The editor of the Witness recently sat down with Professor Tom Copeland to discuss his new book on terrorism and the class entitiled “global terrorism” that he teaches to juniors and seniors at Geneva College.

RP Witness: Your book Fool Me Twice almost wasn’t written. Could you share a little about that?

Prof. Copeland: My original interest for a dissertation topic was U.S. counterintelligence before and during World War II, particularly looking at Communist spies here in the U.S. A lot of new information had come out in the mid-1990s from Soviet and U.S. records. But my advisors all said, “No, lots of books are being done on this.” So I ended up focusing on intelligence study. I was also interested in terrorism. In August 1998, when I was returning to school, the U.S. embassies were bombed in Tanzania and Kenya. In 2000 there was the bombing of the USS Cole, and there were all the questions and threats about the new millennium.

I decided, as I looked at intelligence failures, that most of what had been written was written about wars or crises—the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pearl Harbor, the Yom Kippur War, and so on. Ideas about intelligence failure had never been applied to case studies in terrorism.
But there are so many different types of terrorism, and it has happened over so many years. There are assassinations and genocides, and all kinds of things in between that qualify as terrorism. I ended up just researching the mass-casualty terrorist incidents, partly because it was easy to get information about them.

I did the proposal and the professors liked it. I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2000 and went back to D.C. to work.

A year later, I was sitting in our apartment in Alexandria, Va., just down the river from the Pentagon. My wife had gone to work that morning and I was working from the home office. She called and said, “You’d better watch the TV, because a plane just hit the Trade Center.” It was pretty easy to tell that it wasn’t likely a navigational error. I was watching when the second plane hit.

Then I heard, as I was watching the coverage, that a plane had hit the Pentagon. I had a friend working downtown that day. They had shut down the Metro and everything, so he had to walk several miles to get home. I called and talked to him, and he could see smoke—from where he was it looked like it was from the White House. Within an hour or so we could see the smoke from the Pentagon drifting down the river. A couple days later, I had an interview at the DEA building across the street from the Pentagon, on the 12th floor, and I could see the burned-out side of the building, with the giant American flag draped on the side.

At first I thought that anything I would have to say usefully about intelligence failures in terrorism had been completely thrown away by [the scale of 9/11]. But it became obvious pretty quickly that there had been some major problems in intelligence this time. As I looked into that and into the earlier cases from 1993 onward, I could see that there were some parallels in terms of intelligence sharing.

RP Witness: What has been the response to the book?

Prof. Copeland: It was picked up by a small publishing house that does mostly legal publishing, so it’s not on the Oprah Winfrey bestsellers list or the New York Times bestsellers list. It’s being picked up by a lot of academic libraries, with some individual sales. I hate to say it, but it might take another big incident for the book to get to the front of someone’s pile of review books. I’m hoping that at some point they’ll think about publishing it in paperback, and then I could see it being used in classrooms and being more readily accessible to people.

RP Witness: Have you gotten any response from people in the intelligence community or in Washington?

Prof. Copeland: Not officially. There are some folks I know from down there who are pleased to see it and have read parts of it, but I don’t have a strong sense that it has made any kind of a difference down there.

RP Witness: So far you don’t think it’s going to change anything?

Prof. Copeland: Right. Partly because the conclusion is: Failures are going to keep happening. It’s not like I have the solution. If I gave a solution, it would sell lots of copies and would have plenty of attention.

RP Witness: Right, but also it wouldn’t be realistic. That’s a message you don’t hear very much. It’s one of your messages—that failures are inevitable. It’s one thing to have a good defense; it’s another thing to have people always out there who are hard to find and who are always looking for the holes in the defense. It’s hard for human beings to put up a proper defense against that all the time.

Prof. Copeland: Yes, there are all kinds of “official” explanations that I talk about in the book—the way that bureaucracies are structured, their turf battles, explanations why the CIA and FBI don’t talk to each other, and why information sharing is needed. There are explanations as to why policymakers don’t use the information wisely, official and scientific insights from psychology as to why our minds don’t process the information the right way, and why, in the mass of information overload, we can’t filter everything out. We’re not cognitively built to process as much as is coming in. Then you add the bad guys, whose number one goal is to find a way around our defenses. So we’re always back on our heels, responding to whatever they’re trying to do to us.

A conclusion beneath all of these other official reasons is that man in fallen. It wasn’t easy to articulate that in a book or dissertation headed for a secular school.

I think this really is the underlying thing. The fact that we can’t handle information, that presidents make mistakes, that agencies make mistakes—these things are products of our sinful nature. Intelligence failures are inevitable. Sin failures are inevitable.

That is one of the underlying themes that the book doesn’t really get to. We are fallen, and we are going to continue making mistakes until Christ comes. Although there are lots of good things that government can do, everything it does is still going to be marked by sin. So we need to have reasonable expectations of what government can do. As you look at the candidates for this year’s election, from whichever political party, the promises all have to be taken with a grain of salt, because their ability to do things is limited and it’s marked by sin. They’re never going to accomplish all the things they say they’re going to accomplish. It’s important for us, both as Christians and as citizens, to have that reasonable expectation of what government can do to resolve these things.

RP Witness: I like that term, “reasonable expectations.” What would be some reasonable expectations regarding the threat of terrorism, and what would be some reasonable expectations regarding what government can do about it?

Prof. Copeland: It’s reasonable to expect that terrorism will continue for at least another century. Terrorism is a tactic; it’s just a tool. Governments have used it against people. What we call terrorist groups have been at work for over 100 years, since the anarchists of the early Russian Revolution. As a tactic, it has been used for a long time, and it is not going to go away. People are always going to find a way to use fear to try to produce political change.

In that respect, even if we are able at some point to put the lid on Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups, there are still going to be domestic terrorist groups, like Timothy McVeigh and the Patriots, who committed the Oklahoma City bombing. There are going to be whacked-out cults, like Aum Shinrikyo from Japan in the 1990s, who are going to find that terror is a useful tactic for them.

There’s only one reasonable expectation—that we’re going to have to keep confronting this particular tactic for a long time. And we should expect, within reason, that the government will do its best to try to protect society; but we’re so vulnerable in so many ways that they can’t protect against everything. They can’t protect every building, every school, every shopping center, every place where people gather. Government can’t ultimately keep us safe from everything, by any means.

As far as reasonable expectations, we need to acknowledge that there are limits to how much any tinkering with the intelligence agencies affects things. The 9/11 Commission proposed all kinds of things to restructure intelligence in the U.S. It’s not quite as bad as reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, but it’s pretty close. We’re going to have failures no matter how they reorganize things. In some ways all they’ve done is created a new bottleneck, called the Director of National Intelligence, which makes it harder, rather than easier, for information to get to the president.

RP Witness: What would have been a better response besides creating the Director of National Intelligence and trying to group all this information together under one umbrella?

Prof. Copeland: It’s hard to say. Some of the things that could be better would be information sharing, taking down some barriers between the FBI and the CIA, and providing more resources for analysis of information. In the 1990s, the number of analysts the CIA had was cut, and they didn’t spend money on training. There were only two people in the FBI at 9/11 who could speak Arabic.

We need better human intelligence inside [terrorist] groups. While it is difficult to do that, there are guys like Richard Reid, who was the shoe bomber, and the kid who was the American Taliban, who show that it’s possible for people to get into those organizations. We didn’t put much effort into doing that before 9/11.

They rushed through this decision to centralize everything further, and ultimately penalized the CIA when the FBI was more at fault. So there are some things they could do structurally that were different that might have been a better solution. There are some things in the analysis process that they could do differently in terms of challenging their assumptions, making sure they keep experts on the right track, and so on—they reassign them to things and they then lose their expertise.

But in some ways there is not a lot we can do to make this a whole lot better. We can rearrange and shuffle things, but it’s not necessarily going to keep us from having another failure.

RP Witness: That’s not a rosy picture.

Prof. Copeland: No. A lot of the things that I identify in the book—organizational problems and leadership problems and analysis problems—all those things exist during intelligence successes as well as intelligence failures. We stopped a massive bombing campaign at the time of the millennium in 2000. We had the same broken, dysfunctional bureaucratic problems, same psychological issues internally, same questions about presidential leadership. All those things applied when we stopped the bad guys as they did when we failed to stop them.

RP Witness: You talk in your book about something called “new terrorism.” How does that differ from the older terrorism?

Prof. Copeland: The old terrorism was marked in the 1960s and ’70s by, in some cases, Communist motivation, but usually by nationalist motivations. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) would be the prototypical old cell terrorist groups. They were concerned about winning people’s hearts and minds, so they were careful about who they targeted. They often operated primarily within their own home territory. They didn’t want to cause a lot of extraneous deaths because that would have defeated their purpose. They were willing to negotiate. They would trade prisoners or hostages for something, or they would ask for payment of $1 million; but you could negotiate with them to a certain extent.

In the new terrorism, in the 1990s and forward, you’ve got “lone gunmen” like Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) who have their own set of motivations and are willing to use terrorism to try to kill as many people as possible. Both McVeigh and Shoko Asahara (who ran the Aum Shinrikyo cult) wanted to create civil war, or even nuclear war, on a massive scale to bring about the political change they wanted. They didn’t care who died as a result of their actions.

Then you add fundamentalist Islamic groups, and Bin Laden. They’re not trying to necessarily obtain short-term political objectives. They talk about the caliphate, talk about the big picture and ideas about Islamic rule, but it really means Islamic rule at the expense of killing everyone who’s a nonbeliever. You can’t negotiate with Bin Laden. Yes, he’d like to see U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia, but that’s not going to placate him. And they’re willing to target civilians, to intentionally kill as many as possible to make their point. They’re much harder to deal with. There’s no room for negotiation or compromise with them: Someone has to win, and someone has to lose. There’s no other alternative.

RP Witness: What are the things that are most on the minds of the students in your class?

Prof. Copeland: Many of them comment on how much they realize that they’ve been unaware of a lot that’s going on. They weren’t aware that there were other kinds of terrorists, other than little Bin Ladens, basically. They’ve all been born since the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks bombings in 1983 in Lebanon. Most of them didn’t know the World Trade Center had been bombed a previous time in 1993. They might have some sort of vague notion of the Oklahoma City bombing, and usually don’t know anything about the other big bombings around the world in the years after that. It’s really only 9/11 that struck them.

I try to get them to understand—not to sympathize with, but maybe to understand the motivations of—the people who decide to do this. I have them read a book by a couple social scientists who went and lived inside Palestinian camps for a while and worked alongside folks from Hezbollah, or sat in homes and interviewed people who are involved in Hezbollah and suicide bombers’ families. There’s another book by a guy who spent a number of years as a journalist in Northern Ireland talking to families of IRA bombers. I want them to get a deeper understanding of the world view difference between people who are willing to do that kind of violence and the Christian world view of how we handle differences, and what our appropriate response is to persecution and violence.

RP Witness: Would you describe your students as worried or fearful about the future?

Prof. Copeland: In general, no. They feel pretty good about what has happened with Homeland Security, but I think that’s because no other major incidents have happened since 9/11. They would have all been in high school at the time of 9/11, so I think they probably felt a lot more insecurity at that point. I showed them a documentary called Last Best Chance that creates a short movie version of a scenario where terrorists seize nuclear materials from a defunct Russian military base and use it to create a radioactive device. When I had them do journal responses and responses to movies, a lot of them wrote about how surprised they were. You get threat scenarios on TV, the 24 series on Fox and Jericho, and various kinds of popular images, but they’ve never actually thought about the fact that it actually might be real.

RP Witness: Would you say that some kind of nuclear device being used in terrorism is inevitable?

Prof. Copeland: Yes, I think it is, given the motivation of this new breed of terrorists, where many of them just want to cause as much damage as possible. I don’t think it will happen from domestic terrorist groups. The Tom Clancy novel, The Sum of All Fears, addresses that. I think in the book the actual terrorists using nuclear devices are Middle Eastern terrorists. When they made a movie version, they made it the domestic terrorists who used a nuclear device. I think that’s really unlikely because, like the older terrorist groups, domestic groups—militias, patriots, and so on—would realize that they would lose some of the public support that they would want here in the U.S., that it wouldn’t be very productive for them.

But Al-Qaeda in the past has tried to get access to nuclear materials. They don’t have to make a fissionable nuclear bomb out of it. They just have to get some radioactive material and use a regular explosive, and they could do a lot of damage to ports and cities and residential areas. It’s much easier, frankly, to do that than to do either biological or chemical weapons. It’s so hard to get the materials in those kinds of weapons of mass destruction into a form and in a way that can be spread very effectively. The heat from an explosion will knock out half the material in one of those, unless it’s designed very carefully. It’s more difficult to do that than just a dirty bomb.

I also think it’s inevitable that at some point we’ll face suicide bombers here in the U.S. The level of infiltration by Muslim groups in the U.S. is so high already, and we’re finding enough cases of Americans who have either gone over to work with the Taliban, or guys who’ve been arrested planning things from here in the U.S., that I think it’s clear that there are terrorist cells here in the U.S., and the question is “when,” not “if” they start using that tactic as well.

RP Witness: As you’re teaching and talking to these students and talking about these subjects, you’re bound to evoke some fear in people. Yet, as a Christian, you’re also thinking, “Jesus said, ‘Don’t fear those who can harm the body but who cannot harm the soul.’” How do you help the students, and how do you reconcile those things?

Prof. Copeland: It’s a hard balance. You want to be able to just say, “Look, I rest in the sovereignty of God, I know that He’s got all things in His hand.” It’s hard to balance that, though, with a reasonable level of fear and concern about the threat of terrorism. We want to protect our families, so it’s typical, I think, to think quite a bit about how to keep your family safe. In the class, one of the primary things I’m doing is making them unsettled about it, making them aware of the problem, how it works, the motivations of the folks who do it. At this point I don’t have a lecture on the relationship between God’s sovereignty and terrorism. I point them towards that with some of these issues, such as if or when a Christian might decide to use a terrorist tactic, and how a Christian should think about the use of torture as a response to terrorism.

RP Witness: Are there ways that Christians should be preparing or acting? Is there something we should be stirring the pot about? Is there a policy that we should be endorsing? Is there something we should be talking about more from the pulpit?

Prof. Copeland: We need to be aware not just of issues related to terrorism; we need to have a stronger Christian voice about the ways in which we fight terrorism. I think we tend to uncritically support whatever is done in the name of national security. We can and should still support the government trying to fight the terrorists, but I think we need to have a voice in how the government goes about doing that.

I didn’t have a problem with the warrant-less wiretaps program, by any means, but I do have a problem with torture. I think that rendition is the predecessor to torture, usually.

RP Witness: Rendition?

Prof. Copeland: Seizing a suspect in a foreign country, transporting them someplace else like Egypt or Syria or Jordan to have them tortured to get information from them, and then deciding what to do with them; rather than bringing them here to the U.S. and providing them with some version of the U.S. justice system, whether it’s in the military tribunals or the criminal courts, etc. Rendition started in the 1990s, and Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, came up with the term “extraordinary rendition” as a euphemism for kidnapping and torturing subjects and suspects.

We need to have a stronger voice about how we go about fighting the war on terror. I’m not at all suggesting that we shouldn’t support the government, but we need to have a clearer voice on how to go about that. We’ve clearly made some mistakes in how we do it, and that contributes to public opposition around the world to what the U.S. wants to do. I don’t think it leads directly to new terrorists being formed—we haven’t turned every 17-year-old in the Muslim world against us by doing that—but I think we contribute to an environment where they dislike us enough already, and they see it as one more unfair tool or advantage we’re using against them. You asked about preparation. I’m not a survivalist. I don’t think we need to be stockpiling, at least at this point, unless the government advises us it is better for our safety. We don’t need to be stockpiling duct tape and plastic sheets and canned organic food and so on. But I think we need to be, like any good citizens, sensible and careful, and try to support government policies that seem like they will do the best job of detecting and deterring terrorists from taking action. Ultimately there is some question of cost. Like I said before, the government can’t protect against everything without taxing us to death, so we have to accept some risk.

RP Witness: You brought up wiretapping. Would you say that, so far, you don’t have a great privacy issue with tactics that have been used, or at least publicized?

Prof. Copeland: Yes. In the background of one of the so-called warrant-less wiretap program, the media didn’t cover the behind-the-scene conversations that actually happened between the justice department and the foreign intelligence surveillance court and the Supreme Court. Apparently there were some backdoor proceedings and conversations that, I think, gave the administration the green light, they felt, from the courts, that what they were doing was going to be legal.

I think as long as it is clearly targeted at terrorism, we need to allow the government some room to filter information. They can’t know every time, “This is the one terrorist communication out of one million.” I know that there are Christians who are worried. I have some sympathy for this concern—that big government could go from watching terrorists to looking for what people believe, opening the door for later persecution of Christians. While I think that is possible, we have to be careful of the logical fallacy of the slippery slope. And that’s why I think we need to have a voice now in what the government does in fighting terrorism, why we need Christians to continue to devote and be involved in politics and try to transform society and transform government so we put some of those checks in place—kind of restrain sin by staying involved.

RP Witness: Is there anything else?

Prof. Copeland: One thing I had mentioned was the conversation about torture, beyond just rendition. I have the students think about the test case that is always given: If you know that so-and-so had information about a bomb that was going to go off someplace and would kill 1,000 people, would you torture the terrorist to try to get the information? Usually the students’ first response is, “Oh yes, of course, if this would save 1,000 lives, I would do it.” Then you’re left with the case of Abraham and the cities of the Jordan valley [Sodom and Gomorrah]—if there are 100 found righteous, or 50 found righteous—and so on. If you think the terrorist knows about a bomb that might kill two people, is it worth torturing? Then the students’ answers become “maybe.” As the numbers change, their answers change a little bit.

I say, “Well, if you knew that the terrorist knew about a bomb that would harm your family members, would you condone it?” The student says, “Oh, absolutely.”

Of course, if you have that kind of information, you have to have other intelligent sources that tell you what this guy knows, that maybe you can use. I point out to them that often people will say almost anything to avoid being tortured; or after they’ve been tortured they’ll still say anything to make it stop, so the information is often really unreliable and has to be verified against other information anyway.

So on a practical level, as I try to teach about torture, we’ll talk about the types of torture. Is causing psychological harm the same thing as causing physical harm? Pulling out someone’s fingernails seems much more extreme than telling them that their mother didn’t love them. But then they’re left with this sort of long gray scale of harshness of torture, in response to what kinds of things; so I try to get the students to really think about these issues related to how it’s used. Then I ask them a more fundamental question: As Christians, should we ever support intentionally inflicting harm on somebody who is also made in God’s image? And we talk about situations in which Christians believe it is legitimate to take a life, whether in self-defense, or defensive war, or just-war tradition.

But I want them to think how torture is different from just war. You don’t have an enemy who’s acting in the same ways and you don’t know for sure what this person knows. You’re simply inflicting harm in the hope that you’ll get some information that might be useful. I just really try to challenge their thinking about what, if any level of torture, should or could I support as a Christian. A lot of students still come out saying, “Well, I think the government should have some leeway, and we should allow some level of torture.” I’m personally inclined to say, “No, I think we start down a really bad direction when we start using torture.” But I’m still left trying to figure it out myself, about psychological pressure, denying food for a day, making them sleep standing up, bright lights—things that don’t cause lasting physical or psychological harm. Maybe there are some tactics that would be useful in getting information. But once again, you have to connect it back again to the question of God’s sovereignty. I don’t have all the answers. I try to get the students to start thinking about the questions they’ve never asked before. That usually is enough to give them lots of food for thought.

Dr. Tom Copeland is assistant professor of political science and humanities at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa. He worked previously as chief of staff for the government services division of LexisNexis and as an open source intelligence trainer for LexisNexis, serving U.S. federal and state law enforcement and homeland security agencies, as well as law enforcement in Canada and the United Kingdom. He and his wife Ava have two children. They are members of the College Hill (Beaver Falls, Pa.) RPC.