[Ppnews] FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical’

[Political Prisoner News]

FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical’

    * By 
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/author/spencer_ackerman/>Spencer Ackerman
    * http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/fbi-muslims-radical/all/1
The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents 
that “main stream” [sic] 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 
<http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants>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 
“<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/fbi-islam-101-guide/>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 
“<http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2011/09/fbi_islamic_law.pdf>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.

<http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2011/09/fbi_islam_graph_1.jpg>
[]


An FBI presentation titled 
“<http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2011/09/fbi_militancy_considerations.pdf>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 flatlines 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 
“<http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/lieberman_collins_to_obama_if_you_dont_do_something_about_anti-muslim_counterterrorism_training_we_will.php>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 
<http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/browne_010411>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 
“<http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=38575>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 
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/01/if-youve-heard/>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 
<http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/10/060710fa_fact_wright>most 
distinguished counterterrorism agents and author 
of the new memoir 
<http://www.amazon.com/Black-Banners-Inside-Against-al-Qaeda/dp/0393079422>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 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/16/AR2008051603274.html>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.

Photos: 
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/3416310475/sizes/z/in/photostream/>Flickr/Cliff1066, 
ISAF




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