Analysis of Terrorist Tactics and Societal Response

Terrorist Objectives and Methods

The text outlines several potential motivations and methods employed by terrorists, contrasting amateur actions with professional planning.

Potential Terrorist Actions

• Amateur Actions: Involve simply "pressing the button."
• Professional Planning: Suggests that professionals may have planned the explosions and planted the explosives.

Terrorist Goals (As Analyzed)

Terrorists pursue specific goals, which can be categorized as:

1. Destabilization and Panic:
   • Targeting life-support facilities to create panic, often without causing human casualties.
   • Example: Using six hundred grams of explosives to leave an average Moscow district without light, water, and heating, which would cause a greater stir than the current situation.
2. Economic Damage:
   • Targeting major enterprises, factories, and infrastructure centers.
3. Symbolic Statement:
   • Targeting significant symbols of statehood, such as:
     • A business center (as seen in the USA).
     • An administrative building.
     • A monument.
   • Ideally, they take responsibility immediately or even before the explosion.

The Ultimate Goal

The overarching goal of these "operations" is identified as:
* Mass human casualties, but not for the sake of blood, but for the sake of demoralization and embitterment of the people.
* The hope is that a few more such cases will lead to spontaneous unrest, potentially resulting in lynchings, primarily against Caucasians, providing a pretext for a state of emergency.

Media Influence and Mass Hysteria

The text criticizes the role of the mass media in exacerbating the situation:

• The media actively contributes by showing mutilated corpses and crying and screaming people.
• The focus is on sensational facts and effective footage, rather than analyzing the situation or understanding the reasons behind the events.
• This process is described as how mass hysteria is whipped up, which was also successfully planned.
• This training makes society loyal to any, even the most unjustified and absurd, actions by the authorities.

Questions for Authorities (Professional Perspective)

Professionals raise several critical questions regarding the response and investigation procedures:

Procedural Lapses

• Immediate Search Protocol: According to a long-standing order from the Minister of Internal Affairs, immediately after an attack, the district police officer, along with the fire supervision inspector and a representative of the sanitary-epidemiological station, should conduct raids in adjacent territories to search for explosive storage facilities.
• Authority Discrepancy: While the district officer requires a prosecutor's warrant to check premises, a fire inspector can inspect any warehouse or utility room at any time without bureaucracy. The question posed is: Why did such checks only start now?

Investigative Failures

• Intelligence Network: A narrow group is willing to commit such "actions." With a developed agent network among district inspectors (as used by special services), identifying main suspects would not have been difficult.
• System Collapse: The informant network on criminal issues was destroyed along with the network of those who "snitched" for political reasons. The text questions the current call for citizens to watch each other if the informant system has been destroyed.

Note on Detonator: The fuse (detonator) is noted to be similar in size to a pen cap, and the mechanism could be as small as an entire ballpoint pen. The timing could have been set a week ago (if chemical delay was used) or a few hours prior. The text contrasts the possibility of professionals planning the attacks versus amateurs simply "pressing the button."*