Stephen Sloan: Terrorism Expert

March 23, 2005

University of Central Florida professor Stephen Sloan, a terrorism expert who lived 10 blocks from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building when it was bombed, is available for media interviews about the 10^th anniversary of the tragedy (April 19, 1995).

Biography:

Sloan taught 38 years at the University of Oklahoma before he began working last fall as a fellow in the UCF Global Perspectives Office. He has taught classes, made workshop presentations and developed terrorism simulations for nearly 40 years.

He was a member of the steering committee that established the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a nonprofit group that was incorporated in 1999 to provide the families of the Oklahoma City bombing victims a “living memorial.” The group researches the social and political causes of terrorism and ways to counter attacks.

Sloan taught last summer at the Program on Terrorism and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. Since the 1970s, he has developed simulations of terrorist attacks to help the U.S. Army and Air Force and other government agencies and businesses prepare for those scenarios. He conducted workshops for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey before the World Trade Center was first bombed in 1993 and was an expert contributor to the Vice President’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism in 1986.

He has worked as a consultant with U.S. and foreign governments and with state and local law enforcement agencies.

Expertise:

Sloan can speak about several aspects of the Oklahoma City bombing and what we have learned from it. The bombing, according to Sloan:

-- Showed Americans and the U.S. government that more than just big-city buildings on the U.S. east and west coasts are vulnerable to attacks. Terrorism, the bombing showed, could impact the Heartland, and “people began to realize that something like this could happen in Des Moines, Kansas City or Beloit, Wis.,” Sloan said.

-- Demonstrated the difficulties of catching terrorists who operate individually or in small groups before they attack. Even the strongest intelligence systems can struggle to prevent a bombing such as the one in Oklahoma City, because terrorists like Timothy McVeigh can either work alone or use the Internet to communicate in small groups. They drift within a subculture that promotes ethnic hatred, violence, terrorism and distrust of governments, and the terrorists receive emotional support for their views and contacts that help them get information and weapons that are difficult to trace.

-- Served as a wake-up call to local and state agencies to become better prepared for emergency responses. Oklahoma City performed well because its emergency management teams were used to working together after tornadoes, but the bombing called attention nationwide to the need for better coordination of emergency responses.

-- Led to a huge emphasis nationally on making potential terrorist targets, such as federal buildings, more physically secure. Governments began to erect more barriers, which improved security for some government buildings but also increased the “separation” between government officials and the citizens that they serve. Another problem with this emphasis is that terrorists can always find less-protected buildings or areas to target. This makes a sharing of information and analytical training on the local and state levels even more vital to try to identify and apprehend terrorists before they act.

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