It started out just like any other day for the first day of middle school. Some of the kids were in the play ground area and others where just getting dropped off by bus and some by parents. In other parts of the school parents and teachers were talking about the new school year. Mean while 5 men in what appeared to be black or dark green clothes came running across the field towards the school holding large weapons. Some of the kids in the area saw them, but did not know if it was real or if it was just a game until the teachers came running out yelling at them to run and the sound of gun fire could be heard. In the next 2 to 3 minutes a van with 6 more armed gun men will pull up in front of the school and the whole school will be taken over. In the next 5 minutes all adults and children will be rounded up and put into the cafeteria, 5 minutes after that all exits and entrances will have explosives set or will be guarded by armed gunmen. In the next 3 to 5 minutes all adult males and any male children that could put up any kind of resistance will be shot and killed.
As horrible as this story is, it is based on an actual event that occurred on Sunday September 5, 2004 at a middle school in a place called Beslan in Russia. The actual event lasted 53 hours and some 1200 children and adults had been taken hostage. The final results were one of the most horrible terrorist acts that Russia had ever seen. 700 people were wounded, 338 were killed including 172 children. As some one who has been in the security field for a long time I began to think about our schools here, and are they safe from this kind of a terrorist act. The research I did was both an eye opener and scary. The information I found was too much to put into one article so this is going to be a 2 part article. First let’s look at who would want to do such a horrible thing. What I found out was that this is the goal of Al-Qaeda. In few months after 9/11, it was revealed that video tapes captured in Afghanistan showed Al-Qaeda terrorist training to take over a school and as if that was not enough in 2004 An Iraqi was got with a computer that had information on the Department of Education crisis planning for U.S. School districts. Then, there is the statement from Al-Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith, He declared al-Qaeda’s right to kill 2 million American children.
As for right here in the USA, well here are some things you may or may not have heard about. First the FBI and Homeland Security this month issued a routine advisory to state and local officials stating that foreign members of “extremist Groups” had already or were in the process of getting licenses to drive school buses. Also last year 2 Saudi men boarded a school bus full of children in Tampa Florida terrifying them and remained on the bus for the whole ride, during this time they laughed and spoke in Arabic. One of the biggest things I found that has scared me to death is the fact all the attacks on the schools throughout the world and the planned and rehearsed and trained attacks that have been done, none of them had any kind of escape or exit plan. This tells the experts that these terrorist have planned to die where ever they are and take as many of our children with them as they can. John Giduck an expert on Beslan and an author of “Terror at Beslan” says,
To understand how credible the threat is, we need only to look at the achievements of so many terror groups. In the first six months of 2006, 204 schools were attacked in Afghanistan. Three of them were attacked in two days in the first week of July 2007. Between 1984 and 1994 more then 300 schools were attacked in turkey.
The numbers of school attacks are rising in places like Pakistan, Iraq, Indonesia and Thailand as well. A new girls’ school in Iraq was found to have a dozens of bombs hidden in the floor and walls and, just two weeks ago, a school was targeted in Great Britain. I also bet you never heard that the backup plan for the Madrid train bombers was a school.
But, despite all of these incidents, Beslan was the terrorists’ best case scenario – which means that it is our worst case scenario. So what is the likelihood of it happening here? Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders have publicly stated that before this jihad is over they will see to the deaths of 4 million Americans, including 2 million American children. After several attacks involving children in Russia he said that what he was doing in Russia he would do to America. The head of the Chechen terrorists, Shamil Basayev made a similar pledge before his death at the hands of Russian Special Forces. Afghan terror camps training tapes depict jihadists attacking students in a school, issuing instructions in English.
In addition to all of that Mr. Giduck also has said that people with no connection to any schools have come down from Canada and tried to buy buses, and not to long ago some buses were stolen in Houston. There has also been evidence of intelligence gathering of schools and school facilities in places like Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, Florida, Virginia and California. No matter what you may think, you must admit that there is so much evidence that it can not be over looked. One of the biggest things we can not do is to bury our heads in the sand that will not make it go away. As for those you who say that could not happen here, let me say this, we did not think they would fly planes into our buildings, but they did.
So I would imagine that by now you are wandering what can we do to keep our children safe? Well in my next article “How safe is your school (Part 2), I will talk about some of the things we can do to be proactive instead of reactive, and what we can do to make sure that the schools are also doing what they can to keep our children safe. Just remember “Denial has never and will never be a strategy for Victory” By Lt Col Ruffini a counter terrorism expert and author of “When Terror comes to main street: A citizens’ guide to terror Awareness, Preparedness, and prevention”
As for right here in the 
