Free Republic

Sheriff Michael Chapman of Loudoun County, Va. got an unpleasant surprise recently from Old Joe Biden’s handlers. On Thursday, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office published a press release that reveals the truly astonishing extent of the administration’s high-handedness, dishonesty, carelessness, and recklessness in its resettlement of Afghan refugees in cities and towns all over the United States. Without any prior warning, Loudoun County officials were told that 2,000 Afghan refugees would be arriving in the county in just over two weeks and that 2,000 more would be arriving every month after that through September. In what will come as no...

In the latest twist to the document scandal, investigators said the revelation about translators was among several criticisms of America’s ability to deal with the looming al Qaeda threat contained in the “after action” memo on the millennium terror plot that is at the center of the Berger probe. Officials said an appeal to hire more translators familiar with Arabic, Pashto and other key “counter-terrorism” languages at the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency was among 29 proposals to tighten security contained in the report. The report written by former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke also warned of the...

China's intelligence service gained access to a secret National Security Agency listening post in Hawaii through a Chinese-language translation service, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The spy penetration was discovered several years ago as part of a major counterintelligence probe by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) that revealed an extensive program by China's spy service to steal codes and other electronic intelligence secrets, and to recruit military and civilian personnel with access to them. According to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, China's Ministry of State Security, the main civilian spy service, carried out the operations by...

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Michael McCaul (R-TX) stated that there are around 10,000 interpreters who worked with U.S. forces still in Afghanistan, and they “are gone. The Taliban will not allow them to leave.” And are “already being executed.” McCaul said, “The interpreters who worked with our special forces, they are gone. The Taliban will not allow them to leave.” Host Wolf Blitzer then cut in to ask McCaul if he was referring to SIV holders. McCaul responded, “Special Immigrant Visas, these are the guys that worked right with our special...

The people who bravely allied themselves with American efforts to lift Afghanistan out of medieval theocracy — estimated to be 170–180,000 in number — are about to learn that trusting America was a bad bet. Many will be condemned to torture and death as the reward for their service. You can be certain that the lesson will not be lost on those elsewhere in the world contemplating allying themselves with American goals for their countries.Former congressman Steve Israel writes in The Hill:Someone needs to speak for those who spoke for our troops. I'm talking about the Afghan translators who provided...

A linguist for the Department of Defense pleaded guilty on Friday to passing classified information about U.S. human intelligence sources to an individual with ties to Hezbollah, a Lebanese terrorist organization, the Department of Justice said. Mariam Taha Thompson began sending the information after the U.S. killed Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian military commander, in an airstrike in early 2020, according to court documents. Thompson, who held a top secret security clearance, had been stationed at a Special Operations Task Force facility in Iraq from mid-December 2019 until her arrest a few months later. Years before she began passing classified...

Few Americans could fathom the notion that the United States is so indebted to China that one of Beijing’s spies could get away with espionage – especially with an White House in love with espionage prosecutions. But that might be the only reasonable explanation for the Obama administration’s decision to pass on prosecuting a State Department contractor who was allegedly paid thousands of dollars to someone believed to be a Chinese agent seeking information on Americans. According to Fox News, a November 2014 FBI affidavit that was filed in U.S. district court in Maryland indicates that the FBI launched a...

Shares of DynCorp International (DCP: 16.05, +2.14, +15.4%) rocketed up 15% Monday after the government contractor wrested a lucrative translation and interpreting contract away from competitor L-3 Communications (LLL: 79.00, -4.72, -5.6%). The stock gained as much as 21% earlier in the session. The Falls Church, Va., company announced Monday that Global Linguistic Solutions, a joint venture formed by DynCorp International and privately held McNeil Technologies, won a $4.6 billion, five-year contract from the Department of Defense to provide language services to the U.S. Army and other U.S. government agencies fighting in Iraq. The contract calls for 6,000 local Arabic...

A contractor for the Pentagon has been charged with providing classified U.S. intelligence to a Lebanese national connected with terrorist group Hezbollah, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The department alleges Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, began transmitting the classified intelligence around December 30, when Iraqi militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Thompson is a linguist who at the time was working at a U.S. special forces base in Erbil in northern Iraq. The classified “files contained classified national defense information including true names, personal identification data, background information, and photographs of the human sources, as well as operations cables...

A Haverford College student who used a campus computer to attempt to hack into an IRS database to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns days before the 2016 presidential election pleaded guilty Tuesday to two misdemeanor crimes in federal court. Justin Hiemstra, 22, who finished his studies in May but will not get his degree until he completes a study-abroad program next May, told Judge Cynthia Rufe that he did not know what he would have done with the tax returns if he and classmate Andrew Harris had succeeded in obtaining them on Nov. 2, 2016. “It was a time when...

President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

<p>CIA Director James Woolsey was fighting other bureaucratic battles &#8212; instead of [Osama] bin Laden. The CIA was critically short of translators who spoke or read Arabic, Farsi, Pashto and the other languages of the great "terrorist belt." That belt begins on the dirty beaches of Somalia, arcs up the river valleys of Sudan and Egypt, across the desert flats of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, over the dry plateaus of Syria and Iraq, past the wastes of Iran, through the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and ends in the cold steppes of Central Asia. In the world's most terror-prone region, the CIA was essentially blind, deaf, and dumb.</p>

CIA Director James Woolsey was fighting other bureaucratic battles — instead of [Osama] bin Laden. The CIA was critically short of translators who spoke or read Arabic, Farsi, Pashto and the other languages of the great "terrorist belt." That belt begins on the dirty beaches of Somalia, arcs up the river valleys of Sudan and Egypt, across the desert flats of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, over the dry plateaus of Syria and Iraq, past the wastes of Iran, through the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and ends in the cold steppes of Central Asia. In the...

Baseball's popularity in Latin America has swelled the number of Spanish-speaking players to nearly 30 percent, MLB statistics show. That's a far cry from the post-World War II era when only 1 percent of players primarily spoke Spanish, according to the Society for American Baseball Research. By the late 1990s, the language barrier had become such a problem that MLB started offering classes in English as a second language in 1997, with the teams' covering the costs. Those classes are ongoing.

“She called us yesterday night. She asked if we could help out with relocating her cat and dog,” Winner-Davis said. Winner-Davis said her daughter never talked about her work, and her family did not know the specifics of her recently acquired job as a government contractor. She added that her daughter, while quiet about her job, was outspoken about her beliefs. “She’s very passionate. Very passionate about her views and things like that, but she’s never to my knowledge been active in politics or any of that,” said Winner-Davis. On Twitter, she expressed frequent dissatisfaction with Trump administration policies, and...

8pm ET TONIGHT: Watch AC 360 to learn more about the FBI employee who married an ISIS terrorist. An FBI translator with a top-secret security clearance traveled to Syria in 2014 and married a key ISIS operative she had been assigned to investigate, CNN has learned. The rogue employee, Daniela Greene, lied to the FBI about where she was going and warned her new husband he was under investigation, according to federal court records. Greene's saga, which has never been publicized, exposes an embarrassing breach of national security at the FBI—an agency that has made its mission rooting out ISIS...

The New Mexico Supreme Court is cautioning the state's trial courts that citizens who don't speak English have the right to serve on juries. The court issued the admonition in a ruling that upholds an Albuquerque man's convictions for murder and other crimes in the bludgeoning death of his girlfriend and a subsequent armed robbery and stabbing. Michael Samora's appeal argued that his convictions should be reversed because the Bernalillo County court excused a Spanish-speaking prospective juror who had trouble understanding English. The Supreme Court says it agrees with that argument but also says Samora's defense needed to object during...

Tens of thousands of health care professionals, union workers and community activists hired as "navigators" to help Americans choose Obamacare options starting Oct. 1 will be paid up to $48 an hour, more than six times the federal minimum wage of $7.25, according to new regulations issued Wednesday. The 63-page rule covering navigators, drawn up by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, also said the government will provide free translators for those not fluent in English -- no matter what their native language is. It is still not clear how many navigators will be required. California, however, provides a...

Iran has begun enriching uranium deep inside a mountain and sentenced an American to death for spying, angering the West and undermining hopes that diplomacy could avert further sanctions or war. The start of enrichment at the Fordow bunker near the Shi'ite Muslim holy city of Qom was confirmed on Monday by an Iranian official in Tehran and by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran says its nuclear program is purely non-military but the West believes it is designed to produce nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic's decision to carry out enrichment work deep underground could eventually make it much...

Startling revelations by French intelligence experts back David Shayler's alleged 'fantasy'about Gadaffi plot Martin Bright, home affairs editor Sunday November 10, 2002 The Observer British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The latest claims of MI6 involvement with Libya's fearsome Islamic Fighting Group, which is connected to one of bin Laden's trusted lieutenants, will be embarrassing to the Government, which described similar claims by renegade MI5 officer David Shayler as 'pure fantasy'. The...