Posted on 01/07/2004 4:43:49 AM PST by Diogenesis
Arab translators cheered Sept. 11 [.... while the FBI kept the FBI free of Jews]
By Paul Sperry
WASHINGTON – In a shocking revelation, an FBI whistleblower claims some
Arab-Americans translating Arabic intercepts for the FBI spoke approvingly
of the terrorist attacks on America more than two years ago.
Former FBI translator Sibel D. Edmonds says translators of Middle Eastern
origin working for the FBI's Washington field office maintain an
"us"-versus-"them" attitude that's so strong it may be compromising al-Qaida
investigations.
She cited examples of mistranslations and security breaches within the FBI's
language division, where translators with Top Secret clearance interpret
sensitive terror-related information for agents.
"The issues and problems within the FBI's translation units range from
security failures to questions of loyalty to competence of translation personnel
to systemic problems within their low-to-mid-level management practices,"
Edmonds said.
She made the explosive charges Monday in a letter to the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, an independent
panel investigating the 9-11 attacks and U.S. intelligence leading up to them.
WorldNetDaily has obtained a copy of the 9-page letter.
Edmonds, a translator who worked closely with FBI counterterrorism and
counterintelligence agents at an office within blocks of the Washington field
office, said she overheard some translators express sympathy for the 9-11
terrorist attacks.
"During my work with the bureau, I was seriously taken aback by what I
heard and witnessed within the translation department," she said. "There
were those who openly divided the fronts as 'Us' – the Middle-Easterners who
shared certain views – and 'Them' – the Americans who were the outsiders
[whose] arrogance was now 'leading to their own destruction.'"
Not long after the attacks, Edmonds said one translator said: "It is about time
that they get a taste of what they have been giving to the rest of the Middle
East."
She says the remark was made in front of the unit supervisor, also of Middle
Eastern origin.
"These comments were neither rare nor made in a whisper," Edmonds said.
"They were open and loud."
She says such attitudes call into question "the integrity and accuracy" of
information Arabic translators are feeding agents.
Edmonds says agents who don't speak Arabic have no way of knowing
whether the information they receive from translators is tainted.
"They simply have to trust the information given to them by translators," she
said, "and based on that, decide to act or not act."
Decisions to release terrorist suspects taken into custody are also based on
translations of interviews with those suspects, she argues.
Remarkably, agents don't even have direct security access to the translation
unit, Edmonds says. They have to be escorted into the area by translators.
She says she caught a Turkish translator intentionally blocking intelligence
from being translated by labeling it as "not pertinent." The translator also
intentionally mistranslated documents and other information, she says. And
she alleges the same linguist, Melek Can Dickerson, was granted security
clearance by the FBI despite ties to targets of FBI investigations.
After she brought the alleged breaches to the attention of her supervisors,
Edmonds was fired by the FBI. Her termination letter does not state a reason.
Edmonds filed a lawsuit, but Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI
Director Robert Mueller got a federal judge to block it by asserting the
extremely rare claim of "State Secret Privilege."
And her lawyers say Justice's inspector general is slow-walking an internal
review of her case, even though the office has criticized the FBI for security
lapses in recent reports, some related to the language program. In fact, a Nov.
15, 2002, IG report states: "A language specialist was dismissed for
unauthorized contacts with foreign officials and intelligence officers, receipts
of things of value from them and lack of candor in his convoluted and
contradictory responses to questions about his contacts."
Most of Edmonds' charges have been confirmed by Sen. Charles Grassley,
R-Iowa, and other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who have
quizzed the FBI about her case. Edmonds sent a copy of her 9-page letter to
Grassley, one of the FBI's biggest critics on the Hill.
The FBI blamed the security lapses on a chronic shortage of Arabic translators,
which has forced it to hire mostly immigrants from the Middle East, which
makes background checks more difficult.
The Washington field office did not return repeated phone calls seeking
comment.
But the chief of the FBI's language section, Margaret Gullota, has insisted in
congressional testimony that the FBI hasn't loosened its standards in recruiting
Arabic-speaking translators since 9-11.
Edmonds isn't the only one complaining, though.
John Cole, program manager for the FBI foreign intelligence investigations
covering India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, told Congress about what he
believed to be a security lapse regarding the screening and hiring of
translators.
And Donald Lavey, who worked in counterterrorism for 20 years at the FBI,
recalled loyalty issues with a former Arab translator in the FBI's Detroit office.
He said wiretap translations by Mideast-born agents should have a "second
opinion," because their backgrounds may "prejudice" their interpretation and
analysis.
Both he and Edmonds note that translators often exclude large sections of
Arabic dialogue as irrelevant to the investigation, when in fact, they may be
relevant.
"There are thousands of translated documents/information and documents
that were labeled as 'not pertinent to be translated' by certain translators
before and after Sept. 11, that need to, and have to, be retranslated and
re-examined," Edmonds wrote in her letter.
Also, she says some Arab-American translators, including a supervisor,
threatened to sue the FBI for discrimination after complaints were filed
against them.
"In one case, a certain individual ended up getting a supervisory position,
even though initially he was refused due to his questionable past,
incompetence and fraudulent invoices" for expenses, Edmonds said. She
declined to reveal his name.
Edmonds says she is working with some families of 9-11 victims to lobby the
9-11 Commission to investigate the Arabic translation department at the FBI.
My stepson's best friend was on the 10th floor of the Merrill Lynch bldg. and had just sat down at his desk when it started. He looked up and saw 3 people holding hands falling and he knew it was time to get out of there fast.
We are in the Seattle area now and have neighbors who lived near the WTC that day and witnessed it and had to move from NYC because their children still wake up screaming with nightmares due to the event. It is hard for this couple as they are opera singers. They put their children's wellbeing before their careers. I admire them greatly.
This translator story--especially the coverup by Mueller and the firing of the whistle blower--is so Coleen Rowley.
The Rowley letter to Mueller is in Bill Gertz, BREAKDOWN: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11, Regnery, 2002, pp 196-206.
The first sign the administration might be coming out of its opiate dream was Bush recess appointing Daniel Pipes to USIP.
Canning Mueller--and Tenet, and Mineta, andandand--would be a good thing.
They want to meet Allah, here is the weapon that will help them make their goal. I WANT THEM DEAD!
Machine Translation (MT) is not yet sophisticated enough in the languages we are discussing to translate, much less detect fraud. There is, as yet, no substitute for qualified human translators.
I'd run a few tests by having two or more independent translations and compare the outcomes and see how closely they matched.
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