Preparing for Suicide Terrorism
A Primer for American Law Enforcement Agencies and Officers
Below is a summary of a recent RAND report, Preparing for Suicide Terrorism: A Primer for American Law Enforcement Agencies and Officers, Bruce Hoffman, David Brannan, Eric Herren, Robert Matthiessen, 2004. For security restrictions, the complete text of the article is not available on the RAND web site. Members of Congress and their staffs interested in reading the entire report should contact RAND at wea@rand.org.
Unfortunately, other suicide bombers will likely follow those who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, in attacking targets in the United States. Even before 9/11, suicide attacks were either contemplated or planned but thwarted. Timothy McVeigh considered a suicide bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah federal office building in Oklahoma City before finding a plan that did not require suicide. Four years before 9/11, two Palestinians plotted a suicide bombing of the New York City subway. Their plan was foiled when an informant tipped off police. And, of course, suicide attacks have long been conducted against American diplomatic and military targets abroad, from the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassies and Marine barracks in Beirut to the current campaign of suicide attacks in Iraq.
The spread of suicide terrorism worldwide suggests that the United States will not remain immune from this threat. Trends in terrorism already point to suicide terrorism's rising worldwide popularity. More than 350 suicide attacks have occurred in some 23 countries around the globe,including Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Italy, Indonesia, Pakistan, Colombia, Argentina, Kenya, Tanzania, Croatia, Morocco, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. According to The RAND Chronology of Terrorism, two-thirds of the suicide bombings recorded since 1968 have occurred in the past three years alone. As we know from the tragic events of 9/11, the United States is no more able to stop all suicide bombers than is any other targeted country.
However, other countries' experiences with suicide terrorism can teach us lessons that can significantly improve our chances of frustrating the ambitions of future suicide bombers here in the United States and speed our recovery if terrorists do strike. This primer builds on the experiences of foreign police and security forces, particularly in Israel and Sri Lanka, the two countries that have had the most sustained, intense, and numerous suicide attacks, to provide American law enforcement agencies and individual officers with a strong foundation on which to build and structure the preventive and countermeasures they are responsible for designing and implementing. Some of the recommendations are to educate the public and to alert officers to the unreliability of profiling while providing other ways to identify suicide bombers. Officers must also have appropriate policies and procedures in place for reacting to a potential or actual bombing. It is, for example, critical that victims receive immediate medical attention, but it is also critical to ensure that responders are safe from secondary attacks. Finally, the most effective way to counter suicide terrorism is not to rely on specialized units but to instill a countersuicide mindset in every the cop on the street.
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