Many of the state and local law enforcement training trips are organized and paid for by Jewish groups with close ties to Israel, such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The Israeli government also has sent its police commanders and top bomb experts to the United States to brief thousands of police officers and the feds. Maj. Gen. Mickey Levy, the police attache at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., has done a lot of the training. As commander of the Jerusalem police, Levy supervised investigations of 42 suicide bombings in four years that killed 356 people and wounded 1,500 others. "It was a rough four years, believe me," says Levy.

In June 2001, Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a progressive U.S. policing group, invited Levy and his colleagues to tour the World Trade Center's emergency operations command. "We showed them a structure that we thought was impenetrable," remembers Wexler. Three months later, watching the towers crumble to the ground like so much gray confetti, Levy was stunned. "I said to myself, 'It's unbelievable; it's unbelievable.'" Despite 9/11, translating the Israeli policing experience to Americans is a huge challenge. "We are not psychologically prepared to deal with it yet," says former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer, who traveled to Israel three years ago. "Our police departments are inching towards it, as they implement new policies and procedures."

Last July, the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued controversial new training guidelines advising officers to shoot suicide bombers in the head to prevent detonation. Two weeks later, London police, using a similar policy, shot to death a Brazilian man wrongly suspected as a suicide bomber. Some U.S. police chiefs believe that it's important to prepare bomb technicians and SWAT teams. But they say training street patrol officers, who have long been drilled in the use of defensive maneuvers, in these new offensive tactics is premature and risky, given the still largely hypothetical threat. "We go down that path at our own peril," says Miami Police Chief John Timoney, who just returned from Israel, "because there's going to be a bleed-over effect in ordinary dealings with average citizens."

Varied threats. The FBI recently distributed a two-hour suicide bomb response training CD-ROM to police departments nationwide. But the FBI's counterterrorism chief, Joseph Billy, discounts the notion that the next attack will definitely be a suicide bombing. "Suicide bombers are certainly the most confounding thing for us," says Billy. "But there are still truck bombs that are remotely detonated and other plots without martyrdom operations. Our awareness level has to be on all fronts, not just suicide."

Regionally, the Pennsylvania Southeastern Counterterrorism Task Force and the Philadelphia police have conducted some of the most exhaustive first-responder training, with the help of Philadelphia police bomb squad commander Lt. Tom Fitzpatrick, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier who has spent his own money and time to travel numerous times to Israel and other countries to study suicide bombings. "It's obvious that it's a global movement," says Fitzpatrick. "We haven't been hit to the extent other countries have been hit on an ongoing basis yet."