FBI calls in West Point to help fix its counterterrorism training

Two months after Wired’s Danger Room blog first reported that a trainer at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., told agents that “mainstream” Muslims are likely to be “violent” terrorist sympathizers, Danger Room has found that the FBI is asking the Army for help in fixing its counterterrorism training.
“The FBI is calling in the cavalry,” Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman writes. It “represents a frank admission from the FBI that it requires outside help to reform.”

After the news of the Quantico trainer first came out, the FBI said the incident was an isolated one. Employing the Army’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to help look over their training materials, however, suggests a wider concern. An FBI official has also told Talking Points Memo that the Army’s role in the review is “overstated.” While confirming that the numbers about the review were correct, the FBI said a statement that a “core review team included FBI and non-FBI personnel with academic training in areas of Islamic studies and Arab history” which “established guidelines to provide concrete enterprise-wide guidance on the training of counterterrorism and countering violent extremism topics.”

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