime) that we have started to look for new values – which we sometimes seek to define by criticizing those who are reluctant to abandon the security of what went before.

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Militant attacks, such as this one in Islamabad on Monday, are turning the Pakistani population against jihadists.

Peter Bergen
CNN

It hasn't been too often in the past couple of years that you could write about good news from Pakistan. But if there is a silver lining to the atrocities that have plagued the country in the past several years, it is the fact that the Pakistani public, government and military are increasingly seeing the jihadist militants on their territory in a hostile light.

The Taliban's assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the country's most popular politician; al Qaeda's bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad; the attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore; the widely circulated video images of the Taliban flogging a 17-year-old girl; and multiple large-scale attacks on Pakistani police and army installations by the Taliban have provoked real revulsion among the Pakistani public.

In fact, historians will likely record the Taliban's decision to move earlier this year from Pakistan's Swat Valley into Buner District, only 60 miles from Islamabad, as the tipping point that finally galvanized Pakistan to confront the fact that the jihadist monster it had helped to spawn was now trying to swallow its creator.

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Saudi Arabia's Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, head of counterterrorism, was slightly injured in August.

Arsalan Iftikhar
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

In the most recently ‘absurd’ story on terrorism that I have heard in quite a long time, the would-be assassin of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (head of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts) apparently decided to hide his bomb in his underwear, apparently believing that cultural taboos would prevent a search in that part of his body, according to a Saudi government official close to the investigation.

According to CNN, the prince was slightly injured when the bomb exploded in the August 2009 attack a few months ago. Several news reports this week have said that the assailant had hidden the bomb inside of his own RECTUM, but according to the Saudi official, the government assessment discounted those reports, based on various factors.

Even so…Are you serious?

Terrorists are now literally sticking bombs up their own asses to blow people up?

Wow…

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Drew Griffin
CNN 

Program Note: Moammar Gadhafi says he offered his condolences to the families of victims who died in the 1988 Lockerbie bombings. Last month, Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was released from prison and returned to Libay. We'll be talking to Brian Flynn, whose brother was killed in the attack, about Ghadafi's comments tonight. 10 p.m. ET.

Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, 57, boards a plane after his release from prison.

Brian Flynn
For The Guardian

Imagine if one of the September 11 hijackers had lived, that he was fairly tried, convicted and sentenced to a lengthy jail term. Then, after just a few years, under an agreement with the Afghan government, we sent him back to serve out his term with the Taliban under Osama bin Laden.

Although it seems almost impossible, a painfully similar scenario is playing out in the Scotland. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – the terrorist convicted in the Lockerbie bombing – may soon be released by the Scottish government and handed over to Libya, the very government that plotted this cowardly mass murder.

The evidence against Megrahi is overwhelming and has withstood more than two fervent appeals. He was a member of Libyan intelligence travelling under a false passport to Malta on the day of the bombing, and lied about it more than once. Any rational person reviewing the evidence would conclude that Megrahi is guilty. Even more damning, the court's conviction clearly stated that Megrahi committed the murder for "furtherance of Libyan intelligence". There has been no regime change or democratic revolution. And yet the Scottish government is eager to return this murderer to his dictator – Muammar Gaddafi – a man who has gone on the record as hating all things western.

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