Why Did The Pentagon Fund Paranoid, Anti-Muslim Economic Research?
14 March 2011By Juan Cole
Earlier we mentioned a new report funded by the
Pentagon, which argues that economic terrorists were
behind the collapse of the economy (and that they're
not through).
Not only is the pure rubbish, but the report also
appears to be anti-Muslim.
Not only does it claim that Sovereign Wealth Funds had
a major hand in the crash, it makes a big point of
their being "Shariah Complaint."
The report seems to draw a lot of inspiration from
this nonsense (.pdf) titled "The Fifth Generation
Warfare (5Gw Shari'ah Financing and the coming Ummah."
It writes:
The United States and the West cannot win the war
against radical Islam merely with the most
sophisticated military strategies. Winning requires
understanding the role of shari`ah and the Muslim
Brotherhood in developing a global ideological and
political movement supported by a parallel "Islamic"
financial system to exploit and undermine Western
economies and markets. This movement is the foundation
and the major funding source for the political,
economic, and military initiatives of the global
Islamic movement.1
Shari`ah finance is a new weapon in the arsenal of
what might be termed fifth-generation warfare (5GW).2
The perpetrators include both states and
organizations, advancing a global totalitarian
ideology disguised as a religion. The end goal is to
impose that ideology worldwide, making the Islamic
"nation", or ummah, supreme.
So yeah, why is the government funding this kind of
thing?
BTW, here's the chart used in the presentation showing
how these Sovereign Wealth Funds interact with US
companies?
How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam
- By Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze
On a bright January morning in 2010, at Broward
College in Davie, Florida, about sixty police officers
and other frontline law enforcement officials gathered
in a lecture hall for a course on combating terrorism
in the Sunshine State. Some in plain clothes, others
in uniform, they drifted in clutching Styrofoam cups
of coffee, greeting acquaintances from previous
statewide training sessions. The instructor, Sam
Kharoba, an olive-skinned man wearing rimless glasses
and an ill-fitting white dress shirt, stood apart at
the front of the hall reviewing PowerPoint slides on
his laptop.
As he got under way, Kharoba described how, over the
next three days, he would teach his audience the
fundamentals of Islam. "We constantly hear
statements," Kharoba began, "that Islam is a religion
of peace, and we constantly hear of jihadists who are
trying to kill as many non-Muslims as they can."
Kharoba's course would establish for his students that
one of these narratives speaks to a deep truth about
Islam, and the other is a calculated lie.
"How many terror attacks have there been since 9/11?
Muslim terror attacks," Kharoba asked the room.
Silence. "Let's start the bidding."
"Over a hundred," someone volunteered.
"I got a hundred," Kharoba called back. Another
audience member, louder now, suggested three hundred.
"Three hundred!" Kharoba declared.
"Over a thousand," offered another voice in the
audience.
Kharoba stopped the bidding. "Over thirteen thousand,"
he said. "Over thirteen thousand attacks." He paused
to let the statistic sink in.
Kharoba belongs to a growing profession, one that is
ballooning on the spigot of federal and state dollars
set aside for counterterrorism efforts since the
attacks of September 11, 2001. He is a
counterterrorism instructor to America's beat cops,
one of several hundred working the law enforcement
training circuit. Some are employed by large security
contractors; others, like Kharoba, are independent
operators.
Kharoba was born in Jordan, and he likes to intimate
that members of his family are important tribal
leaders. This lends a veneer of insider credibility to
classroom remarks that might otherwise seem like
off-color jokes. He showed the class some photographs
taken in the Gaza Strip. "This is the Arab version of
a line," Kharoba told the students, gesturing to a
photo of Palestinians rushing toward a passport
agency. Then he showed a YouTube video of two
uniformed men beating a nameless prisoner. "This is
what Miranda rights are in the Arab world," he said.
Fortunately for an adept American police officer,
Kharoba said, jihadists telegraph their extremist
intentions in altogether predictable ways. One only
has to learn the signs. Take Mahmoud—Kharoba's
preferred name for a generic Muslim. Kharoba can tell
whether Mahmoud is a Wahhabi (a member of a
fundamentalist Islamic sect from Saudi Arabia) just by
going through Mahmoud's trash. There will be no
pre-approved credit card offers, because interest is
forbidden in Islam. There will be no brown wax
fried-chicken bags, because fried chicken isn't halal.
For Kharoba, extremist Muslims are as easy to spot as
American gang members.
"When you see a bunch of guys in red, what do you
know?" Kharoba asked.
"They are Bloods," responded the audience, many of
whom deal with gangs regularly.
"When you have a Muslim that wears a headband,
regardless of color or insignia, basically what that
is telling you is ‘I am willing to be a martyr.'"
There were other signs, too. "From the perspective of
operational security, there are two things I am always
looking out for: a shaved body and moving lips," he
explained. "Some of the Pakistani hijackers shaved
their whole bodies in a ritual of cleanliness. If
their lips are moving, these guys are praying. As they
are walking through an airport, every second they're
going to be praying."
America today is too politically correct to
acknowledge the reality of Islamic fanaticism, Kharoba
said. "Would Islam be tolerated if everyone knew its
true message?" he asked the class. "From a Muslim
perspective, do you want non-Muslims to know the truth
about Islam?"
"No!" came the audience reply.
"So what do Muslims do?" Kharoba demanded.
"Lie!"
Kharoba strode forward to the front of the room, his
voice slower now, more measured. "Islam is a highly
violent radical religion that mandates that all of the
earth must be Muslim."
The class broke for lunch.
That afternoon, Kharoba offered more tips on how to
detect violent Muslims. "You remember the Alligator
Alley incident?" he asked.
He was referring to the events of September 13, 2002,
when three Middle Eastern men at a Shoney's restaurant
in Calhoun, Georgia—one Jordanian, one Pakistani, and
one Egyptian—were overheard talking about "bringing it
down" to Miami. A nearby diner, one Eunice Stone,
became alarmed and contacted the Georgia highway
patrol. In what became a terrorist scare with national
coverage, the police pulled the three men over on
Alligator Alley, the long section of Interstate 75
that cuts west across Florida. For thirteen hours, the
police combed the vehicle for explosives.
Kharoba projected a picture of Ayman Gheith, one of
the arrested men, onto the screen. "The first thing is
facial hair," Kharoba said. "Do you see how the
moustache is trimmed, and the beard is in a cone
shape? It is very common to have this beard, and the
moustache will always be the same, just like
Muhammad."
There is only one problem with the Alligator Alley
case—a problem Kharoba never mentioned to the class.
The incident was a false alarm. The "terrorists"
turned out to be medical students on their way to a
conference in Miami. They were innocent. After
thirteen hours of interrogation, the police released
them. Kharoba, however, taught the class that Ayman
Gheith was a "textbook case" of Islamic fanaticism.
While his views are entirely his own, the fact that
Kharoba is teaching this course at all reflects a
sweeping shift in America's official thinking about
law enforcement and intelligence gathering. In recent
years, the United States has become more and more
committed to the idea of bringing local police forces
into the business of sniffing out terrorists. In 2002,
the National Joint Terrorism Task Force was set up to
coordinate existing collaborative efforts among
federal, state, and local law enforcement. And since
2006, the Department of Justice has been developing a
program called the Nationwide Suspicious Activity
Reporting Initiative, through which local cops are
meant to act as intelligence gatherers on the ground,
feeding reports of suspicious activity to a network of
data "fusion centers" spread out across the country.
The system is scheduled to be up and running in all
seventy-two of the nation's fusion centers by the end
of this year. But in order for the cops to play a role
in counterterrorism, the thinking goes, they need to
be trained. And that's where Kharoba and his
ilk—counterterrorism trainers for hire—come in.
The very idea of integrating local police into the
nation's counterterror intelligence efforts is a
subject of debate among security experts. People at
the highest level of law enforcement and
intelligence—to say nothing of civil liberties
groups—have concerns about the strategy. While the
premise is perhaps intuitively appealing—particularly
in a place like Florida, where several of the 9/11
hijackers took flying lessons—one danger is that the
system will be flooded with bad leads. An increase in
incidents like the mistaken arrests on Alligator Alley
would only degrade police work, obscure real threats,
and spoil relations between America's cops and
America's Muslims—who have thus far volunteered some
of the most fruitful leads in preventing domestic
terror attacks.
It might be theoretically possible to ward off such an
outcome if police could be provided with impeccable
training. But one of the central problems is that the
demand for training far exceeds the supply of
qualified instructors. Even the CIA and FBI have had
trouble finding people with the key skills to fill
their ranks. For state and local law enforcement
departments, the scarcity is even more acute. Into the
void, self-styled experts have rushed in.
While expertise in counterterrorism training may be in
short supply, money for it is not. Each year the
federal government directs billions of dollars (no one
knows exactly how much) in terrorism-related training
grants to state and local governments. These funds
cascade down into myriad training programs like the
one at Broward College, where instructors like Kharoba
ply their trade with only minimal supervision.
am Kharoba came to the United States from Jordan when
he was seventeen to study computing at Louisiana State
University. When the 9/11 attacks happened, he was
working as a programmer. Noticing that the hijackers
used multiple aliases, he became convinced that the
American intelligence community was unequipped to deal
with the multiplicity of Arab names. Kharoba quit his
job and began work on a database of every jihadi
website and name that he could find. "For nine months,
I worked developing this database, with no income. I
knew I could do it," he told us. "It would be the best
thing. I would solve a critical problem for the
intelligence community, and then I'd call the Bureau,
call the CIA, sell it for five million, and I'm done.
I did my patriotic duty, and lived my American dream."
Neither the CIA nor the FBI showed much interest in
the database, though. Ten years later, Kharoba is
still working on it. He fell into teaching by chance,
in 2002, when the Community Oriented Policing Services
Program in Louisiana invited him to give a talk.
Kharoba had no professional experience in law
enforcement, no academic training in terrorism or
national security, and is not himself a Muslim. But as
a Jordanian-born Christian he was able to turn his
place of birth into a selling point. When we asked the
dean of the Institute of Public Safety why she
recruited Kharoba to teach there, her answer was that
Kharoba "put the flavor of Middle Eastern culture into
it."
Kharoba is an especially colorful character, but he is
in some ways typical of the kinds of people who have
migrated into the police counterterrorism training
business. Many have limited background in U.S.
counterterrorism and domestic law enforcement, and
little patience for the rules and conventions that
govern both fields.
Quite a few have found their way into the profession
by using their military experience to teach courses in
how to respond to terrorist attacks. The trainer Joe
Bierly, based in Riverside County, California, served
twenty-two years in the Marines, "and another ten plus
years in the black world, doing operations." Bierly
has a shooting range at his house, and practices every
day. Most cops, he said, only go to the range, "what,
once a year?" He doesn't think American law
enforcement is ready for the next terrorist attack. At
the end of the day, he said, the question is this:
"Can you run fifteen yards on a blood-slicked floor,
take aim, and still hit the target?"
Richard Hughbank, another counterterrorism trainer, is
a fourth-generation combat veteran on his father's
side. "Honestly, I kinda fell into it," Hughbank told
us when we interviewed him in November 2009. "I think
most of us did." The idea that fighting terrorism was
a mission that might extend beyond his military career
began to sink in when Hughbank was in Afghanistan. "A
man I very much respect, with whom I turned the first
five hundred people in to Guantanamo Bay, told me,
‘Richard, this is your future, this is your enemy.';"
Hughbank went on to found and became president of
Extreme Terrorism Consulting, which provides
counterterrorism training to law enforcement.
John Giduck was a practicing lawyer in the 1980s.
Then, he says, during the late Gorbachev era, the
American Bar Foundation dispatched him to Leningrad
(now St. Petersburg), where he met the head of the KGB
for Leningrad. ("Putin's boss," he says.) They became
fast friends, and Giduck began traveling frequently to
Russia. He claims to have trained with multiple
Russian special forces units, and to be certified by
the "Vityaz Special Forces Anti-Terror School." In
2004, Giduck traveled to Russia immediately after the
Beslan school massacre and wrote a book called Terror
at Beslan. It was published in 2005, and it raised
Giduck's profile, earning him a guest appearance on
the Glenn Beck show in the fall of 2007. Among the
book's most sensational allegations is that the
terrorists at Beslan systematically raped their
hostages, a claim that no other primary source account
has made. In the meantime, Giduck has also become an
in-demand counterterrorism trainer.
Some trainers do have roots in law enforcement. In a
major recent report on America's efforts to use local
police to monitor the population for terrorist
threats, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William
M. Arkin spoke to a counterterrorism trainer named
Ramon Montijo, a former Los Angeles police detective
and Army Special Forces sergeant. Like Kharoba,
Montijo made sweeping generalizations about Muslims.
"They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic
flag will fly over the White House—not on my watch!"
he said. "My job is to wake up the public, and first,
the first responders."
Despite their different backgrounds, the
counterterrorism trainers we interviewed have a
remarkably similar worldview. It is one of total,
civilizational war—a conflict against Islam that
involves everyone, without distinction between
combatant and noncombatant, law enforcement and
military. "Being politically correct inhibits you,"
Hughbank said. "I know Islam better than my own
religion. Some things need to be called a spade."
In Terror at Beslan, Giduck recounts giving a
presentation on the 2002 hostage crisis at the
Nord-Ost Theater in Moscow. After most of the
terrorists were knocked unconscious by the gas that
security forces pumped into the building, Spetsnaz,
the Russian special forces, came through, methodically
shooting each of the terrorists once in the back of
the head. Giduck is convinced that as Americans we
could do better: we could shoot them twice. Giduck
writes of being alarmed when a policeman came up to
him after the talk and said that not one of the cops
in the room would ever have considered doing this. "I
think the first thing we need to do is pass federal
legislation exempting law enforcement from any civil
or criminal prosecution, any liability at all, for
what they do if there is a terrorist attack on U.S.
soil," Giduck writes. "In attempting to prepare the
American psyche for the worst possible terrorist
act—the taking and killing of children—we must all
shed the veil of civility and luxury in which we
conduct our lives."
"The former military guys [working as trainers] are
always looking at this thing from a battlefield
perspective," explains Jack Cloonan, a
twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI who worked in the
Osama bin Laden special unit from 1996 to 2002. "They
are always looking at it as a U.S. military operation.
But what does that have to do with sitting in the
Bronx? Or trying to blend into society to carry out an
attack? It's just not related."
And yet these trainers reach a considerable swath of
law enforcement personnel. Of the half-dozen
instructors we spoke to, most estimated that they had
individually trained between 10,000 and 20,000
students over the course of the past five to six
years. There are about 800,000 police officers in
total in the United States.
hen I look at the life of Muhammad, I get a very nasty
image," said Kharoba, pausing to look around the
auditorium. The audience was silent. "I am talking
about a pedophile, a serial killer, a rapist," Kharoba
said. "And that is just to start off with.
"Anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace,"
he continued, "is either ignorant or flat out lying."
Frustration seemed to be burning in the air, and a
cop—looking grim, anguished—spoke up. "From a law
enforcement standpoint, what can we do?" he asked.
"What do we do to deal with these people?"
"The best way to handle these people is what I call
legal harassment," Kharoba answered. "Start to
identify who is coming into your area." Go to the DMV
and see who has applied for a driving license. Look at
the owners of convenience stores. Corner stores are
one of the principal ways Hezbollah launders money in
the United States, he said. (The claim is not true.)
"You only need one precedent," Kharoba said. "Health
inspectors, alcohol trade officers, these guys can
turn a convenience store upside down without a
warrant."
Eventually the discussion turned to Islamic names, a
subject in which Kharoba claims a specialty. There are
two types of Muslim immigrants, Kharoba told the
class: honest ones who Americanize their names, and
those who use long Arabic names as a smokescreen. "If
I pull someone over at a traffic stop," said Kharoba,
"I'll ask for a couple of IDs. And if I see different
spellings of a name, my Christmas tree is lit up.
That's probable cause to take them in."
As a law enforcement officer in the audience pointed
out, this is hardly true. People have different names
for all sorts of reasons. Arabic names often include a
long chain of references to ancestors, occupations,
places, and relatives, and don't readily fall into the
pattern of first, middle, and last names common in the
Christian West. A Muslim name on a passport might be
rendered one way by an immigration clerk, and quite
another by a desk agent at the local DMV. These
differences are not illegal.
Kharoba was undeterred. He pointed out a laminated
reference card that he had included in the course
materials. With this card, an officer could see if a
driver's name follows the standard naming pattern for
the Arabic world. If the police officer remained in
doubt, he should call Kharoba, who has an unusual
hobby: he collects phone books. Kharoba has a
collection of Jordanian phone books right up until
1992. If a cop were to call up with a Jordanian name
not shown in the phone book, Kharoba's advice would be
unequivocal. "Fingerprint him. Take him to prison."
Kharoba reiterated the need to fight ruthlessly,
sharing a story about the government of Syria quelling
an uprising in Aleppo by shelling the city and killing
more than 7,000 people. It's a terrible story—but no
such thing happened in Aleppo. It happened in Hama, a
city about ninety miles to the south, in 1982.
Similarly, when we examined his manual, A Law
Enforcement Guide to Understanding Islamist Terrorism,
we found the claim that when the Muslim population of
a country exceeds 80 percent, one should expect
"state-run ethnic cleansing and genocide." The
examples given were Iran and the United Arab Emirates.
Neither state has ever been involved in genocide. In
fact, large sections of Kharoba's guide turned out to
be word for word the same as open-source materials
found online—everything from publicly available
Facebook pages to anonymously authored PDFs.
hough the federal government covers much of the cost
of counterterrorism instruction, it has surprisingly
little control over who is chosen to conduct the
training. Structural problems abound. There is no
unified system of expert evaluation or regulatory
authority to impose quality control. The Tenth
Amendment, which states, "The powers not delegated to
the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the States, are reserved to the States
respectively, or to the people," has been interpreted
to mean that police powers, and officer training, are
the preserve of the states. By design, state and local
law enforcement is not the responsibility of the
federal government, and neither is officer training.
While the Department of Homeland Security offers
certification, this only means that approved courses
are eligible for DHS funds. If the course is paid for
by other means—by a regional source, or by another
federal department—DHS accreditation isn't necessarily
required. Even DHS money, once received by a state or
local police department, can often be used for
trainers without DHS accreditation.
Another theoretical gatekeeper to the world of
training is at the state level. In many states,
entities called Police Officer Standards and Training
(POST) boards determine what should be taught both in
basic training and in continuing education courses.
However, POST approval does not entail evaluation of
the content of each course. If an instructor submits a
syllabus that lists appropriate topics and concepts,
teaching accurate course content is that instructor's
job. Approval of the instructor, in turn, is usually
done on the basis of a resume.
This is the case even with stricter states.
Instructors in California must submit a course
description, an expanded outline of the material
covered, a budget, and—if the course involves such
skills as firing a weapon—a safety plan. Under these
criteria, Kharoba was deemed qualified.
There are also private accrediting agencies that
supposedly vet trainers for competence and expertise
and offer a kind of seal of approval. But many of
these organizations sprang up after 9/11, and they
often consist of little more than websites and a few
names.
One of these accrediting organizations is called the
Anti-Terrorism Accreditation Board, or ATAB, founded
in 2001. ATAB promises that if you pay $695 for their
certification (or $495 with a fee waiver), you will
receive forty PowerPoints and over eight hundred
books. Among ATAB's promotional materials is a
PowerPoint slideshow outlining current al-Qaeda
tactics. One of the slides features a grainy picture
of someone swinging a golf club and warns of "Golf
Course Assassinations," and the possibility of grenade
attacks on the carts.
Richard Hughbank, of Extreme Terror Consulting, has
taken ATAB's more advanced course and become a
certified master anti-terrorism specialist (CMAS). He
provides ATAB with a glowing reference on its website,
as well he might, because although the website doesn't
mention it, Hughbank is also the chairman of ATAB's
Standards Committee.
The certification chairman for ATAB is a man named
Keith Flannigan. Flannigan claims numerous
qualifications: a BA from Kent State University in
2008, an MA in psychology from the University of
Frankfurt, likewise in 2008, and a PhD in philosophy
from Northfield University—once again in 2008.
However, the National Student Clearing House, a
degree-verification service, was unable to find record
of Flannigan at Kent State, nor did the University of
Frankfurt find any evidence of attendance. When
queried, Flannigan claimed that we couldn't find his
records because Keith Flannigan is not his legal name.
Flannigan may well have a doctorate, for what it's
worth, from Northfield University, as it is run by the
University Degree Program, described by Chronicle of
Higher Education as "the granddaddy of diploma mill
operations."
None of this has stopped ATAB from gaining some
important clients. For example, the U.S. Navy pays its
personnel to get certified with ATAB. Why? "Any
certification agency whose subject matter matches 80
percent or more of what the sailor does becomes
eligible," explained Keith Boring at the Navy's
credentials office. "Once the learning center and Navy
leadership approves it, then we can pay for the
exams." To date, more than 2,000 Navy personnel (each
presumably at the rate of at least $495, for a total
of nearly $1 million) have been certified by ATAB.
Another way to gain authority as a counterterrorism
expert is to publish a book. Richard Hughbank just
published his first, The Dynamics of Terror and
Creation of Homegrown Terrorism. John Giduck told us
that his career got a significant boost from his book
Terror at Beslan, which purports to be the most
"complete and accurate" story of the Beslan school
siege. We asked Giduck to clarify the sources for his
most sensational charge: that scores of rapes occurred
during the siege. Who were the alleged rape victims,
and when exactly did these alleged incidents occur? In
an email to us, Giduck didn't provide much in the way
of clarification but alleged there has been a public
cover-up by both the terrorists and the Russian
government. He did not explain why no other journalist
among the dozens assigned to cover Beslan had managed
to unearth such accounts.
"Who was raped? Give me one name and date," said C. J.
Chivers, a New York Times reporter and former Marine
who published an 18,000-word narrative reconstruction
of the school siege for Esquire magazine and won a
2007 National Magazine Award for his work. Chivers
says he interviewed scores of hostages immediately
after the event and in the following months and
specifically examined Giduck's allegations of rape.
"There were no rapes at Beslan," he says.
When we wanted to know more about Giduck's time with
the Russian special forces, Giduck wrote back to say
that he had done a "series of trainings with Vityaz [a
unit of Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces] at their
special forces compound and training school on the
Balashikha Army Base about 30 miles east of Moscow
from 1999 to 2004" and had had close access to a
series of elite Russian units, including Rus, another
Spetsnaz division. When we made inquiries at the
Russian Interior Ministry, we were informed that
Giduck had not trained with Vityaz. Instead, he took a
commercial course in extreme survival skills, with no
counterterrorism component. Representatives from Rus
said they had never heard of Giduck.
ven organizations cited for their high standards lack
an adequate system for screening trainers. The best
example is the Federal Law Enforcement Training
Center, known as FLETC. FLETC has been around since
1970, and it provides training to more than eighty
federal law enforcement agencies—all of them, in fact,
except for the DEA and the FBI. Its course development
process, according to former FLETC curriculum
developer Les Jenson, is stringent. "Subject-matter
experts tear apart course proposals," says Jenson.
"They look at handouts, lesson plans, textbooks, and
then they say to an instructor, We can accredit you if
you make these changes." FLETC can readily call on
both in-house experts and outside contractors to
evaluate course proposals and materials. In short,
FLETC represents the gold standard for rigor in
curriculum evaluations.
So did Sam Kharoba make the cut? Indeed he did. In
2004, Kharoba says, a FLETC training coordinator
happened to hear him speak at a counterterrorism
conference and was so impressed she invited him to
teach sessions to law enforcement agents at FLETC
headquarters in Glynco, Georgia. His courses were so
well received that Kharoba was soon invited to teach
senior instructors at FLETC. Those instructors then
began, on an ad hoc basis, incorporating Kharoba's
curriculum into the courses they taught at
agency-specific academies at FLETC. Kharoba told us
that on March 15, 2005, he received an email from
FLETC stating that they wanted to include his
materials in the center's basic curriculum.
As things turned out, though, the students of FLETC
wound up being more skeptical than the school's course
evaluators. The same month that Kharoba was being
invited to incorporate his material into the FLETC
curriculum, FLETC received a complaint from an
Immigration and Customs Enforcement official named
Muhammad Rana. Rana had been angered by course
materials that included a handout describing
"fundamentalist Muslims" as people with "long beards
and head coverings" who, while "we call them radicals
… are practicing true Islam." Eleven out of fifteen
members of the class submitted a letter in support of
Rana's complaint, and Rana took his case to the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, which ruled in his
favor.
Perhaps embarrassed by the Rana incident, FLETC
suspended the official incorporation of Kharoba's
course into the standard curriculum. However, once
core FLETC classes are completed, officers and agents
attend additional classes specific to their agencies,
and as Les Jenson explained, "If an agency hired
someone, it would be up to a specific agency to do the
quality control." Via this loophole, Kharoba continued
to teach at FLETC for at least a year, from 2005 to
2006. The FLETC website continued to list "Islamic
Culture and Names," which is the name of Sam's course,
in its Fundamentals of Terrorism Training Program
until January 22, 2010. That day, we telephoned to
inquire about Sam Kharoba and received no answer. By
the next day the information had disappeared from the
website. Despite the fact that online archives show
"Islamic Culture and Names" as part of the curriculum
through 2008, in response to a Freedom of Information
Act request about the course, FLETC maintains it has
"no records."
Though he is no longer a presence at FLETC, Kharoba
continues to teach in other places. In November 2010,
the St. Petersburg Times reported that the sheriff in
Pasco County, Florida, planned to spend $45,000 of a
$361,000 training budget teaching local officers how
"radical Muslims groom their facial hair and wear
their pants, as well as a ‘behavioral analysis
technique to distinguish visually between moderates
and radicals.';" Those classes held at Pasco-Hernando
Community College will be taught by Sam Kharoba.
n law enforcement training, student feedback is
supposed to act as a check on questionable trainers.
Positive course evaluations from police officers are
central to the steady employment of those who would
train them. The trouble is that most of the terror
trainers stay in business precisely because their
audience members, few of whom have any background in
Islam, report favorably on the instruction they're
receiving.
Police attend classes like Kharoba's for a variety of
reasons. Local and state law enforcement officers must
meet annual or biannual training requirements, a
certain number of hours of which are slated for
maintenance of "perishable skills": things such as
driving and shooting. Officers or their departments
can generally pick the rest. Often, departments need a
"go-to" person, someone who is a source of information
on a subject such as counterterrorism. Attendees tend
to be self-selected, motivated by an awareness of how
little they know about Islam or a heightened concern
about Islamic terrorism, and this can make them more
inclined to be receptive to an instructor like Kharoba.
It also helps that the terror trainers are often
entertaining. They engage their audience with
questions, jokes, stories, and visuals. Like other
trainers, Kharoba has a useful stage presence. "He
kept an audience of police chiefs captivated," said
Phil Ludos of the Florida Police Chiefs Association.
"That is not an easy thing to do."
When we spoke to students from Kharoba's class in
Florida, many were enthusiastic. Olga Gonzalez, who is
a TSA officer in Miami, to
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