Taj attack couldn't have been prevented

[ridata]

Part of an article here.

Do you think the attacks could have been prevented? I think the measures they had in place / took after the warning were rather lame. And they relaxed those that they had right before the attack.
They need to learn from the terrorists, who clearly knew what they were doing. The security needed to know the inside of the building in the day and in the night. Backup lighting needs to be in place that doesn't feed off a single source that can be wiped out with a grenade. Security needs to have firepower that equals or excedes that of the terrorists. There needs to be a security force that doesn't up and run off as soon as terrorists come in and hold a couple hundred people hostage(I'm not sure if the ones they had did, but they didn't seem to do a whole lot of good, the army seems to have done most of it).

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, regardless of the fact that it relaxed security shortly before the attacks.

"If I look at what we had, which all of us complained about, it could not have stopped what took place," he said. Video Watch Tata discuss the threats »

"It's ironic that we did have such a warning, and we did have some measures," Tata said, without elaborating on the warning or when security measures were enacted. "People couldn't park their cars in the portico, where you had to go through a metal detector."

However, Tata said the attackers did not enter through the entrance that has a metal detector. Instead, they came in a back entrance, he said.

"They knew what they were doing, and they did not go through the front. All of our arrangements are in the front," he said.

"They planned everything," he said of the attackers. "I believe the first thing they did, they shot a sniffer dog and his handler. They went through the kitchen."

...

 Tata said that not even the army or commandoes who ultimately took over the offensive were prepared for the level of organization and execution that the attackers seemed to have put into their plan.

"They seemed to know [the hotel] in the night or in the daytime," he said of the attackers. "They seemed to have planned their moves quite well, and there seem to have been a lot of pre-planning."

[TommyGunn]

I have so far heard one report, from a photographer who was angry because he spotted police cowering and not returning fire when the terrorists shot at them.
What to make of this is another matter.  Did the photographer have reasonable expectations of what the police were able to do under the circumstances   Don't know.
Maybe they were so outgunned that would have been impossible.
Could it have been prevented?
Well, maybe.  There's going to be a lot of talk of this in the autopsy reports on the incident.

[stephendutton]

I can't think of anything specific that would have stopped the attacks taking place. Only random chance such as a costal patrol boat happening to be in the right place at the right time to stop the terrorists coming ashore, but they had probably figured out when such boats would be around.
The Indian response could have gone much better, but I don't know of any precident for an attack like this for governments or security forces to base training on. I saw in the news today that an Indian government minister has resigned over this, saying he had to take moral responsibility.

[Gunsmom]

I suspect the police may very well have been outgunned; I'd have been surprised if they were as well-armed and trained as US SWAT teams, for example. The hotel security also seems inadequate- why put a metal detector at only one entrance, for example- but then again, it doesn't sound as if metal detectors would have done much if anything to deter the terrorists.

I believe that if I were the hotel owner and wished to stay in business, particularly with a large hotel catering to foreign visitors, I'd hire the best security consulting firm I could find ASAP and sink considerable resources into doing everything possible to discourage a repeat performance.

I'd do the same if I were the owner of a similar hotel just about anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

[Doug Wojtowicz]

When a sane dog battles a mad dog, it will surely lose its ear.