September 14, 2011
The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main
stream. American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the
Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving
charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”
At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents
are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely
he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI
instructional presentation adds:
“Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”
The FBI’s Islam
Training Documents
These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training
material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the constitutionally
protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator
of terrorist activity.
“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a
normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The
strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main
stream.”
The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying
ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism
agents say.
It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.
Focusing on the religious behavior of American citizens instead
of proven indicators of criminal activity like stockpiling guns or using shady
financing makes it more likely that the FBI will miss the real warning signs of
terrorism. And depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is
exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins ~as is the related idea that America and
Islam are necessarily in conflict.
That’s why FBI whistleblowers provided
Danger Room with these materials.
Over the past few years, American Muslim civil rights groups have raised alarm about increased FBI and police presence in Islamic community centers and mosques, fearing that their lawful behavior is being targeted under the broad brush of counterterrorism.
The documents may help explain the heavy
scrutiny.
They certainly aren’t the first time the FBI has portrayed Muslims in a negative light during Bureau training sessions. As Danger Room reported in July, the FBI’s Training Division has included anti-Islam books, and materials that claim Islam “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.”
When
Danger Room confronted the FBI with that material, an official statement issued
to us claimed, “The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for
a limited time that has since been replaced.”
But these documents aren’t relics from an earlier era. One of
these briefings, titled “Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law,” took
place on March 21.
The Islam briefings are elective, not mandatory. “A disclaimer
accompanied the presentation stating that the views expressed are those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government,” FBI
spokesman Christopher Allen tells Danger Room.
“The training materials in question were delivered as Stage Two
training to counterterrorism-designated agents,” Allen adds. “This training was
largely derived from a variety of open source publications and includes the
opinion of the analyst that developed the lesson block.”
Not all counterterrorism veterans consider the briefings so
benign. “Teaching counterterrorism operatives about obscure aspects of Islam,”
says Robert McFadden, who recently retired as one of the Navy Criminal
Investigative Service’s al-Qaida-hunters, “without context, without
objectivity, and without covering other non-religious drivers of dangerous
behavior is no way to stop actual terrorists.”
Still, at Quantico, the alleged connection between Islam and
violence isn’t just stipulated. It’s literally graphed.
An FBI presentation titled “Militancy Considerations” measures
the relationship between piety and violence among the texts of the three
Abrahamic faiths. As time goes on, the followers of the Torah and the Bible
move from “violent” to “non-violent.” Not so for devotees of the Koran, whose
“moderating process has not happened.” The line representing violent behavior
from devout Muslims flat lines and continues outward, from 610 A.D. to 2010. In
other words, religious Muslims have been and always will be agents of
aggression.
Training at Quantico isn’t designed for intellectual bull
sessions or abstract theory, according to FBI veterans. The FBI conducts its
training so that both seasoned agents and new recruits can sharpen their
investigative skills.
In this case, the FBI’s Allen says, the counterterrorism agents
who received these briefings have “spent two to three years on the job.” The
briefings are written accordingly. The stated purpose of one, about allegedly
religious-sanctioned lying, is to “identify the elements of verbal deception in
Islam and their impacts on Law Enforcement.” Not “terrorism.” Not even
“Islamist extremism.” Islam.
According to this
FBI training,
religious Muslims have been and always will be agents of
aggression.
What’s more, the Islamic “insurgency” is all-encompassing and
insidious. In addition to outright combat, its “techniques” include
“immigration” and “law suits.” So if a Muslim wishes to become an American or
sues the FBI for harassment, it’s all just part of the jihad.
On Tuesday, the leaders of the Senate Committee on Homeland
Security, Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), warned
that law enforcement lacks “meaningful standards” to prevent anti-Islam
material from seeping into counterterrorism training. Some FBI veterans suspect
the increased pressure on American Muslims has a lot to do with the kind of
training that Quantico offers.
“Seeing the materials FBI agents are being trained with
certainly helps explain why we’ve seen so many inappropriate FBI surveillance
operations broadly targeting the Muslim-American community, from infiltrating
mosques with agents provocateur to racial- and ethnic-mapping programs,” Mike
German, a former FBI agent now with the American Civil Liberties Union, tells
Danger Room after being shown the documents.
”Biased police training can
only result in biased policing.”
(Full disclosure: This reporter’s wife works
for the ACLU.)
The chief of the Training Division, Assistant FBI Director
Thomas Browne, came into his current job in January. His official biography lists no terrorism expertise beyond
serving as a coordinator for a bureau “Domestic Terrorism Program” in Tennessee
sometime in the last decade.
It is unclear what vetting process the FBI used to approve these
briefings; if any Muslim scholars contributed to them; and what criteria
Quantico uses to determine Islamic expertise. “The development of effective
training is a constantly evolving process,” says FBI spokesman Allen.
“Sometimes the training is adapted for long-term use. This particular training
segment was delivered a single time and not used since.”
Several of these briefings were the work of a single author: an
FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop. In 2006, before he joined the
Bureau, he gave an interview to the website WorldNetDaily, and discussed some
of the themes that made it into his briefings, years later. The Prophet “Muhammad’s
mindset is a source for terrorism,” Gawthrop told the website, which
would later distinguish itself as a leader of the “birther” movement, a
conspiracy theory that denies President Obama’s American citizenship.
At the time, Gawthrop’s major suggestion for waging the war on
terrorism was to attack what he called “soft spots” in Islamic faith that might
“induce a deteriorating cascade effect upon the target.” That is, to discredit
Islam itself and cause Muslims to abandon their religion. “Critical
vulnerabilities of the Koran, for example, are that it was uttered by a
mortal,” he said. Alas, he lamented, he faced the bureaucratic obstacle of
official Washington’s “political taboo of linking Islamic violence to the
religion of Islam,” according to the website.
Back then, however, Gawthrop didn’t work for the FBI. He had
recently stepped down from a position with the Defense Department’s
Counterintelligence Field Activity. That agency came under withering criticism
during the Bush administration for keeping a database about threats to military
bases that included reports on peaceful antiwar protesters and dovish Church groups. It is
unclear how Gawthrop came to work for the FBI.
Through an intermediary, Gawthrop told Danger Room that he was
unavailable for comment before our deadline.
‘Instead of looking
for indicators of nefarious behavior,
you have a sweeping generalization.’
The FBI didn’t always conflate terrorism with Islam. “I never
saw that,” says Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s most distinguished counterterrorism agents and author
of the new memoir The Black Banners, who retired from the bureau
in 2005. “Sometimes, toward the end of my time, I started noticing it with
different entities outside the FBI. You started feeling like they had a problem
with Islam-as-Islam, because of the media. But that was a few people, and was
usually hidden behind closed doors.”
Soufan, a Muslim, has interrogated members of al-Qaida and
contributed to rolling up one of its cells in Yemen after 9/11.
But by the logic of the FBI’s training materials, Soufan’s religious
practices make him a potential terrorist.
McFadden, the former NCIS counterterrorist, has a lot of respect
for his FBI colleagues, who he believes are ill-served by these Islam
briefings. “These are earnest special agents and police officers who want to
know how do their job better,” McFadden says.
Too often, McFadden says,
counterterrorism training
becomes
simultaneously over-broad and ignorant.
“Instead of looking for indicators of
nefarious behavior, you have a sweeping generalization of things like, for
instance, the Hawala system,” McFadden explains. “It’s a system that most of
the developing world and expatriates from it use to move money around,
including terrorists. But you can’t say the whole hawala system is about
terrorism, just like you can’t say that Islam as a whole has anything to do with
bad behavior.”
McFadden, a Catholic, believes that obsessing over obscure Koranic verses is as useful a guide to terrorist behavior as “diving into the rite of exorcism” is to understanding Catholicism.
On April 6, barely two weeks after the “Islamic Motivations for
‘Suicide’ Bombers” briefing at Quantico, FBI Director Robert Mueller defended
the bureau’s budget before a congressional committee. Among his major points:
the FBI needs cooperation from American Muslims to stop the next terrorist attack.
“Since September 11th, every one of our 56 field offices and the
leadership of those offices have had outreach to the Muslim community,” Mueller
said.
“We need the support of that community … our business is basically relationships.”
That is exactly the opposite message sent in the training rooms
of Quantico, where the next generation of FBI counterterrorism is shaped.
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