Free Republic

A jury on Friday acquitted a former military translator of secretly working as an Iraqi agent in the US but convicted him of making false statements when he sought a security clearance. The split verdict offered some relief to Issam "Sam" Hamama, who claimed he was only passing along basic information about Iraqis in the US when he reached out to Iraqi officials in the 1990s during the regime of Saddam Hussein. "We've been vindicated. They were accusing him of voluntarily working as a spy," defense lawyer Haytham Faraj said. Hamama, 60, of El Cajon, California, was found not guilty...

The investigation into the shooting death of Spc. Alyssa Peterson found her suicide came soon after she was reassigned for objecting to prisoner interrogation techniques but did not specifically give a reason for her action. A Flagstaff soldier who died in Iraq committed suicide after she refused to participate in interrogation techniques being practiced by her U.S. Army intelligence unit, according to a report about an Army investigation aired by a Flagstaff radio station. U.S. Army Spc. Alyssa R. Peterson, 27, died Sept. 15, 2003, in Tel Afar, an Iraqi city of about 350,000 residents in the northern part of...

PHOENIX - A Glendale optometrist's yearlong legal fight over what services he had to provide for a Spanish-speaking customer has translated into new protections for other businesses. Gov. Jan Brewer has signed legislation affirming that nothing in state law requires businesses to provide "trained and competent" interpreters when a customer comes in speaking a language other than English. Assistant Attorney General Michael Walker said that has probably always been the law. But that didn't save John Schrolucke from having to spend time and money defending himself and his practice before Walker's office finally dismissed the case.

"...The conspirators were in the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group’s MOS 09L program (“Lima Nine”), E Company, 187th Ordnance Battalion. Lima Nine was started because of the Army’s desperate lack of linguists speaking Pashto, Dari or Arabic. To attract such recruits, military intelligence promises foreigners that if they join the Army as a translator they will get U.S. citizenship and a top security clearance. Candidates from Afghanistan and Iraq, including the Jackson Five, speak such poor English the Army puts them in Lima Nine and gives them English lessons, so they will have some hope of passing basic training. Clayton...

A South Carolina congressman said Friday that five Muslim soldiers at Fort Jackson, S.C., had been removed from active duty, and four of them discharged from the Army, in connection with an ongoing probe into alleged threats to poison food at the large South Carolina base. Republican Rep. Joe Wilson, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said the soldiers' laptops had been seized and were being analyzed. Congressional officials with knowledge of the case said cell phones and Arabic writings had been confiscated as well. Wilson also disclosed for the first time that four of the Muslim soldiers...

If there was nothing to the allegations, then why were four of the five Muslim soldiers discharged? It seems to me that the earliest reports were wrong that the five Muslims were plotting to poison Fort Jackson's food supply. But later reports that there were nothing to the allegations were also clarified when we learned that the investigation was not into a plot but over comments about poisoning the food.

<p>No info at link yet, just came across the TV. Investigators believe that the poisoners where Arabic translators! ROP strikes again???</p>

A California teenager suspected of attending a terrorist training camp and his father are being denied re-entry to the United States after spending four years in Pakistan unless they submit to interviews and lie-detector tests, their attorney says.     Julia Mass says the rights of her clients, Muhammad Ismail, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, and his 18-year-old son, Jaber Ismail, to return to the United States are being violated because they are on the "no fly" list.     Miss Mass said an official at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad told Jaber Ismail that he and his father would be allowed...

When U.S. or NATO soldiers need to communicate with Afghan villagers, they rely on translators provided by private contractors. But for various reasons -- regional dialects, cultural misunderstandings, or even ethnic animosities -- translators in Afghanistan often don't relate everything they hear. And what is lost in translation can hurt efforts by NATO and the U.S.-led coalition to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. In the worst cases, innocent civilians can be arrested or wrongly targeted as Taliban fighters. Zalmai Zurmutai, a Pashto translator for NATO troops in Afghanistan, is angry about what he has seen happen...

For over a year, we have been waging a relentless, nearly solitary battle in apprising the Congress and the American public about a billion dollar boondoggle and scandal: the lack of credible Arabic translators for our national security and intelligence agencies. As a result hundreds have been killed in Iraq from infiltration of our military and civilian intelligence agencies by agents of Islamist terrorists. Our FBI and CIA have been infiltrated by Muslim linguists who have successfully evaded polygraph tests and been able to pass on vital information to terror groups in the Middle East such as Hezbollah. Tens of...

WERE THE KING JAMES TRANSLATORS KJV ONLY? By: Dr. Robert A Joyner D.B.S., Th.D., Ph.D. There is a group today that is called the King James Only.  This is because they insist that the King James Version is the preserved Word of God and the only Bible for the English speaking people.  They usually attack all other versions and delight in pointing out the errors in them. I want to raise and answer the question, is this the position of the King James translators?  If I can prove that the King James translators disagreed with the King James Only group...

In the U.S. Eastern District Court in Brooklyn on Valentine's Day, a Muslim and naturalized American citizen with five different aliases – stretching from Mauritania to Morocco to Lebanon – pleaded guilty to a charge of illegally possessing classified documents and was sentenced to 13 years, according to a report in the New York Sun – a light sentence for committing espionage and passing classified documents to Iraqi Sunni insurgents during one of his two stints in Iraq. Federal prosecutors allege he did this when deployed at Al Taqqadam Air Base west of Baghdad in March 2004. The irony is...

With a tide of non-English speakers surging through the state, courtrooms, hospitals and schools are scrambling to find people who are qualified to interpret and translate. Court interpreter Dora Ornelas interprets for Jose Jimenez in Judge James Gavin's courtroom in the Yakima County jail. And the limited pool of certified interpreters is expanding career opportunities for multilingual speakers. In the past several years, many Cantonese, Laotian, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese monolingual speakers have requested services within Washington's judicial system, said Robert Miera, an Olympia-based state court program analyst. Although the state has certified 208 interpreters, Miera believes some counties...

BAGHDAD, Jun 6 (IPS) - An Iraqi doctor who was in Haditha during a deadly U.S. raid last year says there are many more stories like that in Haditha that are yet untold. The Pentagon admitted last week that U.S. Marines killed 24 civilians -- including a 66-year-old woman and a four-year-old boy -- in the Western Iraqi town last November. Before that, the military had maintained the civilians were killed by a roadside bomb. "There are many, many, many cases like Haditha that are still undercover and need to be highlighted in Iraq," Dr. Salam Ishmael, projects manager with...

(Waterbury-WTNH, May 10, 2006 5:50 PM) _ Is there a communication gap in Waterbury? A community group says part of the city's population is underserved at area hospitals. Waterbury fire fighters always answer the call but on scene not everyone always speaks English. Howard Osorio says,"Usually there is a neighbor or a child who is bilingual to help us out." 14-year-old Isomar is one of those bi-lingual kids. Isomar says,"Since I was 8-years-old I have been translating for my mom." She says the hardest part is at hospitals and having to translate medical jargon. Isomar says,"It's just really embarrassing for...

The Justice Department has backed away from a court battle over its authority to classify and restrict the discussion of information it has already released, handing a local advocacy group a victory by granting it explicit permission to publish letters written by two senators that contain the contested information. The case was considered a potential test of limits to the government's power to restrict access to information in the public domain on national security grounds. Former attorney general John D. Ashcroft had strongly defended the practice in this case by likening it to putting "spilt milk" back in a jar...

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court turned aside efforts to open to the public closed-door arguments Thursday in the case of a fired FBI contractor who alleged there were security breaches and misconduct at the bureau. Sibel Edmonds is seeking to revive her lawsuit against the government. It was thrown out of U.S. District Court when the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to withhold information to safeguard national security. Edmonds says she was dismissed from her job as a wiretap translator because she told superiors she suspected a co-worker was leaking information to targets...

BAGHDAD, Iraq — They venture into hostile areas on raids to capture insurgents. They travel in Humvees knowing that at any time they could drive over a bomb hidden in the road. They know they are moving targets at all times. They are Iraqi interpreters, a vital link between local residents and U.S. troops trying to rein in the insurgency. With nicknames such as Tony, David and Sara, the interpreters, Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds, sleep in the same tents as soldiers and are privy to the most private of conversations. Some say they have the most dangerous civilian jobs...

PRESIDIO OF MONTEREY, Calif., (Army News Service, Aug. 12, 2005) – New technologies and teaching approaches are improving the quality of instruction here at the Defense Language Institute as the school supports the Defense Department's effort to boost foreign-language capability within the ranks. Army Col. Michael Simone, commandant, said the school experienced "explosive growth" this year and expects the trend to continue in supporting the Defense Transformation Language Roadmap. The plan aims to sharpen foreign language skills within the military, with more language professionals trained to comprehend, read and converse in more world languages and at higher proficiency levels than...

MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (Aug. 11, 2005) -- People join the Marine Corps for many different reasons. Some join for money, some for freedom, and some even join for a place to live. Others, like Cpl. Mediya A. Abakar, joined the Marine Corps to reunite with their family. “Family is precious. Everything comes and goes except family,” Abakar said. So Abakar left Chad, Africa, for the United States to be closer to her two brothers in the Marines and two sisters in the Navy. Living with her aunt, Abakar found she could be closer to her family and...