Heads To Roll?

[suffragette]

This sort of thing never happens in the movies!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6171 600.stm
It may seem a very minor incident, but I bet the real terrorists are analysing this situation as much as the secret service.

Do you think numerous guards actually protect family members of VIP's or merely draw attention to them wherever they go and make them more liable to a random attack of some description?

[jno]

I shouldn't think the guards were standing in a ring around them flourishing machine guns. More likely they were sitting as inconspicuously as possible at a nearby table. Probably had so much Argentine steak piled on the table in front of them they lost sight of the subject. Hard to say what terrorists might learn from this, except that everyone makes mistakes, which they probably knew already. But I imagine one or two of the guards will be put on gardening duties for a while.

[WoWo]

To be honest, the idea anybody is safe these days is rubbish. You could kill pretty much anybody you fancied... the thing is that the rules are different, take for example the IRA, despite there being plenty of casualties during the "troubles" their bombing campaign was always about dirsuption and importantly people were not necessarily willing to die for the cause (at least not needlessly). This made both detection and stopping such activity easier, but today with people willing to get caught up in such things there isn't really any stopping them.

In most cases body guards are there to stop something like a kidnap, look at the success rate of presidencial assasinations, pretty high to be honest.

[jake-the-peg]

I think the point is that if someone got close enough to do that and get away there's all sorts of other things they could have done.

And it's not just terrorists there are enough head cases out there!

Somebody's going to be directing traffic.

Still at least they didn't leave a laptop full of national secrets in a tapas bar!

[Bazile]

Unless they were being tracked ( which is unlikely ) would anybody have known that they were the daughters of the president - before the theft ?

[Grunty]

Would they have been paid to guard the persons, or look after their handbags.?

[NH]

I think the guards were looking for terrorists, snipers, assassins etc. as opposed to handbag thieves.

I mean, come on...you put the strap around a chair leg and the bag under the table...every woman knows that.

[Bazile]

Oh come on NH ... We are talking here about the daughters of the President of the USA .

They have been from birth ,coseted and protected from the
big bad world out there - they woud hardly be street wise enough to know that they should wrap their handbag straps around their chair , when out and about .. lol