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Security experts angry about performance of Phillipine police
Security experts Tuesday were baffled and angered by the Philippines' handling of a hostage crisis in which a lone gunman was able to monitor ill-coordinated police operations live on television."The fact that there was essentially live video was mistake number one," said assistant professor John Harrison, a homeland security analyst at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He told AFP there should have been a media blackout to deny the hijacker feedback on what was going on around him. No way, "freedom of the press" is more important, even when people get killed. Journalists say so and they're the ones who get to have opinions. Instead, he was able to follow events -- including frenzied speculation by serving and former police chiefs appearing on Philippine networks -- via the bus's internal TV. A retired Philippine military official who wrote a counter-terrorism manual and now runs a security consultancy said the police had enough expertise and equipment to deal with such an incident, but they were not put to use. "Those budget-stealing bastards on the SWAT team aren't getting the glory from this one!" The retired official believed many of the policemen on the scene, some of them seen crouching without any body armour behind patrol cars, did not appear to be fully trained Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) personnel. "They just put helmets on certain people," he remarked. Posted by: gromky 2010-08-24 |
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