True. One would think that if you throw away concern for hostages, it should be trivial to just surround the place with hundreds of troops and shoot everyone inside a structure...Sea Skimmer wrote: OF COURSE it was planned as massacre. That isn't in doubt, it still doesn't make the Russian handling even slightly competent. Remember that some of the Chechens got away from that siege, and others were caught and killed only by armed Russian civilians.
But that's where we come back to the point about simple countermeasures to wonder weapons, don't we? Clearing the building took that long because A) It was HUGE and B) There were explosives everywhere.Sea Skimmer wrote: According to some Russian doctors all but one of the hostages killed died from the gas. The only Chechens to able to fight back were in a backroom away from all but IIRC one hostage who was showing them the video the theaters cameras had taken of the initial seizure. They were killed rather quickly. All the rest were simply executed out of hand. It was not any major pitched battle that took place. Some of the hostages were done for from the initial gassing and that’s more or less acceptable given how hopeless a storming was without gas, but to then remove the rest, place them sitting upright and unconscious on buses, which took hours to load in some cases before heading to the hospital, and then refusing to tell doctors what drugs they had been exposed too.. all murderous incompetence. But its Russia, the goal was to kill the terrorists.
And while a competent rescue effort would've vastly reduced hostage casualties, it couldn't elliminate them because of the problems inherent to the use of gas, namely controlling the dosage - some hostages would've died anyways and no amount of fully informed doctors would've saved them. And sure, it was acceptable because the alternative was a company-sized infantry battle that would've ended with the Chechens detonating the explosives and killing EVERYBODY...
Seeing as the original point was a guy wondering why knock-out gas wasn't commonly used...how does the moscow theatre argue in favor of that? The gas killed hostages. Wondering why it isn't used every time there's a hostage situation is like wondering why SWAT doesn't just throw frag grenades through the windows as standard practice.
They don't because it WILL kill hostages (less than frag grenades, but still). Which is acceptable when there's a platoon of guerillas holding 800 people, not when it's five guys holding ten or twenty people.
It's still common. In fact getting more common, both with guerillas and organized criminal groups, except now you kidnap people and hold them in remote places (like a mountainous jungle) while negotiating, because that pretty much elliminates the headache of figuring out how to get away from hundreds of angry cops surrounding youSimon_Jester wrote:When did hostage taking actually work, anyway? Was there a period back in the '60s or '70s where it was at least occasionally effective?
