Posted on 11/29/2008 5:32:18 PM PST by nufsed
The Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, India, had been warned of a possible terrorist attack before a deadly rampage hit the iconic landmark this week, the chairman of the company that owns the hotel said Saturday.
The Taj was one of nine sites attacked by gunmen in a 60-hour wave of terror that killed at least 183 people and injured hundreds more before it ended in a standoff at the hotel Saturday morning.
Before the attacks, the hotel had heightened security because of a warning it received, Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata said in an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria that will air Sunday.
But Tata said that nothing could have prevented gunmen from entering the hotel, despite the fact that it relaxed security shortly before the attacks............
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
The response forces weren’t limited to slings and arrows:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/11/29/india.attacks/index.html?iref=werecommend
Isn’t that a H&K PSG-1 over his shoulder?
Disney World has better security than that ugly hotel.
The terrorists are smarter than security forces.
Charming
But Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata said those measures, which were eased shortly before this week's terror attacks, could not have prevented gunmen from entering the hotel. Convenient for the murderers. Why bother having them??
You’re probably right.
Part of the issue is that Disney’s outfits aren’t right across a narrow body of water from Iran.
Another part of the issue is that Disney has planned for problems. Dubai obviously didn’t — two huge hotels, out on artificial islands, with only one approach by land? Not really bright.
BTW — there are now two hotels at the artificial “Palm Islands” area.
From reading his quotes, I’d say that they were planning and prepp’ing against a mobile bomb attack.
They were not planning on a direct confrontation from roving bands of gunmen.
The world has to admit now that Beslan was not a one-off.
I have a friend who travels internationally as a speaker and she had heard back in the middle of Octbober that there was to be a major muslim attack in a city someplace in SE Asia during last week of November. She canceled a trip to Malaysia, because she thought it was going to happen there. I think it will be shown that there were a lot of warnings going around of something happening that were ignored.
..........admit now that Beslan was not a one-off. NVD please explain.
Disney World is starting to look good.
Beslan was where the muslim terrorists seized a school and raped and killed hundreds of kids in Russia.
Thanx. I remember the incident and forgot the names.
OK, let’s review what happened in Beslan, when the 31, or 34, or 50+ (reports vary) Chechen Muslims took a school full of children hostage and killed many of them, along with most of themselves in a direct confrontation with small arms and small-scale explosives.
The attack was done by selecting a soft target with lots of children and women, ie, people who don’t live in a state of tactical readiness. These people were taken hostage, tortured, raped, abused in all manners. For the savage manner in which this attack was made, the west has largely ignored it as a one-off attack, a tit-for-tat response by Chechens against Russians, rather than seen as an attack by Islamic militants against an easy target with locality to Chechnya. There were non-Chechens in the attacking party, at least two Arabs and one African muslim reported in the attacking party.
The success of this operation (from the standpoint of the Islamists) painted a prototype of a large-scale, multiple-party attack on a soft target. Even in a militarized state like Russia, where civil rights are few and far between and there is nothing like the ACLU to play little yappy dog nipping at the heels of police, the response was confounded by a lack of training, a lack of knowledge of the tactical environment and poor communications up and down the chain of command. Add into all of this the problem that the innocents in the mix were heavily composed of women and children and we have a situation that paralyzes reaction forces.
In Mumbai (Bombay, whatever we want to call it), we have a similar MO - selection of soft targets, hostages, small arms and small scale explosives, coupled with attacks on responding forces, and a high death toll.
The west has used technology to respond to the “bomb threat.” So now if you want to mount a terrorism op with a high loss of life, you’re going to have to choose something other than a bomb for the attack vector. Beslan and Mumbai now show that a small group of attackers with a relatively low capital investment and a game plan formed up-front can wreck havoc and tie a major city in knots for days on end - in both the Beslan and Mumbai cases, about three days.
There is no technology widget that can be used to respond to this type of attack. The only credible response is to harden targets, and not with technology but response training. The US is infatuated with technology as a response to very basic security problems, and this creates a very thin barrier to terror attacks inside the technology barrier.
And then earlier this month throwing acid on the school girls.
All of that is true. But that’s their own, and it isn’t considered terror any more than “honor killings” are considered murder. That’s just their sick, twisted sense of “justice” and “law.”
This job was designed to kill hundreds, if not thousands (they always aim much higher in numbers, NB) and not their own. NB that they released Muslims who made themselves known as such.
Dog-eared for Sunday reading.
I’ve got news for you: these countries, and I’ve been to many of them, smell like cow crap and are filled with noise and smoke and pollution. There are fews laws, no lanes on the roads, there’s no such thing as car insurance. Goats, cows, etc. run alongside cars, rickshaws, motorcycles, etc. on the streets. It’s quite a culture shock. They burn their garbage in ditches in the middle of the streets (more common in Pakistan) and you can smell the stench inside the PLANE way before you land! I don’t know why people would go without knowing people there or as a requirement of their jobs.
Those are just claims and counter claims people are making. There hasn't been any official statement yet that they had prior warning.
Isn’t that why the terrorists hit there? To rip the heart out of tourism?
&&&
You are so right.
All of our travel plans for the forseeable future involve no foreign countries whatsoever.
The biggest problem trying to prevent an attack is if you have an enemy that doesn’t mind or is looking forward to being killed. Get that number to 10 and above and you have a huge crapstorm on your hands.
One of the scenarios that always worries me is that a motivated group such as 20 or 30 of those missing Somalis show up at a College Football game etc.. Actually, lets make it a Christmas Parade in Wichita, KS, State Fair in Dallas, Texas or Mardi Gras in Nawlins?
How prepared do you think police would be at a event such a OSU or Notre Dame football game? You have lets say 10 guys with Automatic weapons, Grenades and Semtex explosive running around. Give them bulletproof vest and have them go up against cops that are running every day security and are NOT expecting this kind of threat. Have 15 - 20 vehicles strategically wired with explosives to go off in intervals.
Goal of the Police would be to minimize casualties while those guys wouldn’t care. Police would be hard pressed to fire at them with TONS of people running around and running the danger of shooting innocent bystanders. Everyone running, screaming, total chaos, panic. Kids yelling for their mothers, mothers screaming for their children, gun fire people running to their cars trying to get out when all of a sudden cars randomly explode. Now they have nowhere to go?!!!
Anyone remember that bank robbery several years ago in CA where guys with AK47’s and bulletproof vests went on a bank robbery? Think about how many guys it took to respond and take them down?
What about the guys at VT?
You can NOT prepare for scenarios like that. You will be able to plan and mitigate SOME damage. But if someone is willing to die AND motivated AND well trained, crap will hit the fan and there is not a dang thing you can do about it.
Remember, for them its a PERCEPTION thing. They want to make a STATEMENT (we can get you).
Our national agencies get so many threats on a daily basis that it is VERY easy for something to slip through. Doesn’t matter if its Mumbai, London, Madrid, Baghdad or NYC.
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