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Ways To Prevent, Minimize Damage From Next Terrorist Attack
The Advocate
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
What form will the next terrorist attack take? It will either be a spectacular attack with a weapon of mass destruction, such as a dirty nuke, or a less spectacular attack at a soft target, probably a hotel. There is a significant probability of either kind of attack, but this column will focus on the more probable — against a soft target by conventional means.
The trend is obvious. An article in the magazine Counter Terrorism (May 21), by James G. Conway Jr., the president of Global Intel Strategies, a security consulting firm, focuses on hotel security and hotel vulnerability: “The pattern was established before Mumbai — Islamic terrorists targeting hotels owned by western companies, symbols of the west and who host foreigners from around the globe.”
Consider the examples:
• The Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan in September 2008 — 60 victims.
• The Serena Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan in January 2008 — eight victims.
• The Radisson SAS Hotel, the Grand Hyatt and the Days Inn in Amman, Jordan in 2008 — 60 killed.
• The JW Marriott in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2003 — 12 victims.
• The Sheraton Hotel in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002 — 11 French engineers killed.
That is clearly handwriting on the wall of hotels worldwide. So now in addition to worrying about fire and crime hazards when traveling, you better take into account your security risk and how to minimize it. You can get a sense of what to look for by reviewing this discussion of the kinds of precautions called for by security experts.
You are likely to find security weaker in the U.S. and the West than elsewhere. Mr. Conway notes, “At airports, diplomatic missions, embassies and other western targets have ‘battened down the hatches’ throughout the Middle East and Asia, western hotels have remained relatively open and present themselves as a classic ‘soft target’ for terrorists bent on causing death and destruction.”
Mr. Conway says when it comes to security, the “hotel industry is caught in a quandary.” Hotels want to provide security and safety to their guests. But they want the hotel to present a warm and welcoming environment. Safety and security measures sometimes detract from that warm and welcoming atmosphere. In fact, as safety and security measures are stepped up, guests may have their fears and anxieties about safety and security also stepping up.
I might add a point not made by Mr. Conway. As an investigative reporter, I spent years doing stories testing security measures at oil refineries, hospitals, nursing homes, day camps, childcare centers and airports. They all had one thing in common — weak or non-existent security and little inclination to improve it.
This conclusion was confirmed by Frank Friel, a leading national authority on security and a former consultant on security to major league baseball. This was some years ago, but I have seen no reason to change that conclusion. Americans are simply not into security and prevention.
What’s more, as soon as we solve one security problem, we are likely to create another. For example, after the Bali disco bombing, Indonesian authorities tightened security at hotels. As a result, terror cells shifted their targets to other soft targets such as restaurants and unprotected public areas.
It should also be recognized that security measures might not prevent the terror strike but only minimize the damages. At the Islamabad Marriott, where 60 died in 2008, the security prevented the terrorists from reaching the hotel’s inner perimeter security and that may have saved hundreds of lives.
The lessons from the November 2008 massacre in Mumbai, India, are extensive, instructive and frightening. That’s because it was such a major disaster, it was subjected to extensive studies by security experts around the world.
Lesson One
A small number of terrorists can wreak incredible disruption and damage to a system. There were only 10 terrorists involved in the execution of the plot, and they tied up multiple locations and a major city of 12 million for four days. And no one can forgot that only 19 terrorists executed the 9/11 catastrophe.
Lesson Two
Mumbai was not equipped to handle this kind of incident and neither are most cities, including those in the U.S. It takes 200 highly trained security specialists to handle a terrorist incident. Mumbai posed a terrorist attack at multiple locations — at a train station, a hospital, a café, a cinema and a religious center.
That would take 1,000 specialists in anti-terrorist tactics to handle five locations. Mumbai did not have enough personnel to handle the multiple locations, and that’s why so many died, and why it took so long to kill or capture the 10 terrorists (all but one were killed).
Lesson Three
Because of the large number of security personnel that might be needed, Israel has solved the problem by what is called up-training. This up-training is explained in an article by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), which also appears in this issue of the magazine Counter Terrorism.
Up-training means they train their personnel so they can operate one step above their usual assignments. ITRR stresses the importance of this up-training: “This training style gives a wider operational flexibility to police forces and allows for extra partially trained first responders who can be mobilized separately from a higher trained unit, or who can be integrated into the unit for lower level support.”
In Mumbai, they didn’t have enough specialists and had no up-trained regular forces. This meant some of the terrorist sites had to be handled by police that were simply not trained for the task. This involved a serious and fatal failure that cost lives of both civilians and police.
Lesson Four
The counter-terrorist forces have to arrive on the scene in a hurry and they did not in Mumbai. The attack started at 11:30 p.m., on a Wednesday, and the counter-terrorism force had to be brought in from 150 miles from the target city. They did not arrive until 7 a.m., Thursday. So these multiple attacks require large numbers of counter-terrorism personnel on tap almost immediately.
Lesson Five
Counter-terrorism training cannot be limited to the police and special personnel. The ITRR writes, “In Mumbai, most of the lifesaving actions during the terrorist assault were non-violent actions taken by untrained civilians and employees of the arenas attacked.”
But these types of lifes-aving actions should be part of a written and exercised standard operating procedure designed for all employees.
ITRR writes, “Public places like hotels, airports, train stations and shopping centers must have emergency standards of procedures that employees are trained to carry out to deal with evacuation or separating soft-target-rich environments from the threat. Simple acts — like alerting incoming trains, shutting down sections of buildings or leading a group of survivors to an emergency exit — can save more lives than anyone else … When emergencies happen, people do what they have been trained to do; if they have not been trained — they do nothing.”
Lesson Six
The police and others with responsibility have to be in constant training, as terrorists keep changing and refining their tactics. They study successes and failures and take action accordingly. But ITRR says the police in Mumbai haven’t even absorbed the lessons of that incident: “It is our belief that an attack similar to the November incident carried out today would produce the same tragic results because there has apparently been no internalization of the necessary lessons. Police and domestic security forces still appear unprepared in terms of mentality, equipment and physical defense measures.”
Lesson Seven
The media can help the police or the terrorists. In Mumbai, the media helped the terrorists. It, in effect, provided field intelligence for the terrorists, giving them step-by-step reports of rescue and assault plans. This was in part the fault of law enforcement.
ITRR found, “The areas of attack were not made sterile by any means, allowing both mainstream media and other citizens to observe and report on security operations as they happened.”
The media also kept giving conflicting and erroneous reports, which gave the population a feeling of helplessness. This again was the fault of law enforcement and government, as they provided no official spokesman who could give relevant and accurate reports to the media.
There is another serious fault of the media that has already been demonstrated. The public has to appreciate the threat. It’s up to the media to carry out a large part of the educational function. But the mainstream media is already in a pre-9/11 mentality and pays little attention to the threat of terror and what should be done about it.
They are too busy assuring the comfort and legal rights of enemy combatants. (With all due respects to the Obama administration, I still call them enemy combatants and I use the term terrorists, too. If the present trend of the Obama administration continues, we’ll soon be told to call these genocidal maniacs by a moniker such as consumer advocates.)
Lesson Eight
It is not enough to have special training for police forces and employees of public places. The whole population has to be aware of terror threats, as they can be a good source of intelligence. For example, people may observe suspicious activity, objects or personnel that should be reported to authorities. They should also have some appreciation of how to react in the event of a terrorist attack.
The ITRR reports, “The citizens of Mumbai also appear to lack the requisite conscious awareness of the terrorist threats arrayed against them from without and within the city. For example, passerbys do not react to suspicious objects or behaviors in a way that indicates their awareness of the potential threat.”
Lesson Nine
The police forces need more than training. They need arms and equipment to assure technological superiority over the terrorists. One of the most shocking findings coming out of Mumbai is that there was a lack of arms in the police, some with obsolete arms and many with none.
The ITRR found that firearms laws were part of the problem: “India has a very tough firearms law that allows only high-ranking officers in the army or police to carry weapons after completion of their service. Of the 40,000 policemen that serve in Mumbai, only around 5,000 have weapons, most of which are antique, in bad working conditions and carried by untrained personnel.
“Security guards in India are almost totally unarmed, creating an immediate problem for private (corporate) interests in their attempts to ramp-up hard, real-time security.”
India represents the usual scenario of gun-control advocates out of control, passing laws that endanger, rather than protect, the people.
This issue wasn’t raised by the discussion in the magazine Counter Terrorism, but it is hard not to see it: Wouldn’t we be in a much better position to fight terrorism if we had more citizens with weapons rather than fewer armed citizens? When you have an armed terrorist shooting the unarmed, the consequences are clear.
One or more armed citizens could tip the scales in favor of the target of terrorist and certainly minimize the death toll. Th e National Rifle Association has ample records of how an armed citizenry is an effective defense against crime, and that means it could be an effective defense against terrorism.
Lesson 10
The handling of the Mumbai massacre was botched from beginning to end, including the post-massacre time. By keeping the attacked hotels closed for a long time, the authorities magnified the psychological damage of the terrorist attack. They should have taken steps to minimize that damage.
The ITRR looks to the country that has had the most experience with terrorism as an example: “In Israel, in contrast, there is a supreme effort put into returning life to normal as soon as possible after a terrorist attack, in order to lessen the effect of the incident. Such an approach avoids playing into the hands of the terrorists, who are seeking to obtain their arms by sowing terror and thus destroying civil society.”
Lesson 11
Good intelligence is the key to preventing terrorist attacks. The ITRR writes, “Field intelligence … is the single most effective tool to prevent terrorist and criminal activity.” But the best intelligence won’t help if the warnings it generates are not heeded.
There was advance warning communicated to hotels but they soon let down their guard, and missed opportunities to stop the terrorist attack.
Lesson 12
Americans should not take consolation in the fact that the Mumbai police botched their response from beginning to end, and that we might do better under similar circumstances. Even though we might be better prepared and equipped than the Indians, the experts at ITRR think the same kind of attack that took place in Mumbai would probably exact the same kind of toll here in the U.S. as it did there.
Lesson 13
Perhaps one of the most important lessons of Mumbai is that we’re all targets of the terrorists and we all have real and specific responsibility to try to prevent them.
Mr. Conway concludes: “Counter-terrorism measures were once the purview and responsibility of only governments. Today, in this ever-increasing world of shadowy and unpredictable terror threats to our western democratic ‘soft targets,’ it has become the responsibility of both the public and private sector to heed and maintain our safety.
Lesson 14
Another of the most important lessons is that these terrorist attacks are not just quickie attacks by a few freelancers. An article in the same issue of Counter Terrorism titled “Understanding the Mumbai Attack” by Stefan H. Leader, a senior intelligence analyst with the Analytics Corporation, explains the terrorists are organized and planning attacks just as enemy nation might.
First, the terrorists are usually not independent actors, but (in Mr. Leader’s words) “are identified, recruited, trained, and, above all, manipulated by organized groups…”
The agenda of the organizers may be different than those who actually execute the plan. The attacker may just be deluded into planning for their 72 virgins and all the rest that comes from martyrdom. But the organizers may be playing on a grand scale. In the case of Mumbai, Mr. Leader thinks the organizers wanted more dead Muslims so “to further mobilize their base and seemed to think Indian Hindus would oblige.” Some think they had an even more ambitious goal: to provoke a Pakistani-Indian military confrontation.
This all suggests the war against terror is a real war, in many ways posing a greater threat than past wars and requiring more extensive combat in both time and geographic reach than previous wars. Too many of our people and our institutions and our politicians are in denial. They better wake up in a hurry if they want to assure the survival of American and the free world, as we know them.
We’ve been approaching the war against terrorists as if they were nuisances that, like flies, just have to be swatted away. If the public understands the nature of terrorism and terrorists, it will quickly realize we’re in a real war that requires the kind of mobilization and resources demanded by any of our previous major wars.
In fact, this war will undoubtedly last longer than any of our previous wars and poses new threats that we have not previously encountered. We have to wake up in a hurry if we want to win the war that has been thrust upon us. As they say in sports, it is ours to win or lose.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
The trend is obvious. An article in the magazine Counter Terrorism (May 21), by James G. Conway Jr., the president of Global Intel Strategies, a security consulting firm, focuses on hotel security and hotel vulnerability: “The pattern was established before Mumbai — Islamic terrorists targeting hotels owned by western companies, symbols of the west and who host foreigners from around the globe.”
Consider the examples:
• The Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan in September 2008 — 60 victims.
• The Serena Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan in January 2008 — eight victims.
• The Radisson SAS Hotel, the Grand Hyatt and the Days Inn in Amman, Jordan in 2008 — 60 killed.
• The JW Marriott in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2003 — 12 victims.
• The Sheraton Hotel in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002 — 11 French engineers killed.
That is clearly handwriting on the wall of hotels worldwide. So now in addition to worrying about fire and crime hazards when traveling, you better take into account your security risk and how to minimize it. You can get a sense of what to look for by reviewing this discussion of the kinds of precautions called for by security experts.
You are likely to find security weaker in the U.S. and the West than elsewhere. Mr. Conway notes, “At airports, diplomatic missions, embassies and other western targets have ‘battened down the hatches’ throughout the Middle East and Asia, western hotels have remained relatively open and present themselves as a classic ‘soft target’ for terrorists bent on causing death and destruction.”
Mr. Conway says when it comes to security, the “hotel industry is caught in a quandary.” Hotels want to provide security and safety to their guests. But they want the hotel to present a warm and welcoming environment. Safety and security measures sometimes detract from that warm and welcoming atmosphere. In fact, as safety and security measures are stepped up, guests may have their fears and anxieties about safety and security also stepping up.
I might add a point not made by Mr. Conway. As an investigative reporter, I spent years doing stories testing security measures at oil refineries, hospitals, nursing homes, day camps, childcare centers and airports. They all had one thing in common — weak or non-existent security and little inclination to improve it.
This conclusion was confirmed by Frank Friel, a leading national authority on security and a former consultant on security to major league baseball. This was some years ago, but I have seen no reason to change that conclusion. Americans are simply not into security and prevention.
What’s more, as soon as we solve one security problem, we are likely to create another. For example, after the Bali disco bombing, Indonesian authorities tightened security at hotels. As a result, terror cells shifted their targets to other soft targets such as restaurants and unprotected public areas.
It should also be recognized that security measures might not prevent the terror strike but only minimize the damages. At the Islamabad Marriott, where 60 died in 2008, the security prevented the terrorists from reaching the hotel’s inner perimeter security and that may have saved hundreds of lives.
The lessons from the November 2008 massacre in Mumbai, India, are extensive, instructive and frightening. That’s because it was such a major disaster, it was subjected to extensive studies by security experts around the world.
Lesson One
A small number of terrorists can wreak incredible disruption and damage to a system. There were only 10 terrorists involved in the execution of the plot, and they tied up multiple locations and a major city of 12 million for four days. And no one can forgot that only 19 terrorists executed the 9/11 catastrophe.
Lesson Two
Mumbai was not equipped to handle this kind of incident and neither are most cities, including those in the U.S. It takes 200 highly trained security specialists to handle a terrorist incident. Mumbai posed a terrorist attack at multiple locations — at a train station, a hospital, a café, a cinema and a religious center.
That would take 1,000 specialists in anti-terrorist tactics to handle five locations. Mumbai did not have enough personnel to handle the multiple locations, and that’s why so many died, and why it took so long to kill or capture the 10 terrorists (all but one were killed).
Lesson Three
Because of the large number of security personnel that might be needed, Israel has solved the problem by what is called up-training. This up-training is explained in an article by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), which also appears in this issue of the magazine Counter Terrorism.
Up-training means they train their personnel so they can operate one step above their usual assignments. ITRR stresses the importance of this up-training: “This training style gives a wider operational flexibility to police forces and allows for extra partially trained first responders who can be mobilized separately from a higher trained unit, or who can be integrated into the unit for lower level support.”
In Mumbai, they didn’t have enough specialists and had no up-trained regular forces. This meant some of the terrorist sites had to be handled by police that were simply not trained for the task. This involved a serious and fatal failure that cost lives of both civilians and police.
Lesson Four
The counter-terrorist forces have to arrive on the scene in a hurry and they did not in Mumbai. The attack started at 11:30 p.m., on a Wednesday, and the counter-terrorism force had to be brought in from 150 miles from the target city. They did not arrive until 7 a.m., Thursday. So these multiple attacks require large numbers of counter-terrorism personnel on tap almost immediately.
Lesson Five
Counter-terrorism training cannot be limited to the police and special personnel. The ITRR writes, “In Mumbai, most of the lifesaving actions during the terrorist assault were non-violent actions taken by untrained civilians and employees of the arenas attacked.”
But these types of lifes-aving actions should be part of a written and exercised standard operating procedure designed for all employees.
ITRR writes, “Public places like hotels, airports, train stations and shopping centers must have emergency standards of procedures that employees are trained to carry out to deal with evacuation or separating soft-target-rich environments from the threat. Simple acts — like alerting incoming trains, shutting down sections of buildings or leading a group of survivors to an emergency exit — can save more lives than anyone else … When emergencies happen, people do what they have been trained to do; if they have not been trained — they do nothing.”
Lesson Six
The police and others with responsibility have to be in constant training, as terrorists keep changing and refining their tactics. They study successes and failures and take action accordingly. But ITRR says the police in Mumbai haven’t even absorbed the lessons of that incident: “It is our belief that an attack similar to the November incident carried out today would produce the same tragic results because there has apparently been no internalization of the necessary lessons. Police and domestic security forces still appear unprepared in terms of mentality, equipment and physical defense measures.”
Lesson Seven
The media can help the police or the terrorists. In Mumbai, the media helped the terrorists. It, in effect, provided field intelligence for the terrorists, giving them step-by-step reports of rescue and assault plans. This was in part the fault of law enforcement.
ITRR found, “The areas of attack were not made sterile by any means, allowing both mainstream media and other citizens to observe and report on security operations as they happened.”
The media also kept giving conflicting and erroneous reports, which gave the population a feeling of helplessness. This again was the fault of law enforcement and government, as they provided no official spokesman who could give relevant and accurate reports to the media.
There is another serious fault of the media that has already been demonstrated. The public has to appreciate the threat. It’s up to the media to carry out a large part of the educational function. But the mainstream media is already in a pre-9/11 mentality and pays little attention to the threat of terror and what should be done about it.
They are too busy assuring the comfort and legal rights of enemy combatants. (With all due respects to the Obama administration, I still call them enemy combatants and I use the term terrorists, too. If the present trend of the Obama administration continues, we’ll soon be told to call these genocidal maniacs by a moniker such as consumer advocates.)
Lesson Eight
It is not enough to have special training for police forces and employees of public places. The whole population has to be aware of terror threats, as they can be a good source of intelligence. For example, people may observe suspicious activity, objects or personnel that should be reported to authorities. They should also have some appreciation of how to react in the event of a terrorist attack.
The ITRR reports, “The citizens of Mumbai also appear to lack the requisite conscious awareness of the terrorist threats arrayed against them from without and within the city. For example, passerbys do not react to suspicious objects or behaviors in a way that indicates their awareness of the potential threat.”
Lesson Nine
The police forces need more than training. They need arms and equipment to assure technological superiority over the terrorists. One of the most shocking findings coming out of Mumbai is that there was a lack of arms in the police, some with obsolete arms and many with none.
The ITRR found that firearms laws were part of the problem: “India has a very tough firearms law that allows only high-ranking officers in the army or police to carry weapons after completion of their service. Of the 40,000 policemen that serve in Mumbai, only around 5,000 have weapons, most of which are antique, in bad working conditions and carried by untrained personnel.
“Security guards in India are almost totally unarmed, creating an immediate problem for private (corporate) interests in their attempts to ramp-up hard, real-time security.”
India represents the usual scenario of gun-control advocates out of control, passing laws that endanger, rather than protect, the people.
This issue wasn’t raised by the discussion in the magazine Counter Terrorism, but it is hard not to see it: Wouldn’t we be in a much better position to fight terrorism if we had more citizens with weapons rather than fewer armed citizens? When you have an armed terrorist shooting the unarmed, the consequences are clear.
One or more armed citizens could tip the scales in favor of the target of terrorist and certainly minimize the death toll. Th e National Rifle Association has ample records of how an armed citizenry is an effective defense against crime, and that means it could be an effective defense against terrorism.
Lesson 10
The handling of the Mumbai massacre was botched from beginning to end, including the post-massacre time. By keeping the attacked hotels closed for a long time, the authorities magnified the psychological damage of the terrorist attack. They should have taken steps to minimize that damage.
The ITRR looks to the country that has had the most experience with terrorism as an example: “In Israel, in contrast, there is a supreme effort put into returning life to normal as soon as possible after a terrorist attack, in order to lessen the effect of the incident. Such an approach avoids playing into the hands of the terrorists, who are seeking to obtain their arms by sowing terror and thus destroying civil society.”
Lesson 11
Good intelligence is the key to preventing terrorist attacks. The ITRR writes, “Field intelligence … is the single most effective tool to prevent terrorist and criminal activity.” But the best intelligence won’t help if the warnings it generates are not heeded.
There was advance warning communicated to hotels but they soon let down their guard, and missed opportunities to stop the terrorist attack.
Lesson 12
Americans should not take consolation in the fact that the Mumbai police botched their response from beginning to end, and that we might do better under similar circumstances. Even though we might be better prepared and equipped than the Indians, the experts at ITRR think the same kind of attack that took place in Mumbai would probably exact the same kind of toll here in the U.S. as it did there.
Lesson 13
Perhaps one of the most important lessons of Mumbai is that we’re all targets of the terrorists and we all have real and specific responsibility to try to prevent them.
Mr. Conway concludes: “Counter-terrorism measures were once the purview and responsibility of only governments. Today, in this ever-increasing world of shadowy and unpredictable terror threats to our western democratic ‘soft targets,’ it has become the responsibility of both the public and private sector to heed and maintain our safety.
Lesson 14
Another of the most important lessons is that these terrorist attacks are not just quickie attacks by a few freelancers. An article in the same issue of Counter Terrorism titled “Understanding the Mumbai Attack” by Stefan H. Leader, a senior intelligence analyst with the Analytics Corporation, explains the terrorists are organized and planning attacks just as enemy nation might.
First, the terrorists are usually not independent actors, but (in Mr. Leader’s words) “are identified, recruited, trained, and, above all, manipulated by organized groups…”
The agenda of the organizers may be different than those who actually execute the plan. The attacker may just be deluded into planning for their 72 virgins and all the rest that comes from martyrdom. But the organizers may be playing on a grand scale. In the case of Mumbai, Mr. Leader thinks the organizers wanted more dead Muslims so “to further mobilize their base and seemed to think Indian Hindus would oblige.” Some think they had an even more ambitious goal: to provoke a Pakistani-Indian military confrontation.
This all suggests the war against terror is a real war, in many ways posing a greater threat than past wars and requiring more extensive combat in both time and geographic reach than previous wars. Too many of our people and our institutions and our politicians are in denial. They better wake up in a hurry if they want to assure the survival of American and the free world, as we know them.
We’ve been approaching the war against terrorists as if they were nuisances that, like flies, just have to be swatted away. If the public understands the nature of terrorism and terrorists, it will quickly realize we’re in a real war that requires the kind of mobilization and resources demanded by any of our previous major wars.
In fact, this war will undoubtedly last longer than any of our previous wars and poses new threats that we have not previously encountered. We have to wake up in a hurry if we want to win the war that has been thrust upon us. As they say in sports, it is ours to win or lose.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
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