‘Institutional Failures’ Led Military to Teach War on Islam

Wired
Spencer Ackerman
Noah Shachtman

A class urging senior US military officers to wage “total war” on Islam wasn’t just the work of one misguided teacher. According to an inquiry ordered by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was the result of “institutional failures in oversight and judgment” at one of the military’s top educational institutions.

Those are the results of a months-long, military-wide review into the US armed forces’ educational programs, prompted by a series of Danger Room articles on counter-terrorism training that sought to portray the world’s billion-plus Muslims as enemies of the United States.

The worst of those courses was taught at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. Titled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” the course began years ago as an inoffensive examination of the roots of violent extremism. But in later years, the class was “modified to adopt a teaching methodology that portrayed Islam almost entirely in a negative way,” said Col. Dave Lapan, a spokesman for Gen. Martin Dempsey, the nation’s top military officer.

The instructor of the course, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, spent weeks arguing that the US was at war with the Islamic faith. In planning for that war’s next phases, Dooley invited his students to use the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, and to target the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

Dooley has now been stripped of his teaching position at the college and formally reprimanded — but not cashiered from the Army. Two civilian officials at the college are being reviewed for possible “administrative or disciplinary action,” according to Lapan. “A second military officer will receive administrative counseling.”

With the exception of Dooley’s class, however, the Pentagon review “confirmed that adequate academic standards for approving course curricula, presentations and selecting qualified guest lecturers were in place” at the rest of the military’s teaching centers, Lapan added.
That brings the inquiry to a close — without resolving several questions about the course. Nor will the officers exposed to the anti-Islam message receive retraining to correct what the military itself considers an inappropriate and offensive instruction.

U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam

Wired
Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman

(Presentation at the end of the article)

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to make sure it doesn’t contain similarly hateful material, a process that is still ongoing. But the officer who delivered the lectures, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia college, pending an investigation. The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.

For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.

“We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”

Dooley could not be reached for comment. Joint Forces Staff College spokesman Steven Williams declined to discuss Dooley’s presentation or his status at the school. But when asked if Dooley was responsible for the course material, he responded, “I don’t know if I would classify him [Dooley] as responsible. That would be the commandant” of the school, Maj. Gen. Joseph Ward.

That makes the two-star general culpable for rather shocking material. In the same presentation, Dooley lays out a possible four-phase war plan to carry out a forced transformation of the Islam religion. Phase three includes possible outcomes like “Islam reduced to a cult status” and “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation.” (It’s an especially ironic suggestion, in light of today’s news that Saudi intelligence broke up the most recent al-Qaida bombing plot.)

International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.”