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The recent terrorist takeover of a grade school in southern Russia serves as a devastating reminder that law enforcement must be prepared for literally anything. al-Qaeda training manuals have included specifics on attacks on schools, and the threat is real.
The following cautionary report is presented in the hopes that it will serve as a catalyst to launching an evaluation of your own personal and departmental readiness to confront a similar situation.
As you read this article, consider these questions:
- Are the channels of communication between your agency and your local schools solid? Has your department contacted school authorities to ensure that emergency procedures are current, well-constructed, and ready for immediate action in the event of a terrorist emergency?
- Has your agency considered hosting a training class for local teachers and school officials to discuss protocols for mass emergency situations and to share insights into hostage situations?
- Does your agency maintain or have immediate access to detailed school building blueprints/layout maps?
- Have you prepared yourself for the near impossible, but extremely crucial task of remaining professionally focused should you find yourself responding to a situation at your own child’s school? How about the other key players at your agency?
- Is your negotiation team fully prepared to confront suicidal hostage-takers who are clearly prepared and highly motivated to act on murderous threats against children and other hostages?
- Are you trained to quickly and effectively secure an impenetrable perimeter around a school and maintain it in an emotionally charged, highly volatile atmosphere?
Remember, you will be confronted by panicked parents, perhaps your friends and relatives among them. You need to be prepared to successfully reassure them that the perimeter has been established for the safety of the children and MUST be obeyed.
- Is your agency prepared to deal with an overwhelming influx of members of the media? Are your officers trained for responding/not responding to reporters’ questions? Hostage-takers may be monitoring the media and the wrong comments can prove devastating.
As we know from the Columbine rampage, a school-based crisis, particularly a hostage-taking like the one in Russia, is fraught with near paralyzing emotions. The combustible mix of confusion, fear and an overwhelming sense of urgency can make it extremely difficult to remember that response protocols are expertly designed to successfully resolve crisis situations.
Make sure that your department has established solid, tested procedures for handling a school-based emergency. Preparing yourself and your agency to respond as planned is paramount.
Beslan Terror Tragedy a U.S. Possibility
By William Rusher, DDDNews.com
In the next year or two, it is entirely possible that a dozen or so Islamic terrorists (which may include men, women and some non-Arab recruits) will take over an American school and hold a couple of hundred children and their teachers hostage, vowing to kill them all if their demands--for the release of imprisoned terrorists, or American withdrawal from Iraq, or whatever--are not promptly met.
There is nothing impossible, or even unlikely, about this. In fact, it has already happened, in Russia. The ghastly drama was played out in Beslan, a small city in southern Russia, a couple of weeks ago. When it was over, 150 children, together with an equal number of teachers and other adults, and all but one of the hijackers, were dead.
Most of the aspects of the tragedy weren’t even new. Terrorists willing to commit suicide on behalf of their objectives have been around for years: Osama bin Laden deployed 19 of them in Al Qaeda’s attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. The only novelty in Beslan was the diabolical tactic of seizing children. (The rebels threatened to kill 50 children for every terrorist slain by the authorities.)
The Russian government has been criticized for ineptness in its handling of the episode, and perhaps it was guilty as charged. But it was negotiating with the hijackers, and had even managed to persuade them to release about 20 of the youngest children, when some unexplained occurrence set off two huge bombs that collapsed a large section of the school’s roof. After that, both sides began killing everyone they could.
How would Americans--the children’s parents and the public at large, not to mention the government--respond to such a crisis? We could forgive the parents if they demanded immediate surrender to the terrorists’ demands; human beings are simply not designed to acquiesce nobly in the killing of their children for a higher cause. But the government would be duty-bound to reject the hijackers’ demands, even at the cost of the children’s lives, lest it encourage other terrorists to turn America into a charnel house of the youngest and most innocent among us.
And what about the public at large? If the crisis extended over several days, there would be time for many people to reason the matter through, and see the grim wisdom of the government’s position. But you can bet that there would also be an articulate minority of college professors, deracinated intellectuals and the usual crackpots who populate protest demonstrations, arguing that President Bush (or Kerry, as the case may be) brought the whole tragedy on us by reason of his vicious policies.
In a way, the determination of these dissenters to politicize such a ghastly scenario is the mirror image of the terrorists’ determination to create it in the first place. There is no one more horrible than the person for whom political goals transcend all other considerations.
If such an event as the one at Beslan occurs in the United States, it will remind us, as nothing else can, of the nature of the evil we are facing. The terrorists who have organized and spread across the face of the world in recent decades are the radical fringe of Islam, and they are fueled by despair. Their culture has simply failed to come to terms with modernity; or, as they would more proudly put it, it rejects modernity. They cannot possibly defeat, in military terms, the great nations of the Western World--most notably, the United States. But their faith is strong, and they believe that in its name they can make world dominion simply unendurable for the West.
To that end, they are ready to sacrifice their own individual lives, and even the lives of innocent children. And a readiness to commit suicide does, unquestionably, give tactical advantages to an attacker. We cannot possibly eliminate all such foes, but we can and must resist them. They will disappear only when radical Islam, in the fullness of time, has made its peace with the modern world.
William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.
Source: BBBnews.com; ERRI