Tahawwur Hussain Rana’s right eyebrow twitches frequently, as does the right end of his mouth, occasionally making a barely audible smacking sound. It is an involuntary action.It is a nervous tick which probably long predates his arrest in October 2009 in connection with the Mumbai terror case.His also slouches in his chair as if not wanting to be too obvious.
In contrast, his childhood friend David Coleman Headley sits in the witness box with the bearing of someone who is surveying everything around him with urgent but passing curiosity. His face is is largely inscrutable but has an incomplete smile. When he stands up, as is required when the judge and jury enter the courtroom, he has the bearing of someone who has taken a full measure of his surrounding. His two different colored eyes can be unsettling only because it is hard to determine what it is that he is looking at.
There could not be a greater contrast between two men, who until recently were the closest of friends. From the descriptions given by his attorneys Charles Swift and Patrick Blegen, Rana seemed to have been the grown-up in the friendship and Headley an oversized and petulant teenager.
Both are deeply religious within their conflicting Islamic sectarian convictions and as we discovered during the jury trial each tried to relentlessly convert the other to his beliefs. When Headley was asked by Blegen yesterday whether he succeeded in converting Rana from his own Deobandi tradition to the Salafi tradition, he, “Unfortunately, not.”
If you believe the defense’s implicit characterization of Headley, throughout his life he has been a man who is not too troubled by moral compunctions while forsaking anyone who stands in the way of whatever it is he perceives to be his goal. Blegen and Swift cited an incident from his 20s when he took Rana and some other friends to Pakistan’s tribal areas in search of heroine without telling Rana what the real purpose of the visit was. Headley chose to take Rana with him only because he had a military identity card because he was studying medicine at a military college. Rana was taken to clear any obstacle that might come up in Headley’s quest for some drugs.
After watching him for four days one has some measure of Headley. Going by all that has been said about him, he seems to have delusions of grandeur. For instance, there was a reference made to a dream he had before the Mumbai attack. In that dream, he saw his grave being close to the Prophet Mohammad’s. In a religion where the prophet is out of bounds for even visual representation of any kind because he is considered unattainable, for Headley to have a dream of his grave being next to him can only be explained by delusions of grandeur.
Towards the end of the day yesterday Blegen asked Headley: "You were proud of it (the Mumbai attacks) then?"
"Yes," Headley replied.
"Are you still proud of it today?" Blegen asked.
"No," Headley replied without even a moment's hesitation.
This was probably the closest he has come to expressing remorse about the Mumbai attacks. It sounded lip-deep to me but for someone who has a certain grandiosity about himself this has to have taken some effort.
Rana, on the other hand, continues to maintain somewhat diffident bearing, taking down notes and suddenly getting lost in thoughts.
