Officers study threat of suicide bombers

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

There something ironic, surreal even, about sitting in a room with a fire flickering in the hearth, a Christmas tree glowing with lights, and snow falling gently just beyond the windows – to watch videos of explosions and talking about how to deal with people who want kill Americans.
But that’s how about 50 Smyth County law enforcement officers, school officials, and emergency service providers spent snowy Wednesday morning. Inside cozy, Christmasy Hemlock Haven Conference Center, they learned about suicide bombers who wish for Americans something very different from peace and goodwill.
Virginia State Police and Smyth County Commonwealth’s Attorney Roy Evans and Victim/Witness Services Director Susan Williams hosted Prevention and Response to Suicide Bombing Incidents, a training program developed by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology’s Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center.
That’s where the explosion videos were made, showing the effects of carried, person-borne and vehicle bombs. High-speed video played back slowly extended an eye-blink blast over a few minutes, allowing a time-warped inspection of detonations like those suicide bombers could unleash anywhere, anytime.
And that was the message of the day, in addition to the techniques of identifying and responding to the nine stages of a suicide bombing: it’s probably only a matter of time before an ideology-driven suicide bombing kills Americans on their home soil.
VSP First Sgt. Ed Murphy attended the New Mexico training, saw things blown to smithereens by devices he said law enforcement officers could encounter and that can be made using readily available instructions.
While a dozen groups are known to authorities to use suicide bombers, including some most of the public hears little about – the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka and the Chechen Shaheeds join the more publicized Hizballah of Lebanon and of course Al Qaeda— Murphy’s presentation centered on handling a suicide attack carried out by Muslim extremists.
“We don’t understand that Muslim extremists want to kill us all,” Murphy said. They don’t just want Americans out of the Middle East, he added. “They want us off the map.”
The course, approved by the Department of Homeland Security, is designed to bring public safety officials to a level of awareness of the suicide attack threat Murphy said has already been reached in other countries.
“Israel is so far ahead of us on this,” Murphy said. He cited the case of a small Israeli child alerting her father to a bomber she spotted on their bus. “This country is headed in that direction. I hate to say it. There’s a lot of things these people think of that we don’t.”
As an example, Murphy noted how easy it would be to steal a fire truck from a rural department and use it to transport a bomb. “I’m not telling you this stuff to panic you but to make you pay attention. You have to be thinking about these things.”
Murphy said groups who use suicide attacks are “smart enough to watch what we do” in responding to large-scale incidents like the April shootings at Virginia Tech. “Four hundred troopers went to Tech,” presenting a would-be attacker the knowledge that staging a big incident would bring police and other responders in close proximity – a key ingredient for a successful bomb attack on them.
Virginia, Murphy said, is prime real estate for terrorists seeking big targets. “Virginia is hot. Maybe not Chilhowie, but you have Norfolk Naval Base. There’s groups here with known associations to these groups. But because we have freedom in this country, we can’t just go in and kick them out. We’re monitoring them.”
Murphy said local law enforcement, “the sheriff’s department guys,” will be the first line of defense against a suicide attack.
“Here’s where we stop these guys,” Murphy said of the first half-dozen of nine stages leading to a suicide attack. Those stages, from the potential bomber’s identification by a group and his recruitment, through training target selection and reconnaissance, procurement of bomb-making materials, to construction and final preparation of the device and its delivery and detonation, are features of every bombing.
Interdiction, he said, must happen before an attacker moves a bomb to the target, and certainly before he explodes it. Vigilance is one of the best defenses against a suicide attack. The public should never attempt to approach or thwart a suspected attacker, but should report suspicious activity to the police.
Things to report include threats, displays of anger, and bragging about destructive plans and grandiose estimates of their results.
Bombers planning attacks may probe the target’s defenses by measuring reactions to their presence. As an example, Murphy said a stranger at a school door with neither a child enrolled nor good reason to be there should be reported to police as someone possibly casing the building’s physical security and safety procedures.
Success in all of the earlier stages, Murphy said, involves good intelligence and information sharing, knowing what to look for and how to accurately interpret findings. He cited a case in which New Jersey firefighters responded to a smoke report at an apartment where they found no smoke source, but saw several jugs of liquid identified as human urine. The firefighters decided it posed no threat until a graduate of a New Mexico Tech terrorism response course recognized the urine as part of a Middle East terrorists’ technique for production of explosive urea nitrate. An FBI investigation turned up blueprints of the tunnels and bridges in Manhattan and an arrest was made.
At the end of the classroom session, VSP explosives experts demonstrated bombs, blowing up a can and, most disconcertingly, a manila folder with flattened C-4 explosive inside. Commonwealth’s Attorney Evans said that demonstration appeared to impact observers most strongly, perhaps because it was something they all could relate to.
Evans summed up the days lessons about the new ways of thinking required of police and firefighters in modern times: “There’s a whole bunch of stuff to be aware of. It’s a whole new world.”
For many of a certain age whose greatest worry came and went with the Cuban Missile Crisis, the loss of that old world is accompanied by a sense of sadness, of longing for simpler, safer times for our children. But Glen Moorer, who attended the training, observed that this is their world. It’s all they will have known, he said, and they’ll be all right in it.