After accusations had been made last fall, that the FBI is using inaccurate and offensive training materials, the bureau invited experts from the Army’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to review all of their resources and help remedy the problem.
The update on the results of that review came on February 8, at a meeting between FBI Director Robert Mueller and a host of Arab and Muslim advocacy groups and religious leaders.
But IPT, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, reports that some of Mueller’s guests included pro-Hamas and Hizballah groups, a few of whom had been accused of issuing blatantly anti-Semitic statements.
Among Mueller’s guests were representatives from the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab American Institute, Interfaith Alliance, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Muflehun and the Shoulder-to-Shoulder campaign.
MPAC Executive Director Salam al-Marayati attended the meeting with Mueller. In 1996, following the killing of a man who crashed his car into a crowded Jerusalem bus stop, shouting Allahu Akbar, killing one bystander and injuring 23, al-Marayati condemned the killing of the terrorist and demanded the shooter’s extradition to the United States to stand trial.
And according to IPT, on September 11, 2001, speaking on a Los Angeles radio program, al-Marayati said, “If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.”
ISNA has been accused of having links to Hamas, and to the infamous Holy Land Foundation, which was shut down in Ohio for fundraising for terrorism.
The FBI chief told his guests about the removal of more than 1000 presentations and curricula on Islam that were deemed “offensive” from FBI offices around the country.
FBI spokesman Christopher Allen confirmed to Wired Magazine’s Danger Room, which exposed the existence of the offending documents in the first place, that the bureau found some of the documents to be objectionable because they were inaccurate or over-broad, and others because they were plain offensive.
Allen added that those documents represent “less than 1 percent” of more than 160,000 documents reviewed by the inquiry. The FBI purged documents according to four criteria: “factual errors,” “poor taste,” the employment of “stereotypes” about Arabs or Muslims, and presenting information that “lacked precision.”
Back in September, Danger Room uncovered documents by FBI counter-terrorism agents who suggested that mainstream Muslims sympathized with terrorists; that the Prophet Mohammed was a cult leader; and that the more devout a Muslim was, the more likely he would be to commit a violent act, with a graph that illustrated this correlation.
The bottom line question has to be: would the bureau’s acceptance of those largely stylistic, politically correct curbs on its work result in reducing its effectiveness. If those curbs only mean agents can’t call Mohammed a cult leader, then no harm’s been done. But if this added measure of PC prevents agents from pursuing suspects based on profiling, for fear that it could later stain their record – then we’ve just invited the enemy to decide the boundaries of our national security policy for us.