FACT CHECK: Republican presidential candidates misstate White House policy on Islam references

WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidates have claimed that the Obama administration is cleansing government files of references to radical Islam, an assertion so juicy that politicians keep repeating it — even though it’s a wild exaggeration.

The latest to run with the story is former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who told a crowd in Des Moines that the president “actually ordered all references to Islam and Muslim sanitized out of our national security documents.”
And over the weekend, Newt Gingrich told a veterans’ forum in Des Moines that the administration has “issued instructions, for example, that in developing training papers on terrorism that no mention should be made of radical Islam.” Rep. Michele Bachmann paved the way on Oct. 28, when she told 75 Republican faithful in Iowa that “Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI’s terror training manual.”

So where is this coming from? Last September, the online publication Wired.com broke a story that an FBI analyst had given a lecture to bureau trainees that was critical of Islam. The publication followed up, disclosing that the same analyst had given a similar lecture to an FBI-sponsored event in New York City. The FBI immediately ordered a comprehensive review of all the materials it uses to train its agents.

It would be hard to overstate the importance the FBI attaches to assistance from the Muslim community in the bureau’s terrorism investigations in the United States — a point that FBI Director Robert Mueller drove home in an appearance Wednesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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