Glaciergate, and would you rather be blown up by al Qaeda or have lunch with a Hindu?

I interrupt my coverage of the Haiti crisis to bring news from my favorite Hindu Nationalist, the very smart and well-informed Rajeev Srinivasan, who is right 99 percent of the time (okay; sometimes only 97.5 percent) in his analyses of Pakistan and the present government in New Delhi, both of which he detests.

He's also not a fan of India's JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) so he was delighted when I sent him RBO's January 17 Glaciergate post, which I crossposted) because it makes unfavorable mention of the research of one Syed Hasnain, "a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi."

Rajeev has been avidly pursuing the story ever since. Now he's snapped up a U.K. Telegraph report by Christopher Booker, datelined yesterday, titled: Pachauri: the real story behind the Glaciergate scandal. Glaciergate, for those who are new to the story, is the first spinoff scandal of Climategate. Booker writes:

I can report a further dramatic twist to what has inevitably been dubbed "Glaciergate" – the international row surrounding the revelation that the latest report on global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained a wildly alarmist, unfounded claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Last week, the IPCC, led by its increasingly controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to issue an unprecedented admission: the statement in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis, and its inclusion in the report reflected a "poor application" of IPCC procedures.

What has now come to light, however, is that the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is director-general. Furthermore, the claim – now disowned by Dr Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC – has helped TERI to win a substantial share of a $500,000 grant from one of America's leading charities, along with a share in a three million euro research study funded by the EU. [...]

I don't know which is more fun to read, the rest of the report or Rajeev's comments about it -- although I suppose most of his observations would seem like hieroglyphs to Americans who know zilch about Indian matters. However, there's no better time for Washington to start paying a little more attention to what Indians think and a little less to what Pakistanis think. Even if this means official Washington sitting on its prejudice against Hindus.

Incidentally, sometimes I wonder if the U.S. Congress would rather be blown up by terrorists working with Pakistan's military than have lunch with a Hindu. If you think I'm taking it over the top, do you know anything about (Ret.) Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed, who was head of the intelligence branch of Pakistan's military at the time of 9/11? And the response of the 9/11 Commission to requests to investigate the financing of the 9/11 plot? If not, maybe you should find out.