A former FBI agent who believes that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the US government and that John Brennan, the director of the CIA, is a secret follower of Islam is poised to begin three days of counter-terrorism training with law enforcers in northern Virginia.



Starting on Tuesday, John Guandolo will deliver what is billed as “advanced counter-terrorism” training under the title of “Jihadi Networks in America”. About 50 law enforcers from Culpeper County, Virginia, and elsewhere will attend.

The event, advertised at $225 per trainee and being held at Germanna community college in Culpeper, has prompted an outcry from local and national Islamic groups, which warn that he is a notorious Muslim-basher and conspiracy theorist. Islamic leaders see the training sessions as part of a conscious attempt post 9/11 to spread misinformation about American Muslims within law enforcement circles.

In an interview with a far-right website last year, Guandolo claimed that Brennan had converted to Islam when he was CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s. “I have direct sources who were government officials and they have direct knowledge that he was not only befriended by employees of Saudi government and intelligence but as the culmination of this relationship he converted to Islam while serving as the senior US intelligence representative for the US.”

In his training materials, Guandolo claims to uncover the infiltration of the US federal government by the Muslim Brotherhood. In his view, mosques are also fronts for the Brotherhood.

Scott Jenkins, the sheriff of Culpeper County who booked Guandolo, has vowed to carry on with the training despite the outcry. But he met with Islamic leaders on Friday, and has agreed to allow them to address his 25 deputies on Monday afternoon in order to hear their qualms about Guandolo before the training begins.

“We’ve got sense enough not to take anything we might not agree with at face value,” Jenkins told the local news outlet Fredericksburg.com. The sheriff said he would also provide a disclaimer to the sessions saying that his department did not endorse Guandolo’s teaching.

Guandolo’s opponents claimed a mini-victory on Monday afternoon when the Rappahannock regional criminal justice academy withdrew a training credit from the course. One of the attractions for the deputies who have signed up for the session is that they would have earned credit towards the 40 hours of training they are obligated to complete every year, but that incentive is now removed, potentially threatening the viability of the event.

The academy apologised to those affected and said it had made the decision after “careful consideration and consultation with other law enforcement agencies and academies, having firsthand knowledge of this training”.

Corey Saylor, spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that Guandolo’s intention and impact was to undermine the rights of Muslim Americans. “Counter-terrorism training is important. Bad counter-terrorism training is damaging. Guandolo provides bad counter-terrorism training.”

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, demand for counter-terrorism training expanded exponentially across the country. Considerable sums of taxpayers’ money has been devoted to the problem, with the federal government providing $1.7bn in grants in 2010.

Far-right groups have spotted an opportunity in this rapidly growing new industry to disseminate Islamophic theories posing as legitimate counter-terrorism strategy. A report by the progressive think tank Political Research Associates in 2011 found that an influential sub-group of the counter-terrorism training industry “markets conspiracy theories about secret jihadi campaigns to replace the US constitution with sharia law, and effectively impugns all of Islam”.

The sub-group includes the Thin Blue Line Project, a campaign by Act! for America, with which Guandolo is closely associated, that disseminates the idea of a Muslim Brotherhood jihadi takeover of the US among law enforcers.

Concern about the influence of such groups has been taken seriously by federal agencies, with the department of justice and FBI promising to expunge all such propaganda from its training manuals. But watchdog groups remain alarmed by the proliferation of anti-Muslim training at a local level.

“Groups are still actively trying at a local level to get their paranoid vision of the world into law enforcement and the military,” said Josh Glasstetter, campaign director of the anti-extremist monitoring group the Southern Poverty Law Center. “The danger of these programmes is that they carry the official imprimatur of the local police department, and as such are officially sanctioned.”