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.
Most of the problem domain is classified, which means you will not see anything by symptoms of the problem that slip out before they can cover them as they did with the judge in this case. I believe it and I have good reason to believe it.
That's incorrect. You will learn the language with the accent in which it is taught.
I've heard Swiss, German, Russian, Austrian and even Vietnamese people speaking English (as a second language) with no accent whatsoever. Why? They had American teachers (so actually to a Brit or Aussie, they are speaking with "an American accent").
I've been learning Vietnamese off-and-on for the last 6 years. I'm told that within my limited vocabulary I have no accent at all, although it was a compliment to once have been informed that I have a "southern" accent (which is quite different from the North, like South Boston American English versus New Orleans American English).
And immersion learning will produce dramatic results in 6 months. That is, where you speak, read, and write nothing but the foreign language for 8 to 12 hours per day.
Translate it from what ?
It is one thing to translate a type, grammatically correct, edited document. It is quite another to document real-time voice, handwriting, etc. Think how hard it can be to read someone else's handwriting in English. The more expertise one has in a language the easier the problems are to solve. As a nation we need to apply national resources to solve translation problems. All issues must be managed. There must be tranparency in all the agencies. There must be accountability. There are no excuses for failure within our agencies now.
They have already hired and cleared them. They are in the agencies. They have different sets of biases. They get away with what they are allowed to get away with.
Funny (well, not really funny), but, MANY nationalities lost 'people' that day, including Pakistanis -
- this was, after all,
"THE WORLD TRADE CENTER"
and *not* the US Trade Center ...
You''ll have to go to soccar stadiums in Tehran to see that. We don't do that. And government officials are never, but oh my, never guilty of anything.
This is a disgrace!!!!!!
That nothing was done to rid the bureau of these traitors, or that nothing will be done now nor in the future?
The story mentioned several cases of questionable assocations.
But since its a WND story, we should probably be talking about this in terms of hypotheticals.
Oh, ya think? ROFLOL is this what 32 billion in Home Land Security is buying us?
What really takes time and immersion is learning the hidden and implied meaning of phrases and words placed together. A translator could get every word correct and yet miss an important statement due to lack of knowledge of the culture and colloquialisms.
For example, if you trained a non-English speaker to translate English word for word in 6 months, and he/she translated phrases correctly such as "on the ball" or "under the table" or "light in the loafers", they may miss the whole meaning of the paragraph and toss it as irrelevant nonsense. I'm sure there are many such hidden meanings in Arabic text that go in one shredder and out the other.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.