FBI agents aren’t allowed to treat individuals associated with terrorist groups as potential threats to the nation, according to a startling, newly discovered FBI directive.

The fact that a terrorism suspect is associated with a terrorist group means nothing, according to the FBI document, “Guiding Principles: Touchstone Document on Training.” The “touchstone” document, dated March of this year, is available online but hasn’t been reported on by major media outlets.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents are to be instructed that “mere association with organizations that demonstrate both legitimate (advocacy) and illicit (violent extremism) objectives should not automatically result in a determination that the associated individual is acting in furtherance of the organization’s illicit objective(s),” the touchstone document states.

This is a bizarre kind of procedural fairness as viewed in a funhouse mirror, applying something akin to a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard to an FBI investigation. Such an evidentiary threshold may be appropriate for a criminal trial, but it sets the bar far too high for mere investigations. This new rule no doubt provides aid and comfort to the much-investigated phony civil rights group known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

After first handcuffing FBI agents investigating terrorism, the touchstone document also invokes the gods of political correctness by making FBI agents afraid of being called “racist” – even though almost all Islamic terrorism suspects come from the same part of the world.

“Training must emphasize that no investigative or intelligence collection activity may be based solely on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious affiliation,” the touchstone document reads. “Specifically, training must focus on behavioral indicators that have a potential nexus to terrorist or criminal activity, while making clear that religious expression, protest activity, and the espousing of political or ideological beliefs are constitutionally protected activities that must not be equated with terrorism or criminality absent other indicia of such offenses.”

The touchstone document is examined in The Project, a film about the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for America that is airing this week. (The movie was produced by The Blaze’s documentary unit. Part I of The Project premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern, followed by Part II the next evening at the same time. Dish subscribers may watch it on channel 212.)

One of the movie’s arguments is that Americans’ civil rights and political correctness are weapons of infiltration used by our Islamofascist enemies. This happens to be consistent with Saul Alinsky’s fourth rule of “power tactics”: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” In other words, Islamists are using Americans’ goodness, their sense of fair play, including an aversion to being accused of racial stereotyping, against America.

Five congressmen sent a letter in June to Michael E. Horowitz, Inspector General at the Department of Justice, about the touchstone document, protesting that it and other Obama administration “policies and initiatives strike us as deeply problematic with respect to our national and homeland security.” The letter was signed by Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Thomas Rooney (R-FL), and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA).

The touchstone document brings to mind the 1995 memo written by Bill Clinton’s “Mistress of Disaster,” then-Deputy Attorney Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick’s directive, titled “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations,” provided proof of the Clinton administration’s distaste for fighting Islamic terrorism and hindered investigations, according to DiscoverTheNetworks:

While two George Soros-funded nonprofits, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America, use the Alinsky playbook to try to convince Americans that “Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness, is a threat to American democracy and pluralism, the embattled Obama administration is currently in full-time damage control mode as the president’s foreign policy aimed at appeasing totalitarian Islamic theocrats collapses. The administration has been sucking up to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a 57-state (56 sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority) group that considers itself the Caliphate reborn. The Obama administration may even be planning to promote Saudi-style anti-blasphemy laws at the behest of Islamists, as Rep. Trent Franks discovered.

News of the touchstone memo comes amidst reports that the Obama administration is considering releasing 55 terrorist detainees from the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp. One of those former detainees is thought to be behind the recent torture-killing of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya.

The news also comes amidst reports that the Obama administration is working on sending the “Blind Sheikh,” convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman, back to Egypt where that country’s new rulers would hail him as a hero for orchestrating the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Hani Nour El-Din, a member of Abdel-Rahman’s terrorist group, Jamaa Islamiya, visited the Obama White House in June. He asked the Obama administration to free Abdel-Rahman, saying such a move “would be a gift to the revolution” in Egypt. Hillary Clinton’s State Department had granted El-Din a visa to travel to the U.S. even though as a member of an officially designated terrorist group he is clearly ineligible.

Samuel Tadros, an Egyptian citizen and research fellow in Egyptian politics at the Hudson Institute, was astonished that El-Din was allowed into the U.S. “It would have taken the State Department five seconds to Google his name in Arabic and realize he is a member of a designated terrorist organization,” he said in June.