SALT LAKE CITY — There are good days and there are bad days. For Danny Barber, a legal adviser to the president of the United States, Friday fell somewhere in the middle.

"We had a plane explosion where several thousand people died," Barber said, ruefully. "But we made the right decision, apparently."

Barber is not, in fact, a legal adviser to President Barack Obama. Nor was there a large plane explosion anywhere in the U.S. on Friday. But that was the situation that played out in a 3.5-hour counterterrorism simulation at the S.J. Quinney College of Law in Salt Lake, now a well-known annual event organized by counterterrorism professor and drone warfare expert Amos Guiora.

The simulation is so realistic that the Belgian chief of police assembled his staff to watch it unfold on YouTube one year, Guiora said.

Another time, people in New York stumbled across the live stream and wrote letters to the president of the university thanking him for providing a transparent window into U.S. counterterrorism operations, he said.

Amelia Oakes, an international affairs master's student who helped design the simulation, said the designers take inspiration from real-world events.

The students started creating the simulation last summer, but "after the Paris attacks, we realized this could happen in multiple places simultaneously," Oakes said.

This year, the simulation hit students with a barrage of terrorist attacks. In less than four hours, they fended off a plane hijacking, a bombing at an embassy and a data breach involving international hackers.

Law students represented entities like the U.S. Department of State, the White House and the FBI. At each decision point, they had to make a choice. Should they take action? If so, should they choose a drone strike? An arrest? Interrogation? Torture?

"Can we raise the security level at each of these power stations?" a member of the president's team asked at one point early on in the simulation.

Barber sprang into action as other team members argued about the finer points of sovereignty law.

"This is Danny Barber, legal support for the president, and this is a message for federal law enforcement," he barked into a phone.

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Barber and his team eventually decided to blow up the plane before it could crash into a stadium in Georgia, where crowds had gathered for an NCAA basketball game. The hundreds of hypothetical passengers on the plane, including U.S. citizens, died.

Later, students answered for their decisions at press conferences and in congressional hearings led by local attorneys.

"You feel empathetic to the people who have to make these decisions in real life, because in the back of our minds, you can always separate yourself, and this is a fake situation," Barber said. "The people that actually make these real-life decisions, it's very real, and I could see how it'd be incredibly morally difficult."

Several major attacks took place even as students were preparing for the simulation, including the November terrorist attacks in Paris and the attacks in Brussels.

As the first simulation of the day was getting underway, news broke that police had arrested one of the key suspects in the Brussels and Paris attacks.

"Brussels really highlights the importance of countries sharing information amongst one another," Barber said. "A lot of people have criticized Brussels recently for not taking more action on these individuals, because they were on the watch list and known to be radical individuals. That information, whether or not it was shared between the nations, could have helped maybe prevent the attack."

Guiora said the changing nature of modern terrorism has shown that the issue is becoming much more complex than it was in the past.

He draws on his own two decades serving in the Israeli Defense Forces when he says that it used to be easier to distinguish between domestic and international terrorism. "Today, I think they're much more conjoined," Guiora said.

The professor has been at the university since 2007 and has been running counterterrorism simulations for far longer than that.

"You ask any presidential candidate, senatorial candidate, congressional candidate, and I think they would benefit from coming here for three hours," he said.

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