The FBI still is trying to determine how anti-Muslim bias crept into its anti-terrorism training program, NPR reports. Last week, the bureau sent out an email requesting that all training materials related to religion and culture be sent to headquarters and essentially taken offline until they could be vetted. Officials plan to go through every training module and look for instances of bias or inaccuracies that, until now, might have slipped through the cracks.
The FBI asked all 56 of its field offices to do an internal scrub of their counterterrorism training to look for hints of possible bias. The recall suggests that the FBI is not entirely sure what it is teaching in its counterterrorism curriculum. Part of the problem is one of structure. The counterterrorism training division has a lot of autonomy. It is essentially in charge of putting together its own training module and then is supposed to find a way to fit that training into the broader curriculum for agents at the agency’s Quantico, Va., facility. Because of the way it is structured, the vetting process for the counterterrorism curriculum was minimal. The FBI has ordered an internal audit to look at how the problems happened,