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There aren't nearly enough counterterrorism experts to instruct all of America's police. So we got these guys instead.
This is the case even with stricter states. Instructors in California must submit a course description, an expanded outline of the material covered, a budget, and—if the course involves such skills as firing a weapon—a safety plan. Under these criteria, Kharoba was deemed qualified.
There are also private accrediting agencies that supposedly vet trainers for competence and expertise and offer a kind of seal of approval. But many of these organizations sprang up after 9/11, and they often consist of little more than websites and a few names.
One of these accrediting organizations is called the Anti-Terrorism Accreditation Board, or ATAB, founded in 2001. ATAB promises that if you pay $695 for their certification (or $495 with a fee waiver), you will receive forty PowerPoints and over eight hundred books. Among ATAB’s promotional materials is a PowerPoint slideshow outlining current al-Qaeda tactics. One of the slides features a grainy picture of someone swinging a golf club and warns of “Golf Course Assassinations,” and the possibility of grenade attacks on the carts.
Richard Hughbank, of Extreme Terror Consulting, has taken ATAB’s more advanced course and become a certified master anti-terrorism specialist (CMAS). He provides ATAB with a glowing reference on its website, as well he might, because although the website doesn’t mention it, Hughbank is also the chairman of ATAB’s Standards Committee.
The certification chairman for ATAB is a man named Keith Flannigan. Flannigan claims numerous qualifications: a BA from Kent State University in 2008, an MA in psychology from the University of Frankfurt, likewise in 2008, and a PhD in philosophy from Northfield University—once again in 2008. However, the National Student Clearing House, a degree-verification service, was unable to find record of Flannigan at Kent State, nor did the University of Frankfurt find any evidence of attendance. When queried, Flannigan claimed that we couldn’t find his records because Keith Flannigan is not his legal name. Flannigan may well have a doctorate, for what it’s worth, from Northfield University, as it is run by the University Degree Program, described by Chronicle of Higher Education as “the granddaddy of diploma mill operations.”
None of this has stopped ATAB from gaining some important clients. For example, the U.S. Navy pays its personnel to get certified with ATAB. Why? “Any certification agency whose subject matter matches 80 percent or more of what the sailor does becomes eligible,” explained Keith Boring at the Navy’s credentials office. “Once the learning center and Navy leadership approves it, then we can pay for the exams.” To date, more than 2,000 Navy personnel (each presumably at the rate of at least $495, for a total of nearly $1 million) have been certified by ATAB.
Another way to gain authority as a counterterrorism expert is to publish a book. Richard Hughbank just published his first, The Dynamics of Terror and Creation of Homegrown Terrorism. John Giduck told us that his career got a significant boost from his book Terror at Beslan, which purports to be the most “complete and accurate” story of the Beslan school siege. We asked Giduck to clarify the sources for his most sensational charge: that scores of rapes occurred during the siege. Who were the alleged rape victims, and when exactly did these alleged incidents occur? In an email to us, Giduck didn’t provide much in the way of clarification but alleged there has been a public cover-up by both the terrorists and the Russian government. He did not explain why no other journalist among the dozens assigned to cover Beslan had managed to unearth such accounts.
“Who was raped? Give me one name and date,” said C. J. Chivers, a New York Times reporter and former Marine who published an 18,000-word narrative reconstruction of the school siege for Esquire magazine and won a 2007 National Magazine Award for his work. Chivers says he interviewed scores of hostages immediately after the event and in the following months and specifically examined Giduck’s allegations of rape. “There were no rapes at Beslan,” he says.
When we wanted to know more about Giduck’s time with the Russian special forces, Giduck wrote back to say that he had done a “series of trainings with Vityaz [a unit of Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces] at their special forces compound and training school on the Balashikha Army Base about 30 miles east of Moscow from 1999 to 2004” and had had close access to a series of elite Russian units, including Rus, another Spetsnaz division. When we made inquiries at the Russian Interior Ministry, we were informed that Giduck had not trained with Vityaz. Instead, he took a commercial course in extreme survival skills, with no counterterrorism component. Representatives from Rus said they had never heard of Giduck.
Even organizations cited for their high standards lack an adequate system for screening trainers. The best example is the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, known as FLETC. FLETC has been around since 1970, and it provides training to more than eighty federal law enforcement agencies—all of them, in fact, except for the DEA and the FBI. Its course development process, according to former FLETC curriculum developer Les Jenson, is stringent. “Subject-matter experts tear apart course proposals,” says Jenson. “They look at handouts, lesson plans, textbooks, and then they say to an instructor, We can accredit you if you make these changes.” FLETC can readily call on both in-house experts and outside contractors to evaluate course proposals and materials. In short, FLETC represents the gold standard for rigor in curriculum evaluations.
So did Sam Kharoba make the cut? Indeed he did. In 2004, Kharoba says, a FLETC training coordinator happened to hear him speak at a counterterrorism conference and was so impressed she invited him to teach sessions to law enforcement agents at FLETC headquarters in Glynco, Georgia. His courses were so well received that Kharoba was soon invited to teach senior instructors at FLETC. Those instructors then began, on an ad hoc basis, incorporating Kharoba’s curriculum into the courses they taught at agency-specific academies at FLETC. Kharoba told us that on March 15, 2005, he received an email from FLETC stating that they wanted to include his materials in the center’s basic curriculum.
As things turned out, though, the students of FLETC wound up being more skeptical than the school’s course evaluators. The same month that Kharoba was being invited to incorporate his material into the FLETC curriculum, FLETC received a complaint from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official named Muhammad Rana. Rana had been angered by course materials that included a handout describing “fundamentalist Muslims” as people with “long beards and head coverings” who, while “we call them radicals … are practicing true Islam.” Eleven out of fifteen members of the class submitted a letter in support of Rana’s complaint, and Rana took his case to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which ruled in his favor.