TPMMuckraker's Ryan J. Reilly has a key national security story that is all too familiar: private contractors bilking the government with too little oversight and providing no national security benefits. In fact, this one is probably counterproductive.
[I]t is becoming increasingly clear that some of the experts who are providing counterterrorism training for local law enforcement officers are sometimes not well vetted and have provided training which is based on bias against all Muslims and relies on falsehoods and exaggerations.
Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze reported in Washington Monthly on the "self-styled experts" who have rushed into the void due to the lack of trained counterterrorism instructors and benefited from the tremendous amount of money and lack of universal oversight of such programs. The result is local law enforcement in some cases receiving training that is subpar at best, and dangerously misleading at worst.
A separate recent report from Political Research Associates (PRA) found that $1.67 billion in federal funds went to states in 2010 for the purpose of counter-terrorism training and that there was little oversight of the content of the training sessions. The report found there were "inadequate mechanisms to ensure quality and consistency in terrorism preparedness training provided by private vendors; public servants are regularly presented with misleading, inflammatory, and dangerous information about the nature of the terror threat through highly politicized seminars, industry conferences, trade publications, and electronic media."
"In place of sound skills training and intelligence briefings, a vocal and influential sub-group of the private counterterrorism training industry markets conspiracy theories about secret jihadi campaigns to replace the U.S. Constitution with Sharia law, and effectively impugns all of Islam—a world religion with 1.3 billion adherents—as inherently violent and even terroristic," according to the report....
The PRA report specifically looks at International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association (ICTOA), Security Solutions International, LLC (SSI) and The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre) and says that trainers "identify a range of constitutionally-protected activities, including religious practices and free speech, as the most dangerous threat."
One of the speakers at SSI's 2010 convention, according to the PRA report, was David Gaubatz, the man who had his son grow a beard and infiltrate the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He claimed in his SSI speech that "CAIR is a terrorist organization" (a claim that seems to have been adopted by at least one member of Congress). Another trainer, ICTOA's Walid Shoebat, suggests Islam is the fake religion of the "anti-Christ" and implies that Muslims bear the "Mark of the Beast" in various YouTube videos according to the PRA report.
That's comforting. One official who is in charge of a small portion of the budget for counterterrorism training is concerned about these reports. Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) director Bernard Melekian told Reilly, "I would imagine -- and I don't know this -- that there's going to be a review of exactly how instructors and curriculum are [vetted]. When I read that article, I was concerned about it. I would imagine there's going to be a review."
Let's hope so. Training local law enforcement to hate and fear the Muslims in their communities sure as hell won't make anyone safer.