Facebook
Twitter
Features
There aren't nearly enough counterterrorism experts to instruct all of America's police. So we got these guys instead.
In Terror at Beslan, Giduck recounts giving a presentation on the 2002 hostage crisis at the Nord-Ost Theater in Moscow. After most of the terrorists were knocked unconscious by the gas that security forces pumped into the building, Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, came through, methodically shooting each of the terrorists once in the back of the head. Giduck is convinced that as Americans we could do better: we could shoot them twice. Giduck writes of being alarmed when a policeman came up to him after the talk and said that not one of the cops in the room would ever have considered doing this. “I think the first thing we need to do is pass federal legislation exempting law enforcement from any civil or criminal prosecution, any liability at all, for what they do if there is a terrorist attack on U.S. soil,” Giduck writes. “In attempting to prepare the American psyche for the worst possible terrorist act—the taking and killing of children—we must all shed the veil of civility and luxury in which we conduct our lives.”
“The former military guys [working as trainers] are always looking at this thing from a battlefield perspective,” explains Jack Cloonan, a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI who worked in the Osama bin Laden special unit from 1996 to 2002. “They are always looking at it as a U.S. military operation. But what does that have to do with sitting in the Bronx? Or trying to blend into society to carry out an attack? It’s just not related.”
And yet these trainers reach a considerable swath of law enforcement personnel. Of the half-dozen instructors we spoke to, most estimated that they had individually trained between 10,000 and 20,000 students over the course of the past five to six years. There are about 800,000 police officers in total in the United States.
When I look at the life of Muhammad, I get a very nasty image,” said Kharoba, pausing to look around the auditorium. The audience was silent. “I am talking about a pedophile, a serial killer, a rapist,” Kharoba said. “And that is just to start off with.
“Anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace,” he continued, “is either ignorant or flat out lying.”
Frustration seemed to be burning in the air, and a cop—looking grim, anguished—spoke up. “From a law enforcement standpoint, what can we do?” he asked. “What do we do to deal with these people?”
“The best way to handle these people is what I call legal harassment,” Kharoba answered. “Start to identify who is coming into your area.” Go to the DMV and see who has applied for a driving license. Look at the owners of convenience stores. Corner stores are one of the principal ways Hezbollah launders money in the United States, he said. (The claim is not true.) “You only need one precedent,” Kharoba said. “Health inspectors, alcohol trade officers, these guys can turn a convenience store upside down without a warrant.”
Eventually the discussion turned to Islamic names, a subject in which Kharoba claims a specialty. There are two types of Muslim immigrants, Kharoba told the class: honest ones who Americanize their names, and those who use long Arabic names as a smokescreen. “If I pull someone over at a traffic stop,” said Kharoba, “I’ll ask for a couple of IDs. And if I see different spellings of a name, my Christmas tree is lit up. That’s probable cause to take them in.”
As a law enforcement officer in the audience pointed out, this is hardly true. People have different names for all sorts of reasons. Arabic names often include a long chain of references to ancestors, occupations, places, and relatives, and don’t readily fall into the pattern of first, middle, and last names common in the Christian West. A Muslim name on a passport might be rendered one way by an immigration clerk, and quite another by a desk agent at the local DMV. These differences are not illegal.
Kharoba was undeterred. He pointed out a laminated reference card that he had included in the course materials. With this card, an officer could see if a driver’s name follows the standard naming pattern for the Arabic world. If the police officer remained in doubt, he should call Kharoba, who has an unusual hobby: he collects phone books. Kharoba has a collection of Jordanian phone books right up until 1992. If a cop were to call up with a Jordanian name not shown in the phone book, Kharoba’s advice would be unequivocal. “Fingerprint him. Take him to prison.”
Kharoba reiterated the need to fight ruthlessly, sharing a story about the government of Syria quelling an uprising in Aleppo by shelling the city and killing more than 7,000 people. It’s a terrible story—but no such thing happened in Aleppo. It happened in Hama, a city about ninety miles to the south, in 1982.
Similarly, when we examined his manual, A Law Enforcement Guide to Understanding Islamist Terrorism, we found the claim that when the Muslim population of a country exceeds 80 percent, one should expect “state-run ethnic cleansing and genocide.” The examples given were Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Neither state has ever been involved in genocide. In fact, large sections of Kharoba’s guide turned out to be word for word the same as open-source materials found online—everything from publicly available Facebook pages to anonymously authored PDFs.
Though the federal government covers much of the cost of counterterrorism instruction, it has surprisingly little control over who is chosen to conduct the training. Structural problems abound. There is no unified system of expert evaluation or regulatory authority to impose quality control. The Tenth Amendment, which states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” has been interpreted to mean that police powers, and officer training, are the preserve of the states. By design, state and local law enforcement is not the responsibility of the federal government, and neither is officer training. While the Department of Homeland Security offers certification, this only means that approved courses are eligible for DHS funds. If the course is paid for by other means—by a regional source, or by another federal department—DHS accreditation isn’t necessarily required. Even DHS money, once received by a state or local police department, can often be used for trainers without DHS accreditation.
Another theoretical gatekeeper to the world of training is at the state level. In many states, entities called Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) boards determine what should be taught both in basic training and in continuing education courses. However, POST approval does not entail evaluation of the content of each course. If an instructor submits a syllabus that lists appropriate topics and concepts, teaching accurate course content is that instructor’s job. Approval of the instructor, in turn, is usually done on the basis of a resume.