Spencer Ackerman at Wired.com's Danger Room has a major followup today on their recent scoop about an FBI training workshop that characterized Muslims as inherently more prone to violence and terrorism than people of other faiths.
Danger Room's original post about presentations by the FBI's William Gawthrop sparked excuses and amended excuses from the FBI, and inquiries by members of congress. Here's hoping that today's revelations, which include videos like the one above (taken offline by their creator, then snagged and re-posted by Wired) will inspire more action.
The content of the video is shocking. Don't miss the Star Wars reference. Snip:
"At the operational level, you have groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah,
al-Qaida. Like teeth in a shark, it is irrelevant if you take one
group out," Gawthrop said during his lecture to the New York Metro
Infragard at the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan.Since Danger Room published the contents of Gawthrop's April lecture,
top Senators and representatives from Arab- and Muslim-American groups
have blasted the FBI for the training documents, which compare
Mohammed to a "cult leader."This June 8 lecture is controversial in a different way. In Gawthrop's
worldview, the struggle against al-Qaida is really just an
afterthought in a broader war. The group that knocked down the World
Trade Center and rammed a jet into the Pentagon is a mere distraction.
These are the professional assessments of a representative from the
nation's top domestic counterterrorism agency — a man considered so
expert in understanding militant strategy that the FBI had him
training agents on the subject."We waste a lot of analytic effort talking about the type of weapon,
the timing, the tactics. All of that is irrelevant … if you have an
Islamic motivation for actions," Gawthrop said. Even taking down
hostile states like Iran is futile, since "there are still internal
forces that will seek to exert Islamic rule again."The best strategy for undermining militants, Gawthrop suggested, is to
go after Islam itself. To undermine the validity of key Islamic
scriptures and key Muslim leaders."If you remember Star Wars, that ventilation shaft that goes down to
into the depths of the Death Star, they shot a torpedo down there.
That's a critical vulnerability," Gawthrop told his audience. Then he
waved a laser pointer at his projected PowerPoint slide, calling
attention to the words "Holy Texts" and "Clerics.""We should be looking at, should be aiming at, these," Gawthrop said.
