Lovely, Just Lovely

If you ever wondered why we need civil liberties, this story about how the FBI decided to explicitly teach its agents Islamophobic bullsh%$:

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.”

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.

………

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.

(emphasis mine)

The nickel tour is that they turned over rocks and invited the most repugnant bigoted wingnuts to develop a curriculum to train their agents.

After all these years, they are still J. Edgar Hoovers merry band of thugs with a badge, and I don't want these folks taking a piss without a judge reviewing this, which is why things like the judicial review free National Security Letters are such a bad idea.

What we won't see happening here is someone getting fired over this, because law enforcement will only police itself when there is absolutely no alternative.

Everyone in the chain of command who knew about this should be fired, and those who should have known should be transferred to the FBI office in Nome, Alaska.