The FBI has removed hundreds of counterterrorism training documents after a months-long review found inaccuracies and other problems in their description of Muslims.
The review was triggered after a September blog in Wired magazine revealed training documents that reportedly called the Prophet Muhammad a “cult leader,” claimed “devout” Muslims have been generally violent for hundreds of years and made other controversial statements.
The FBI did not get into details about which documents were taken out, but a law enforcement source confirmed to Fox News on Tuesday that hundreds were removed because they were deemed “not consistent with the highest professional standards and the FBI’s core values.”
The results of the review were announced during a meeting earlier this month that included FBI Director Robert Mueller.
The pages which were removed fell into at least one of four categories — “poor taste,” using Arab or Muslim “stereotypes,” information missing “precision,” and “factual errors.”
Despite the outcome, the FBI maintained that the bulk of its training materials is up to FBI standards. Less than 1 percent of the 160,000 training material pages was removed, FBI spokesman Christopher Allen said. The review covered documents dating back to Sept. 11, 2001, which were used in training courses for new agents, continuing education courses for others and presentations to groups.
“As a result of that review, we found that the overwhelming majority of our counterterrorism training materials met the FBI’s standards,” Allen said in a statement.
Allen described the review as “comprehensive,” and said the bureau is developing new guidelines that will govern “future training.”
Allen also said the FBI has been communicating with advocacy groups since the beginning of the review process to explain what happened and what “corrective actions” would be taken.
“The Muslim American community is an essential partner in our efforts not only to prevent terrorism, but to address other crime concerns that affect communities, including the protection of civil rights,” Allen said.
The Wired article detailed, among other materials, a presentation that included a graph that tracked followers of the Bible, Torah and Koran over hundreds of years. It showed “devout” followers of the Torah and the Bible becoming less violent over time, while “devout” followers of the Koran remaining as violent in 2010 as they were hundreds of years ago.
One concern was that the documents played into al Qaeda propaganda that America was battling Islam as a whole, and not just radical Muslim extremists.
“It’s counterproductive to our counterterrorism work,” Salam al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told FoxNews.com. “It’s not effective counterterrorism policy to be at war with the whole religion or any religion.”
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3 Responses
PC run amok again. If there were factual errors in the material, of course those should be removed, but the examples cited were not factual errors at all; they were merely fact that don’t line up with the political line. As for MPAC engaging in “counterterrorism work”, that’s a joke; MPAC is itself a terrorist front!
As a direct result of this change FBI agents will be less well-informed than they could be, and therefore they will be less effective at their jobs. People could die as a result of this nonsense, but who cares about them, so long as we maintained ideological purity?
“As a result of that review, we found that the overwhelming majority of our counterterrorism training materials met the FBI’s standards,” Allen said in a statement.”
IOW, they still won’t hire American Jews who speak arabic because they don’t trust us.