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Special Report
“The Mother of All Misdirections” is the best and most comprehensive summary of the US situation I’ve seen. - intel officer (ret.) |
""outstanding"
- South Carolina "This is the most serious issue facing us now. Our policies cannot be even slightly effective if we continue to proceed blindfolded and deaf. This is not a problem for a someday bucket list, it is our first problem." -commenter at Gates of Vienna |
"Excellent article on CVE. Shared on FB" - North Carolina
Reposted at Gates of Vienna and United West
Reposted at Gates of Vienna and United West
WHY WON'T THE FBI REVISE ITS COUNTERTERRORISM TRAINING
TO BRING IT IN LINE WITH TRUMP ADMINISTRATION POLICIES?
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY HAS ALREADY BEGUN!
FOIA CASE PENDING - See updates here
TO BRING IT IN LINE WITH TRUMP ADMINISTRATION POLICIES?
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY HAS ALREADY BEGUN!
FOIA CASE PENDING - See updates here
The Mother of All Misdirections
- U.S. Counterterrorism Training Still Hostage to Radical Islamist Thought
by Liberato.US
Part 1 - U.S. Counterterrorism Training Still Hostage to Radical Islamist Thought (below)
Part 2 - FBI Still Stuck on Flawed Obama-Era Counterterrorism Paradigm (below)
---
Will the Trump administration bring back counterterrorism training materials that focus on radical Islam? The Sharia TipSheet will stay on this story until the answer is clear. FOIA litigation is ongoing (updates here)
To be continued…
---
Part 1 (September 2017)
On November 5, 2009 about 1:30 p.m. local time, Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan entered a building at Ft. Hood, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire with a laser-sighted weapon. He fanned his weapon, spraying bullets, before taking aim at individual soldiers. Two people charged him but were killed; a third was injured. Hasan moved outside the building where he shot down a police officer and targeted fleeing soldiers. Another police officer stopped Hasan with five shots as Hasan was reaching for a new clip. Hasan killed 13 and wounded more than 30 in his 10-minute shooting rampage. Seven victims were shot in the back. There was so much blood on the floor in the building that nurses had trouble reaching the wounded. The Obama administration called it an act of ‘workplace violence’ but, at his trial, Hasan told the court he was defending the Taliban against the U.S. military.
Army personnel who worked with Hasan knew he was a “ticking time bomb”. He had given presentations supporting the killing of non-Muslims, defending Osama Bin Laden, and justifying suicide bombers. He announced that Islam took precedence over the U.S. Constitution (which he had sworn to defend). He stated on multiple occasions that Muslims in the military could kill other service members. The Army did not rebuke him but instead gave him credit toward his academic requirements for his views.
These are some of the findings of a Senate Homeland Security Committee report - "A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack” (February 3, 2011) (pp. 27-31). The report cited the Defense Department’s “failure to address violent Islamist extremism by its name” and predicted “[i]t will be more difficult for the military to develop effective approaches to countering violent Islamist extremism if the identity and nature of the enemy cannot be labeled accurately.” (p. 48)
The report went on to recommend:
What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?
The switcheroo from standard threat assessment to CVE has had a number of disastrous consequences:
A primary duty of government is to protect the homeland. This the government is failing to do. Americans are paying the price for this willful blindness in blood.
The Trump Administration Backtracks
As candidate and President-elect, Donald Trump and his associates announced he would form a commission on radical Islam; remove Islamist supporters from the government; seek names of bureaucrats working on CVE; terminate the influence of Muslim groups on counterterrorism strategy (Conservative Review); and possibly replace CVE with CIE – Countering Islamist Extremism.
However, a number of subsequent events have left anti-Islamist observers dispirited and contemplating the prospect that no real change in counterterrorism strategy will take place under the Trump administration:
The effort to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group stalled out; funding for CVE grants moved forward; DHS retained the terror-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an outreach partner; promises to introduce “extreme vetting” of refugees and consult Muslim reformers have gone unfulfilled; and a number of anti-Islamist officials were forced out of the administration (Cohen-Watnick, Harvey, Higgins, Lovinger, Townley, Bannon, Gorka), leaving some 40 Obama holdovers on the National Security Council. Meanwhile, CAIR diversity outreach coordinator Mustafa Javed Ali was promoted to a top NSC position where he proceeded to block scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali from giving a talk on radical Islam at the NSC. Finally, all references to radical Islam and radical Islamic terror were removed from Trump’s August 2017 speech on Afghanistan.
Two experts consulted for this report say there is a war for the soul of the Trump administration underway on counterterrorism issues. Tom Trento, executive director of United West, describes it as a battle for whose version of truth, justice, and the American way will prevail. Another expert, speaking on background, confirmed this view, adding that top people within the Trump administration have been at loggerheads on these issues. Fact-based views about the Islamist enemy we face have been stifled because lower-level people holding those views are not in a position to advise those at the top (or have been forced out) and because gatekeepers with contrary views are now in place, limiting what the President hears.
According to DHS whistleblower Phil Haney, part of the problem is that President Trump has not built up a team of his own people in DHS yet. Thus, programs like CVE that were already in place are running on autopilot. Policies haven’t changed because personnel – especially middle managers - haven’t changed, is the way Andrew McCarthy puts it. McCarthy, a former prosecutor and author of the seminal work The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, has not seen any changes in agency counterterrorism training materials since Trump was inaugurated.
McCarthy believes counterterrorism policy is up for grabs at the moment. One camp has concluded what the government has been doing for the last ten years is wrong, but hasn’t come to agreement as to what the error is or how to correct it. This camp is cruising along with CVE, albeit with some grumbling. Another faction is comfortable with what the government is doing, citing the fact there haven’t been any ‘new 9/11’s’ as proof current policies, including CVE, are working. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, this faction argues. In any event, law enforcement officers in the field often will carry out their mission as they see fit, regardless of what policies come down from above. Thus, some field officers may have continued to focus on radical Islam throughout the CVE era, despite pronouncements from Washington.
It’s the Ideology, Stupid!
Choosing the right direction for counterterrorism policy and its attendant training depends on whether one views Islam as a religion of peace with terrorism being a bastardization thereof, or one believes jihad is core doctrine that cannot be airbrushed away. When the Obama administration looked at Muslim extremists, they saw anti-colonialists with legitimate grievances who would not turn to terror were it not for high unemployment, oppression, and other such causes. (“The Flawed Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy” by Katharine C. Gorka, president, The Council on Global Security. October 2014. Katharine Gorka works for DHS at this writing).
Thus, in this school of thought, terrorism has ‘nothing to do with Islam.’ Terrorists are just bad actors or “criminals”, as White House National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has called them. Jihadis have “corrupted the whole concept of Islam as a religion,” now-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has asserted.
These views are guiding the Trump administration. This is a big problem because Kelly and McMaster’s stated views are profoundly ignorant and hopelessly naïve. Jihad is core doctrine, not something tacked on by extremists later. Islam is at war with the West and every non-Muslim in the world, and will remain so until the entire planet submits to Islam. For 790 pages of meticulous, irrefutable documentation of this fact, see Stephen Coughlin’s book Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.
Coughlin starts with the three doctrinal sources Muslims themselves consider authoritative – the Quran, the hadith, and scholarly consensus – and shows how the religious duty to wage violent jihad is inextricably woven into each as core doctrine. According to the Quran (8.60), terrorizing your enemies is an authorized part of reviving the caliphate, and imposing sharia law everywhere, Phil Haney notes.
Thus, terrorists can be taken at their word when they cite Islam as the motivation for their actions:
According to Andrew McCarthy, Trump’s May 2017 Riyadh speech was an improvement in that it identified the enemy – radical Islam. However, it left a key question open – whether Trump would henceforth focus on terrorism or Islamist ideology. A focus on terrorism would lead to looking at symptoms while focusing on the ideology would ferret out true root causes. Trump thus far seems uninterested in causes, which is perhaps why he can name the enemy but still collaborate with the Saudis who, many believe, have been exporting their radical Wahhabi Islamist ideology world-wide for decades. The Saudi royals don’t personally engage in terrorist acts, so no conflict is presented when one only looks at symptoms.
If one were to look at causes, this is what they would find with respect to the Saudis, as detailed by scholar and critic of radical Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
Because Islamist groups don’t state their goal as terrorism per se, efforts like CVE to ‘fight terrorism’ are misdirected and doomed to failure. Moreover, a self-blinding focus on terrorism leaves policymakers and war-fighters alike unable to comprehend that the enemy is inside the wire telling us how to regard the enemy. As long as Islamist ideologues don’t personally engage in terrorist acts, they make fine advisers to DHS and other counterterrorism agencies, so terror-focused reasoning goes.
There is no hope for neutering our Islamist enemies or even eradicating terror until policymakers verse themselves in Islamist war doctrine. Stephen Coughlin’s book Catastrophic Failure is a good place to start. Sources by Muslims writing for Muslims are especially revelatory. The Explanatory Memorandum (Muslim Brotherhood plan for destroying Western Civilization); Reliance of the Traveller (on sharia law), Qutb’s Milestones (battle plans and signposts for subjugating “the whole human environment”), and Management of Savagery by Abu-Bakr Naji (providing Islamist terrorists a strategy to create a new caliphate), are among the Muslim-authored sources that could be cited.
Until policymakers and war-fighters can tell us what dawa, hijra, and taquiya mean, they cannot pretend that they understand Islam or have figured out how to fight terrorism successfully. If you don’t know what these words mean, look them up and understand why Americans will continue to pay the price in blood for our leaders’ criminally negligent failure to understand Islamist war doctrine. It’s the ideology, stupid!
- U.S. Counterterrorism Training Still Hostage to Radical Islamist Thought
by Liberato.US
Part 1 - U.S. Counterterrorism Training Still Hostage to Radical Islamist Thought (below)
Part 2 - FBI Still Stuck on Flawed Obama-Era Counterterrorism Paradigm (below)
---
Will the Trump administration bring back counterterrorism training materials that focus on radical Islam? The Sharia TipSheet will stay on this story until the answer is clear. FOIA litigation is ongoing (updates here)
To be continued…
---
Part 1 (September 2017)
On November 5, 2009 about 1:30 p.m. local time, Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan entered a building at Ft. Hood, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire with a laser-sighted weapon. He fanned his weapon, spraying bullets, before taking aim at individual soldiers. Two people charged him but were killed; a third was injured. Hasan moved outside the building where he shot down a police officer and targeted fleeing soldiers. Another police officer stopped Hasan with five shots as Hasan was reaching for a new clip. Hasan killed 13 and wounded more than 30 in his 10-minute shooting rampage. Seven victims were shot in the back. There was so much blood on the floor in the building that nurses had trouble reaching the wounded. The Obama administration called it an act of ‘workplace violence’ but, at his trial, Hasan told the court he was defending the Taliban against the U.S. military.
Army personnel who worked with Hasan knew he was a “ticking time bomb”. He had given presentations supporting the killing of non-Muslims, defending Osama Bin Laden, and justifying suicide bombers. He announced that Islam took precedence over the U.S. Constitution (which he had sworn to defend). He stated on multiple occasions that Muslims in the military could kill other service members. The Army did not rebuke him but instead gave him credit toward his academic requirements for his views.
These are some of the findings of a Senate Homeland Security Committee report - "A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack” (February 3, 2011) (pp. 27-31). The report cited the Defense Department’s “failure to address violent Islamist extremism by its name” and predicted “[i]t will be more difficult for the military to develop effective approaches to countering violent Islamist extremism if the identity and nature of the enemy cannot be labeled accurately.” (p. 48)
The report went on to recommend:
- that the FBI should produce in-depth analysis of the ideology of violent Islamist extremism, the factors that make that ideology appealing to individuals (including U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents), and what ideological indicators or warning signs show that the individual is weighing or accepting the ideology. Our review also leads us to believe that the FBI also should provide sufficient training to its agents including: (1) ideological indicators or warning signs of violent Islamist extremism to serve as an operational reference guide, and (2) the difference between violent Islamist extremism and the peaceful practice of Islam. (p. 77)
What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?
The switcheroo from standard threat assessment to CVE has had a number of disastrous consequences:
- Islamist supremacists are dictating national security policy.
- U.S. policy has proceeded for years in complete ignorance of Islamic war doctrine (jihad and its preparation – dawa):
- U.S. policy, to the extent it deals with the Islamist threat at all, has been skewed in the direction of political correctness and Muslim civil rights. The DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) “has co-opted the counterterrorism effort and turned it into a civil rights, civil liberties focus,” DHS whistleblower Philip Haney says. Haney is the author of See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government's Submission to Jihad. Meanwhile, the 2013 FBI national threat assessment didn’t mention Islamist terror threats at all, despite Ft. Hood. Animal rights activists, yes. Jihadi terror cells, no.
- GAO found that the government has no idea whether CVE is effective, because no measurable desired outcomes have ever been established. There are no metrics. In other words, there is no evidence CVE has prevented the growth of terrorism in the United States.
- The FBI has missed clues in major Islamist terrorism plots, including the Boston Marathon bombing and the San Bernardino and Orlando massacres, arguably due to the willful blindness of policymakers.
A primary duty of government is to protect the homeland. This the government is failing to do. Americans are paying the price for this willful blindness in blood.
The Trump Administration Backtracks
As candidate and President-elect, Donald Trump and his associates announced he would form a commission on radical Islam; remove Islamist supporters from the government; seek names of bureaucrats working on CVE; terminate the influence of Muslim groups on counterterrorism strategy (Conservative Review); and possibly replace CVE with CIE – Countering Islamist Extremism.
However, a number of subsequent events have left anti-Islamist observers dispirited and contemplating the prospect that no real change in counterterrorism strategy will take place under the Trump administration:
The effort to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group stalled out; funding for CVE grants moved forward; DHS retained the terror-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an outreach partner; promises to introduce “extreme vetting” of refugees and consult Muslim reformers have gone unfulfilled; and a number of anti-Islamist officials were forced out of the administration (Cohen-Watnick, Harvey, Higgins, Lovinger, Townley, Bannon, Gorka), leaving some 40 Obama holdovers on the National Security Council. Meanwhile, CAIR diversity outreach coordinator Mustafa Javed Ali was promoted to a top NSC position where he proceeded to block scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali from giving a talk on radical Islam at the NSC. Finally, all references to radical Islam and radical Islamic terror were removed from Trump’s August 2017 speech on Afghanistan.
Two experts consulted for this report say there is a war for the soul of the Trump administration underway on counterterrorism issues. Tom Trento, executive director of United West, describes it as a battle for whose version of truth, justice, and the American way will prevail. Another expert, speaking on background, confirmed this view, adding that top people within the Trump administration have been at loggerheads on these issues. Fact-based views about the Islamist enemy we face have been stifled because lower-level people holding those views are not in a position to advise those at the top (or have been forced out) and because gatekeepers with contrary views are now in place, limiting what the President hears.
According to DHS whistleblower Phil Haney, part of the problem is that President Trump has not built up a team of his own people in DHS yet. Thus, programs like CVE that were already in place are running on autopilot. Policies haven’t changed because personnel – especially middle managers - haven’t changed, is the way Andrew McCarthy puts it. McCarthy, a former prosecutor and author of the seminal work The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, has not seen any changes in agency counterterrorism training materials since Trump was inaugurated.
McCarthy believes counterterrorism policy is up for grabs at the moment. One camp has concluded what the government has been doing for the last ten years is wrong, but hasn’t come to agreement as to what the error is or how to correct it. This camp is cruising along with CVE, albeit with some grumbling. Another faction is comfortable with what the government is doing, citing the fact there haven’t been any ‘new 9/11’s’ as proof current policies, including CVE, are working. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, this faction argues. In any event, law enforcement officers in the field often will carry out their mission as they see fit, regardless of what policies come down from above. Thus, some field officers may have continued to focus on radical Islam throughout the CVE era, despite pronouncements from Washington.
It’s the Ideology, Stupid!
Choosing the right direction for counterterrorism policy and its attendant training depends on whether one views Islam as a religion of peace with terrorism being a bastardization thereof, or one believes jihad is core doctrine that cannot be airbrushed away. When the Obama administration looked at Muslim extremists, they saw anti-colonialists with legitimate grievances who would not turn to terror were it not for high unemployment, oppression, and other such causes. (“The Flawed Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy” by Katharine C. Gorka, president, The Council on Global Security. October 2014. Katharine Gorka works for DHS at this writing).
Thus, in this school of thought, terrorism has ‘nothing to do with Islam.’ Terrorists are just bad actors or “criminals”, as White House National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has called them. Jihadis have “corrupted the whole concept of Islam as a religion,” now-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has asserted.
These views are guiding the Trump administration. This is a big problem because Kelly and McMaster’s stated views are profoundly ignorant and hopelessly naïve. Jihad is core doctrine, not something tacked on by extremists later. Islam is at war with the West and every non-Muslim in the world, and will remain so until the entire planet submits to Islam. For 790 pages of meticulous, irrefutable documentation of this fact, see Stephen Coughlin’s book Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.
Coughlin starts with the three doctrinal sources Muslims themselves consider authoritative – the Quran, the hadith, and scholarly consensus – and shows how the religious duty to wage violent jihad is inextricably woven into each as core doctrine. According to the Quran (8.60), terrorizing your enemies is an authorized part of reviving the caliphate, and imposing sharia law everywhere, Phil Haney notes.
Thus, terrorists can be taken at their word when they cite Islam as the motivation for their actions:
- Shia and Sunni Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the Islamic State each openly espouse Islamic motivations, repeatedly cite the Quran, and claim they are fighting a religious war. Some of the Sunni groups are violent offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to create a global Islamic caliphate.
According to Andrew McCarthy, Trump’s May 2017 Riyadh speech was an improvement in that it identified the enemy – radical Islam. However, it left a key question open – whether Trump would henceforth focus on terrorism or Islamist ideology. A focus on terrorism would lead to looking at symptoms while focusing on the ideology would ferret out true root causes. Trump thus far seems uninterested in causes, which is perhaps why he can name the enemy but still collaborate with the Saudis who, many believe, have been exporting their radical Wahhabi Islamist ideology world-wide for decades. The Saudi royals don’t personally engage in terrorist acts, so no conflict is presented when one only looks at symptoms.
If one were to look at causes, this is what they would find with respect to the Saudis, as detailed by scholar and critic of radical Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
- the administration's Middle Eastern strategy seems to involve cozying up to Saudi Arabia -- for decades the principal source of funding for Islamic extremism around the world…. President Obama's former representative to Muslim communities, Farah Pandith, who visited 80 countries between 2009 and 2014, wrote in 2015: "In each place I visited, the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence . . . Funding all this was Saudi money, which paid for things like the textbooks, mosques, TV stations and the training of Imams." In 2016, addressing the Council on Foreign Relations, Sen. Chris Murphy (D.,Conn.) sounded the alarm over Islamist indoctrination in Pakistan, noting that thousands of schools funded with Saudi money "teach a version of Islam that leads ... into an ... anti-Western militancy."
Because Islamist groups don’t state their goal as terrorism per se, efforts like CVE to ‘fight terrorism’ are misdirected and doomed to failure. Moreover, a self-blinding focus on terrorism leaves policymakers and war-fighters alike unable to comprehend that the enemy is inside the wire telling us how to regard the enemy. As long as Islamist ideologues don’t personally engage in terrorist acts, they make fine advisers to DHS and other counterterrorism agencies, so terror-focused reasoning goes.
There is no hope for neutering our Islamist enemies or even eradicating terror until policymakers verse themselves in Islamist war doctrine. Stephen Coughlin’s book Catastrophic Failure is a good place to start. Sources by Muslims writing for Muslims are especially revelatory. The Explanatory Memorandum (Muslim Brotherhood plan for destroying Western Civilization); Reliance of the Traveller (on sharia law), Qutb’s Milestones (battle plans and signposts for subjugating “the whole human environment”), and Management of Savagery by Abu-Bakr Naji (providing Islamist terrorists a strategy to create a new caliphate), are among the Muslim-authored sources that could be cited.
Until policymakers and war-fighters can tell us what dawa, hijra, and taquiya mean, they cannot pretend that they understand Islam or have figured out how to fight terrorism successfully. If you don’t know what these words mean, look them up and understand why Americans will continue to pay the price in blood for our leaders’ criminally negligent failure to understand Islamist war doctrine. It’s the ideology, stupid!
Part 2 - FBI Still Stuck on Flawed Obama-Era Counterterrorism Paradigm (November 2017)
The FBI under President Trump has not taken any steps to replace the flawed Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) counterterrorism training program with fact-based threat analysis of radical Islamic terrorism. In stark contrast, the Department of Homeland Security is moving away from CVE.
This publication asked the FBI:
The Justice Department Office of Public Affairs replied:
This publication further asked:
Again, the response was:
This publication sent several more questions but the Justice Department’s public affairs office failed to answer. The additional questions are set forth below but, first, some context:
How the FBI Facilitated the Shift to CVE
In October 2011, fifty-seven U.S. Muslim groups (including CAIR, ISNA, and MPAC) wrote a letter to then-White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan demanding, among other things, that all ‘biased’ government training materials be purged and all FBI agents be retrained. The signatories included Muslim Brotherhood front groups that were unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial. Brennan replied to the letter two weeks later pledging quick action.
At about the same time, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller promised to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the FBI’s counterterrorism training approach. The following month, the White House agreed to set up an interagency task force – inviting participation from signatories to the 2011 letter – to oversee counterterrorism efforts at the FBI. In this way, the enemy successfully got inside the wire.
In February 2012, a number of signatories to the letter met with Mueller for an update on the progress of what they called the ‘purge’. The FBI told them that it had eliminated more than 700 documents and 300 presentations from its training materials. (The numbers were later reported as 876 pages and 392 presentations.)
In March that year, House Judiciary Committee staffers met with the person at the FBI handling the purge of counterterrorism materials. It was learned that the FBI had hired three anonymous outside contractors to review all of the FBI’s counterterrorism training materials. The FBI representative admitted that the FBI did not know whether the contractors were ‘good guys’ or not. The FBI provided the staffers with the FBI’s “guiding principles” for reviewing the materials (the ”Touchstone” document). The FBI’s principles in effect asserted that supporting a terrorist group that engages in violence is constitutionally protected if the group also engages in non-violent activity. This is completely contrary to a Supreme Court case (Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project) which held that nonviolent support for a terrorist group violates federal law. Moreover, you can’t very well ‘counter violent extremism’ if terrorist groups with any nonviolent activities whatsoever are off limits. Such principles ham-string counterterrorism agencies and shut down terrorism investigations.
Later, when Congress asked follow-up questions, the FBI started obstructing. When questions were asked about the identities and qualifications of the FBI’s outside experts, the FBI classified their names. When members of Congress asked for the purged training materials, they had to sign confidentiality agreements and go to a secure room at the FBI to view them under close monitoring.
In May 2012, Rep. Louie Gohmert gave a floor speech using a graph by purged counterterrorism trainer Stephen Coughlin showing how terms used by the 9/11 Commission – e.g., jihad, Islam, and Al Qaeda – were eradicated from the FBI’s Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon. In response, the FBI falsely claimed that no such Lexicon existed.
As mentioned above, unidentified ‘subject matter experts’ determined whether the FBI’s counterterrorism training materials were ‘offensive to Islam’. Among the purged materials were references to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ties to terrorism and Al Qaeda’s links to the 1993 World Trade Center and Khobar Towers bombings. Also purged was material making the indisputable observation that “young male immigrants of Middle Eastern appearance ... may fit the terrorist profile best.” Suggesting that radicalization occurs at mosques drew objection. The reviewers also cited the tired old claim that ‘the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist organization’ in objecting to other material. Mueller himself had previously characterized the Brotherhood as a group supporting terrorism in the U.S. and abroad. Then there was the completely subjective and very convenient objection that some material was just too “inflammatory”. The truth hurts. And now for the pièce de résistance: “the overall tenor of the presentation is too informal in the current political context,” whatever that means.
And thus it was that standard fact-based counterterrorism analysis was obliterated and the CVE era began. The Muslim Brotherhood smiled and said it was good.
Running Red Lights
All of these events occurred AFTER the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Ft. Hood report of February 3, 2011 which found that “The FBI's Training Materials Contemporaneous To The Hasan Inquiry Did Not Adequately Cover The Ideology Of Violent Islamist Extremism” (p. 76). The Ft. Hood report further recommended (pp. 77,88) that “The FBI and other intelligence agencies should ensure that they have sufficient understanding of the ideology of violent Islamist extremism and that ideological indicators or warning signs have been developed for use by agents.” The FBI ignored these recommendations and the tragedy at Ft. Hood which prompted them. The shift to CVE and purge of previous training materials guaranteed that Islamist extremism would be understood even LESS, not more, as the Ft. Hood report had recommended.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in June 2016, Sen. Ted Cruz pointed out that “The FBI counterterrorism lexicon uses the word ‘jihad’ zero times.” The same is true of the national intelligence strategy of 2009, the CVE strategic implementation plan of 2011, the national intelligence strategy of 2014, and Customs and Border Control records after they were scrubbed of all references to jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood, Cruz said.
Despite these warnings, the FBI has not taken any steps to replace CVE with Countering Islamist Extremism (CIE) or other counterterrorism approach that focuses like a laser beam on radical Islam and the terrorist attacks it provokes.
More Questions the FBI Didn’t Answer
This publication sent the following questions to the Justice Department Office of Public Affairs, but no answers were forthcoming:
Regarding my first two questions (status of replacing CVE at the FBI and why the FBI isn’t taking steps like DHS with respect to CVE), what process did you follow to determine the answers and who did you ask within the FBI for information (please provide name, title, and department)?
Many experts are of the view that jihad and world domination are core doctrines of Islam. Because of these core doctrines, ‘real’ Islam is a threat to America. How do you respond? If your answer is that these experts are mistaken about the doctrines, please explain why. If your answer is that Islamic doctrine is unimportant, please explain why. [FBI agents were correctly taught before the CVE era that Islamic ideology itself and mainstream Muslims pose a threat to the United States.]
The Ft. Hood report recommended identifying violent Islamist extremism by name (p. 48). Do your current CVE counterterrorism training materials do so? If so, please provide the specific materials. If not, why not? If Senators Lieberman and Collins were wrong in making this recommendation, please explain why.
The Ft. Hood report also recommended (p. 77): that the FBI should produce in-depth analysis of the ideology of violent Islamist extremism, the factors that make that ideology appealing to individuals (including U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents), and what ideological indicators or warning signs show that the individual is weighing or accepting the ideology. Have these recommendations been implemented? If so, please provide your current CVE training materials that embody the implementation. If the recommendations have not been implemented, why not?
Please provide the pre-CVE counterterrorism training materials reviewed by members of Congress as a result of the March 2012 meeting between the FBI and House Judiciary Committee staff (described here at p. 13).
Please provide current CVE training materials that set forth actual violent extremism counternarratives and messaging.
Please provide current training materials from the Joint Terrorism Operations Course and your other training courses that:
- describe Islam and sharia law
- explain the role of Islamic ideology in terrorism and jihad, and how it poses a threat to the U.S.
- describe how sharia law conflicts with the U.S. Constitution and democracy [(FBI agents were correctly taught before the CVE era that sharia laws is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and American democratic values.]
- describe hijra (the Muslim religious duty to colonize), dawa (the Muslim religious duty to prepare the ground for jihad), and taqiyya (the Muslim religious duty to lie to infidels to further jihad). [FBI agents were correctly taught before the CVE era that the influx of Muslims into non-Muslim countries is an attempt at conquest that starts with “grievance manufacturing” and progresses to “state-run ethnic cleansing” to, finally, “peace” under an Islamic banner.”]
- explain how Islam is a supremacist doctrine that seeks to bring the entire world under a Muslim caliphate
- inform agents and analysts about the jihadi network in the United States
- inform agents and analysts about the activities of Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups in the U.S.
- if any item is not taught, why not?
Please provide evidence of success in partnering with community groups in the CVE programs and the metrics by which success is judged. [As noted in the first part of this Special Report, GAO criticized CVE for lacking any metrics that could be used to determine whether the program is succeeding or failing.]
John Guandolo charges that the FBI is not sharing information about the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups in the U.S. with local and state law enforcement. How do you respond?
Guandolo also alleges that the FBI is not investigating and pursuing individuals and organizations which are supporting and training jihadis in America. How do you respond? If such investigations are taking place, please explain how the fact that Phil Haney was ordered to remove all such information from the DHS database has affected your investigations.
Why aren’t the FBI’s current counterterrorism training materials available to the public online? Will you do so now?
It’s Still the Ideology, Stupid
More evidence has come in that Islam is a supremacist ideology and jihad is core doctrine:
The FBI under President Trump has not taken any steps to replace the flawed Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) counterterrorism training program with fact-based threat analysis of radical Islamic terrorism. In stark contrast, the Department of Homeland Security is moving away from CVE.
This publication asked the FBI:
- In February 2017, it was reported that the Trump administration might replace CVE with CIE – Countering Islamist Extremism. What is the status of this at the FBI?
The Justice Department Office of Public Affairs replied:
- We have no updates or new information to provide on this.
This publication further asked:
- Why isn’t the FBI moving forward with a reevaluation of CVE when DHS apparently is? Specifically, it was reported that DHS is rebranding CVE to “terrorism prevention”; developing a new counterterrorism strategy; and undertaking an end-to-end review of all CVE programs. Why isn’t the FBI doing these things?
Again, the response was:
- … no updates at this time.
This publication sent several more questions but the Justice Department’s public affairs office failed to answer. The additional questions are set forth below but, first, some context:
How the FBI Facilitated the Shift to CVE
In October 2011, fifty-seven U.S. Muslim groups (including CAIR, ISNA, and MPAC) wrote a letter to then-White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan demanding, among other things, that all ‘biased’ government training materials be purged and all FBI agents be retrained. The signatories included Muslim Brotherhood front groups that were unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial. Brennan replied to the letter two weeks later pledging quick action.
At about the same time, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller promised to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the FBI’s counterterrorism training approach. The following month, the White House agreed to set up an interagency task force – inviting participation from signatories to the 2011 letter – to oversee counterterrorism efforts at the FBI. In this way, the enemy successfully got inside the wire.
In February 2012, a number of signatories to the letter met with Mueller for an update on the progress of what they called the ‘purge’. The FBI told them that it had eliminated more than 700 documents and 300 presentations from its training materials. (The numbers were later reported as 876 pages and 392 presentations.)
In March that year, House Judiciary Committee staffers met with the person at the FBI handling the purge of counterterrorism materials. It was learned that the FBI had hired three anonymous outside contractors to review all of the FBI’s counterterrorism training materials. The FBI representative admitted that the FBI did not know whether the contractors were ‘good guys’ or not. The FBI provided the staffers with the FBI’s “guiding principles” for reviewing the materials (the ”Touchstone” document). The FBI’s principles in effect asserted that supporting a terrorist group that engages in violence is constitutionally protected if the group also engages in non-violent activity. This is completely contrary to a Supreme Court case (Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project) which held that nonviolent support for a terrorist group violates federal law. Moreover, you can’t very well ‘counter violent extremism’ if terrorist groups with any nonviolent activities whatsoever are off limits. Such principles ham-string counterterrorism agencies and shut down terrorism investigations.
Later, when Congress asked follow-up questions, the FBI started obstructing. When questions were asked about the identities and qualifications of the FBI’s outside experts, the FBI classified their names. When members of Congress asked for the purged training materials, they had to sign confidentiality agreements and go to a secure room at the FBI to view them under close monitoring.
In May 2012, Rep. Louie Gohmert gave a floor speech using a graph by purged counterterrorism trainer Stephen Coughlin showing how terms used by the 9/11 Commission – e.g., jihad, Islam, and Al Qaeda – were eradicated from the FBI’s Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon. In response, the FBI falsely claimed that no such Lexicon existed.
As mentioned above, unidentified ‘subject matter experts’ determined whether the FBI’s counterterrorism training materials were ‘offensive to Islam’. Among the purged materials were references to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ties to terrorism and Al Qaeda’s links to the 1993 World Trade Center and Khobar Towers bombings. Also purged was material making the indisputable observation that “young male immigrants of Middle Eastern appearance ... may fit the terrorist profile best.” Suggesting that radicalization occurs at mosques drew objection. The reviewers also cited the tired old claim that ‘the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist organization’ in objecting to other material. Mueller himself had previously characterized the Brotherhood as a group supporting terrorism in the U.S. and abroad. Then there was the completely subjective and very convenient objection that some material was just too “inflammatory”. The truth hurts. And now for the pièce de résistance: “the overall tenor of the presentation is too informal in the current political context,” whatever that means.
And thus it was that standard fact-based counterterrorism analysis was obliterated and the CVE era began. The Muslim Brotherhood smiled and said it was good.
Running Red Lights
All of these events occurred AFTER the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Ft. Hood report of February 3, 2011 which found that “The FBI's Training Materials Contemporaneous To The Hasan Inquiry Did Not Adequately Cover The Ideology Of Violent Islamist Extremism” (p. 76). The Ft. Hood report further recommended (pp. 77,88) that “The FBI and other intelligence agencies should ensure that they have sufficient understanding of the ideology of violent Islamist extremism and that ideological indicators or warning signs have been developed for use by agents.” The FBI ignored these recommendations and the tragedy at Ft. Hood which prompted them. The shift to CVE and purge of previous training materials guaranteed that Islamist extremism would be understood even LESS, not more, as the Ft. Hood report had recommended.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in June 2016, Sen. Ted Cruz pointed out that “The FBI counterterrorism lexicon uses the word ‘jihad’ zero times.” The same is true of the national intelligence strategy of 2009, the CVE strategic implementation plan of 2011, the national intelligence strategy of 2014, and Customs and Border Control records after they were scrubbed of all references to jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood, Cruz said.
Despite these warnings, the FBI has not taken any steps to replace CVE with Countering Islamist Extremism (CIE) or other counterterrorism approach that focuses like a laser beam on radical Islam and the terrorist attacks it provokes.
More Questions the FBI Didn’t Answer
This publication sent the following questions to the Justice Department Office of Public Affairs, but no answers were forthcoming:
Regarding my first two questions (status of replacing CVE at the FBI and why the FBI isn’t taking steps like DHS with respect to CVE), what process did you follow to determine the answers and who did you ask within the FBI for information (please provide name, title, and department)?
Many experts are of the view that jihad and world domination are core doctrines of Islam. Because of these core doctrines, ‘real’ Islam is a threat to America. How do you respond? If your answer is that these experts are mistaken about the doctrines, please explain why. If your answer is that Islamic doctrine is unimportant, please explain why. [FBI agents were correctly taught before the CVE era that Islamic ideology itself and mainstream Muslims pose a threat to the United States.]
The Ft. Hood report recommended identifying violent Islamist extremism by name (p. 48). Do your current CVE counterterrorism training materials do so? If so, please provide the specific materials. If not, why not? If Senators Lieberman and Collins were wrong in making this recommendation, please explain why.
The Ft. Hood report also recommended (p. 77): that the FBI should produce in-depth analysis of the ideology of violent Islamist extremism, the factors that make that ideology appealing to individuals (including U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents), and what ideological indicators or warning signs show that the individual is weighing or accepting the ideology. Have these recommendations been implemented? If so, please provide your current CVE training materials that embody the implementation. If the recommendations have not been implemented, why not?
Please provide the pre-CVE counterterrorism training materials reviewed by members of Congress as a result of the March 2012 meeting between the FBI and House Judiciary Committee staff (described here at p. 13).
Please provide current CVE training materials that set forth actual violent extremism counternarratives and messaging.
Please provide current training materials from the Joint Terrorism Operations Course and your other training courses that:
- describe Islam and sharia law
- explain the role of Islamic ideology in terrorism and jihad, and how it poses a threat to the U.S.
- describe how sharia law conflicts with the U.S. Constitution and democracy [(FBI agents were correctly taught before the CVE era that sharia laws is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and American democratic values.]
- describe hijra (the Muslim religious duty to colonize), dawa (the Muslim religious duty to prepare the ground for jihad), and taqiyya (the Muslim religious duty to lie to infidels to further jihad). [FBI agents were correctly taught before the CVE era that the influx of Muslims into non-Muslim countries is an attempt at conquest that starts with “grievance manufacturing” and progresses to “state-run ethnic cleansing” to, finally, “peace” under an Islamic banner.”]
- explain how Islam is a supremacist doctrine that seeks to bring the entire world under a Muslim caliphate
- inform agents and analysts about the jihadi network in the United States
- inform agents and analysts about the activities of Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups in the U.S.
- if any item is not taught, why not?
Please provide evidence of success in partnering with community groups in the CVE programs and the metrics by which success is judged. [As noted in the first part of this Special Report, GAO criticized CVE for lacking any metrics that could be used to determine whether the program is succeeding or failing.]
John Guandolo charges that the FBI is not sharing information about the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups in the U.S. with local and state law enforcement. How do you respond?
Guandolo also alleges that the FBI is not investigating and pursuing individuals and organizations which are supporting and training jihadis in America. How do you respond? If such investigations are taking place, please explain how the fact that Phil Haney was ordered to remove all such information from the DHS database has affected your investigations.
Why aren’t the FBI’s current counterterrorism training materials available to the public online? Will you do so now?
It’s Still the Ideology, Stupid
More evidence has come in that Islam is a supremacist ideology and jihad is core doctrine:
- Studies from a Princeton economist and the World Bank disprove that poverty is the root cause of terrorism.
- A Muslim Brotherhood leader said, “The Muslim Brotherhood was established for a general overall purpose, namely, the return of the comprehensive entity of the Umma (Muslim community) … the Islamic Caliphate….”
- Omar Mateen paid all his debts a week before killing 49 in Orlando. Under sharia law, martyrs are forgiven all wrong-doing, except nonpayment of debt.
- John Guandolo summation: “jihad is warfare against non-muslims and is obligatory until the entire world is under sharia (Islamic law).”