I just returned from a mandated course on Weapons of Mass Destruction that is required for my NYS EMT recertification. It was a steaming pile of crap.
The “All Hazards” approach is the one being taught now. So, for the first 45 minutes we talked about how little money the US has offered Burma for cyclone relief and how the “government” failed the people of New Orleans. You see, all those people who had been cared for by the government for four generations were abandoned and they didn’t know enough to evacuate on their own.
So, the talk began with liberal politics and continued in that manner.
Explosives has been added to the list of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Follow me on this, it’s interesting. The instructor points to Oklahoma City, then moves to “We’ve all been exposed to WMD” as slides appear showing firearms. Yes, the Public Health weenies that consider firearms crimes as an epidemic have infected WMD training.
Columbine was a WMD event, apparently, though I somehow missed that announcement. Now I know because I took the NYS class.
Oh, and BTW, the people that died at the WTC did so because they were following their emergency plan. I guess Rick Rescorla was an idiot.
Essentially, the class was an exercise in attempting to conflate civilian incidents, including but not limited to haz mat incidents, with WMD attacks. Eric Rudolph came up as an example. Crazed bombers like him and Ted Kuzinscki are WMD for our purposes.
Curiously, the instructor maintained that there had never been an insurgent terrorist attack on US soil. I recalled for her the FALN attack on Congress in the late 1940′s and the Black Muslim attack in Washington in the 1970′s. I could have gone on but she wanted to talk about other matters.
We got the usual crap about bird flu and pandemics, without a mention that most people have lived through at least one flu pandemic.
And… as a final criticism, she managed to discuss car bombs without mentioning that both Oklahoma City and WTC I were VIED’s.
