Free Republic

Newly hired as a translator of Turkish and Farsi (the language spoken in Iran), Sibel Edmonds was sitting at her desk in FBI headquarters in Washington on Sep. 20, 2001, retranslating a communications intercept headquarters had received some time before from an agent in Phoenix. The intercept contained references to skyscrapers and to U.S. immigration procedures, clues to the intentions of the 9/11 hijackers, clues overlooked by the person who first translated the document. Edmonds raced to her supervisor and asked to speak on a secure line to the agent who had obtained the intercept, to tell him of the...

UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL The Department of Justice has abandoned its argument that charges made by a fired FBI translator are secret, paving the way for a court case involving charges of incompetence, poor security and possible espionage in the translation unit of the bureau's Washington field office. At issue are accusations by Sibel Edmonds, a contract translator for the FBI hired in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mrs. Edmonds, fluent in Turkish and in the Farsi language spoken in Iran, reported that many of those hired to work in the unit barely could speak English; that they...

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...