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A number of Arabic and Pashtu interpreters at the terror-war detention center at Guantanamo Bay are under active investigation for omitting valuable intelligence from their translations of detainee interrogations, among other security breaches. This could taint some of the evidence at the "9/11 trial" in New York and proceedings against other detainees. Remarkably, the Pentagon never cleaned up the "mole infestation" at its highest-security facility after the FBI busted a Muslim spy ring at Gitmo in 2003. The 2003 probe involved at least two Arabic interpreters with high-level security clearance. Senior Airman Ahmad al-Halabi, a Syrian native, and former Army...

BOSTON (AP) -- The FBI admitted Saturday it accidentally gave classified documents back to the American translator who pleaded guilty to taking them from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, who was released from jail earlier this month, contacted the FBI's Boston office Tuesday after he realized agents had inadvertently given him the compact disc containing the secret files along with his personal property. Mehalba had the disc in his possession for only a "matter of hours" before the FBI retrieved it, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Ricciuti. "Someone in the bureau obviously made a...

An Arabic translator who took classified documents from the US military base at Guantanamo Bay yesterday received a 20-month sentence in US District Court in Boston and said he was trying to do a good job by working on the material at home. Ahmed Mehalba, 32, a linguist, admitted he removed a computer disk containing 368 secret documents from the military base, but his lawyers urged leniency, because he was off his medication for bipolar disorder at the time. In the summer of 2003, Mehalba took the disk with him to his native Egypt during an emergency leave from the...

Guantanamo chaplain charged with porn offences A Muslim chaplain who served at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay has been charged with adultery and storing pornography on a government computer. Army Captain Yousef Yee, who served at the prison camp for terror suspects, was released from pre-trial confinement after being served with the additional charges, said Raul Duany, a spokesman for US Southern Command in Miami. Adultery is a crime under the uniform code of military justice. He was arrested earlier this year in Florida and confined to the military brig in Charleston, South Carolina. Military officials brought the...

BOSTON (AP) — A former Guantanamo Bay translator arrested after he was found with classified documents at Logan International Airport was charged Wednesday with gathering defense information and making false statements. The grand jury's indictment alleges that Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, who has been in federal custody since his arrest, lied to investigators when he told them he was not carrying any government documents from Guantanamo Bay. Customs agents found 132 compact discs in his luggage, including one that contained hundreds of classified documents labeled "SECRET." He also allegedly lied about not understanding the meaning of the term "secret" with regards...

Just after the 1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq, huge tents were erected in Saudi Arabia near the barracks of U.S. military personnel. Inside, day and night, Saudi imams sent by their government lectured the GIs about Islam and made aggressive pitches to convert them. Saudi officials had promised that the discussions would touch only on Arab culture. But within months, about 1,000 soldiers, and perhaps as many as 3,000, converted to Islam -- the largest surge of Muslims ever into the U.S. armed forces. "It was quite aggressive," said David Peterson, then the military's top chaplain in the region....

<p>WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) &#8212; An interpreter at the U.S. prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, who was arrested last month carrying classified documents, had government clearance to access the information, his attorney said in court yesterday.</p> <p>But federal prosecutors, while acknowledging Ahmed Fathy Mehalba was cleared to see classified documents, said he was forbidden to transport any information.</p>

WORCESTER, Mass. -- Federal authorities said in court today that an Arabic linguist with top security clearance at the terrorist detention camp on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had gone to Egypt with reams of classified and secret documents. The linguist, Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, was stopped Sept. 29 at Logan Airport in Boston while on his way home from Egypt. He was found to be carrying 132 computer discs in his luggage. Now, a review of just one of those discs has turned up 725 documents labeled as "secret," "sensitive," or "classified" material from the highly secure Guantanamo Bay prison camp, officials...

Wed October 15, 2003 01:07 PM ET By Greg Frost WORCESTER, Mass. (Reuters) - A civilian translator at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for al Qaeda and Taliban suspects had hundreds of documents labeled "secret" in his possession when he was arrested last month, an FBI agent said on Wednesday. Prosecutors accused Ahmed Fathy Mehalba last month of lying to federal officials about classified information he was carrying when he arrived in the United States from Egypt, where he had been visiting relatives. The arrest of Mehalba, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Egyptian descent, brought to three the number of...

<p>The Muslim organizations that certify chaplains for the U.S. military have come under renewed scrutiny since the arrest of Army Chaplain Yousef Yee and two Muslim translators who worked with al Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay — and that's all to the good. The Graduate School of Islamic Social Sciences (GSISS) and the American Muslim Foundation (AMF) were already being investigated, and it may well be that somehow Mr. Yee picked up his radical Islam from some contact with these groups. But so far another possibility has been overlooked, perhaps because its political incorrectness quotient is positively off the scale: The possibility that Yee was sincere when he denounced the September 11 attacks, and that his mind was changed by the Guantanamo prisoners themselves.</p>

ASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — American interpreters at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who are under suspicion of espionage may have sabotaged interviews with detainees by inaccurately translating interrogators' questions and prisoners' answers, senior American officials said on Monday.It is unclear in how many cases, if any, this may have happened, the officials said. But military investigators are taking the issue seriously enough to review taped interrogations involving the Arabic-language interpreters under scrutiny to spot-check their accuracy.If the investigators' worst fears are realized, officials said, scores of interviews with suspected Qaeda or Taliban prisoners at the Cuban detention center...

Guantanamo interviews to be revised in spy scare By David Rennie in Washington (Filed: 06/10/2003) A line-by-line review has been ordered of every interrogation at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp involving an air force interpreter suspected of espionage and treason. Intelligence officers face the nightmare prospect that Ahmad al-Halabi, a Syrian-born linguist who served at the camp in Cuba for eight months, may have edited or deliberately distorted information given by al-Qa'eda and Taliban suspects during interrogation sessions. Tapes of those interrogations - some lasting hours - are being freshly translated. "If the subject answered 'five' and [Halabi] told interrogators...

WASHINGTON Oct. 3 — Pentagon officials said Thursday they worry that terrorists are trying to infiltrate the U.S. military and may have done so at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Three workers at the prison, including two members of the military, have been arrested on suspicion of espionage at the high-security base. It is unclear whether the men were connected to or part of any terrorist plot, the commander in charge of homeland security said. "I'm hoping we're going to find these are unusual, these are few and far between, that this isn't some large cell," said Gen....

<p>October 3, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - The FBI is investigating whether a translator at the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gave extremist groups the names of al Qaeda operatives who are being exposed by detainees during their interrogations, it was revealed yesterday. Law-enforcement officials confirmed that authorities found the names of dozens of al Qaeda operatives, whose names surfaced in interrogations with the Guantanamo Bay detainees, on a computer disk carried by camp translator Ahmed Mehalba when he was arrested earlier this week.</p>

SALEM - He was the quiet, well-groomed man in the suit, who kept to himself in this neighborhood nestled at the edge of a bustling college, where almost everybody seemed to be from somewhere else and nobody stood out. But yesterday, a different Ahmed Fathy Mehalba was on display, this time in a federal court, where he appeared in jeans and an orange golf shirt, accused of possessing classified information he allegedly acquired at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he worked as a civilian translator. Just what route the Egyptian-born Mehalba, 31, took after his days...

Ahmed Mehalba was taken into custody at Logan's International Airport late on Monday