Are taxpayers giving over a billion dollars to anti-Muslim crackpots?

[ck4829]

There's been an explosion of both state and federal money flowing into counterterrorism training for law enforcement in the years since Sept. 11. But it 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.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/federal_funds_for_counterterrorism_training_pay_for_anti-muslim_instructors.php