Army Gen. Martin Demp-sey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has ordered the entire US military to scour its training material to ensure it doesn’t contain anti-Islamic content.
Danger Room, a part of Wired magazine, first reported the action, which was later confirmed by the Pentagon.
The extraordinary order from Dempsey was prompted by content in a course titled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism” that was presented at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
The course instructed lieutenant colonels, colonels and their equivalents from across all four armed services that “Islam had already declared war on the West,” said Lt. Gen. George Flynn, Dempsey’s deputy for training and education.
“It was inflammatory,” Flynn told Danger Room last Tuesday. “We said, ‘Wait a second, that’s really not what we’re talking about.’ That is not how we view this problem or the challenges we have in the world today.”
Last September, Danger Room sparked a similar rapid response in the Justice Department when it reported on similar anti-Islamic material in the FBI’s counter-terrorism training. That story sparked strong reactions from the US attorney general on down, and prompted the White House to order a review of US counterterrorism training last October.
Despite that White House order, the military’s “Perspectives” course, taught since 2004, not only evaded review, but also had defenders in the Joint Forces Staff College that taught it, Danger Room reported.
Danger Room said it first learned about the course in March, and determined that one of its guest lecturers was Stephen Coughlin, who has taught FBI and US Army audiences that Islamic law is a danger to US national security.
Danger Room said that when it sought comment from the Joint Forces Staff College, a representative defended the propriety of the course. Feedback from students was “mostly positive, usually around the 90 percent range,” Steven Williams, a spokesman for the college, e-mailed Danger Room six weeks ago. “Students generally appreciate thought-provoking discussion and the freedom to consider critical perspectives.”
The Pentagon, however, painted a very different picture last Tuesday. General Flynn said multiple officers who attended the course had raised internal objections about its presentation of Islam and Muslims.
Flynn said he heard about the objectionable material the previous week after a colonel enrolled in the course complained about the anti-Islam lessons. “We looked at it and we found the material to be objectionable and we started digging into it to see how did the course get this way,” Flynn said.
The course was scheduled to hold its second weekly meeting of the semester last Wednesday, but that class was canceled. Flynn appointed a two-star general to spend the next 30 days investigating how the course came to include anti-Islam material in apparent contravention of the White House’s specific directive.
General Dempsey has issued a letter to the chiefs of all four military services and the leaders of the military’s regional commands to make certain their own educational and training materials “are consistent with our values,” said Brig. Gen. Richard Gross, Dempsey’s senior legal adviser.
“Possibly, we did not follow the procedures we should have followed in academically approving the course, but that’ll be formally determined when we complete the inquiry into this,” Flynn told Danger Room.
“We have an elective that did not meet the educational standards or the values of our JPME [Joint Professional Military Education] enterprise, so we’re going to suspend the course,” Flynn said.
There have been frequent exposÈs of anti-Islamic training material being used, generally at the state and local level to train police officers. But the FBI and military exposÈs involved federal agencies where more academic rigor is expected.
Last fall, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed 87 requests for access to training materials used around the country in an effort to track down other abuses. That probe was aimed at training for law enforcement.
A CAIR statement then said, “CAIR’s public records requests seek to ensure that law enforcement agencies are using qualified trainers who present objective and unbiased information to help protect Americans from violent extremists of all types. We firmly believe that good training leads to good investigations, while biased training leads to biased investigations. We are particularly concerned with ensuring that taxpayer dollars are not wasted on training that is agenda-driven, inaccurate or Islamophobic.”