Posted on 08/21/2004 2:06:08 PM PDT by wagglebee
Everybody loves the whistle-blower, except maybe the one he's blowing the whistle at. I think it’s time we diverted a little love over to the kibbitzer.
The kibbitzer, a term borrowed from the Yiddish language, may not be able to play the game or do the job or solve the problem; but, brother, can he ever nudge his way in close and COMMENT! The role of the kibbitzer is to throw so many half-informed suggestions into the air that wiser heads may eventually hear something useful. The kibbitzer never rolls heavy boulders of advice down upon those who actually have to DO the job. That’s the job of the BLOWHARD. The kibbitzer is humble. He knows his place. He has no qualifications. He needs none. He may be annoying; very annoying. The kibbitzer annoys you when he’s wrong. He can annoy you even more when he’s right.
In that spirit I'd like to kibbitz our American intelligence disaster.
It sounds juvenile to say, ‘My college is prettier than yours!’ but even after all these decades I still feel the pride of our University of North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill. It was called the American Heidelberg. Each May as the end of the school year approached, the Y-Court, sort of a campus public square in front of the YMCA building, sprouted dozens of card tables groaning under the weight of corporate brochures urging the graduating class to consider a career with “us”: U. S. Steel, Reynolds Aluminum, Kellogg, Polaroid, the big ones. Representatives of those companies were on hand smiling and trying to recruit.
Among the organizations recruiting in the Y-Court were the FBI and the CIA. Although the pay was less, there was a pervasive feeling of patriotism that guided the Best and the Brightest of the graduating class to those (at the time) highly respected government agencies. No shame attended a senior’s interest in the FBI and the CIA.
Then came the 1960s and Viet Nam, long before Political Correctness even had a name, when university presidents began to appease the roiling leftist masses by banning FBI and CIA recruiters from campus. Then came the Sen. Frank Church committee gaining national applause by lacerating the CIA. Then came Carter-era rulings forbidding the CIA to accept life-saving and possibly America-saving assistance from characters with unsavory pasts.
There should be a monument on the Mall in Washington to many of those characters with unsavory pasts. So very many of them in the cloak-and-dagger field braved the twisted alleys of the twilight world to bring back the death-averting and democracy-saving dots for our agents with more savory pasts to connect in air-conditioned comfort. The FBI suffered similar image erosion.
Go back, says this kibbitzer; return to the attitude of the early 1950 s toward the FBI and the CIA. 9/11 should have convinced us we no longer have the luxury of liberal disdain for those organizations. The same folks, high on liberal self-righteousness, that eviscerated the FBI and the CIA now lament their ineffectiveness. When I invoke the example of the boy who kills both parents and then begs for mercy on grounds that he’s an orphan, I don’t do it just to limp on a long-lame joke. It’s to define a reality with cruel precision.
Only a redundant kibbitzer would waste words lamenting the wall that blocked cooperation and information-sharing between and among our various intelligence agencies, the arteriosclerotic bureaucracies they became that aborted information gathering in the womb, and big-media’s joy at humiliating those agencies whenever possible; fairly or unfairly.
Let’s move on to language translation.
Are any other football fans puzzled? I remember there were some good passers on our high school football team. More than one! HIGH SCHOOL! In college our first-string quarterbacks were good passers and so were their substitutes. Why is it, then, that backup quarterbacks today in the National Football League - PROFESSIONALS, mind you - pass like girls throwing the ball left-handed?
The nation can survive bad passing from backup quarterbacks. We might not get off so easily with the deterioration of our foreign language skills.
I served in the Army in a language unit during the Korean War. My buddies were mostly graduates of the Army Language School from the Presideo of Monterrey in California. Those guys were fantastic. They took Americans boys and turned them into qualified interpreters in languages like Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese within six months. Languages like Chinese, Arabic, and Russian took a year. My bunkmates - Harry Cahill could speak Bulgarian; Ernie Dakin knew Serbo-Croatian; Walter Plaine could translate Chinese. And we didn t stop with what the Army taught us. It was so much fun knowing another language, we read books, listened to recordings, and learned songs in our languages on our own time. They call that morale.
A father who worked 18 hours a day to build the business is not ready for his son to complain about insufficient coffee breaks. The father who walked three miles through snow back and forth to school is not ready for complaints about the air conditioning on the school bus breaking down. And I'm not ready to hear about tons of vital documents inside the FBI and the CIA going untranslated into English because of lack of qualified translators.
We had tons of enemy documents during the Korean War. We also had tons of competent personnel translating those documents in a timely fashion. And that was before computers!
Not for hundreds of years will computers ever be able to take a document and render a grade-A translation with a button-push. But computers can help solve the unforgivable problem of important documents lying around until it’s too late.
If a student of the language knows the rudiments of that language, a computer translation of the foreign words into English will, indeed, guide him to an accurate translation. A good machine translation will offer at least the translation of the document into English words; but not in a form that would be intelligible to anyone except a student of that language who knew the rudiments.
So, while we look for those who can translate relevant languages into English, at least we can break the mystery of those documents with those who can translate - if not the original documents - at least the documents the computer has broken down into understandable vocabulary.
Confessing redundancy, let me lay out that same point another way. Let’s say you know zero Arabic. If a computer hands you a machine translation of an Arabic document it will be almost as meaningless to you as the raw Arabic itself. It will be a jumble of mostly unrelated words. But if you are an intermediate student of Arabic or even an advanced beginner, if you have even a rudimentary knowledge of how the language works, you can make enough sense out of that document possibly to avert a terrorist attack.
Pretend there are a whole host of brand new languages. Call them Computer Arabic, Computer Pashtu, Computer Farsi, etc. It’s many times quicker, easier, and less expensive to train for the translation of those languages than to wait until we build a translation force of security-cleared, reliable Americans who can translate the whole raw thing from the original.
The Army way back in the 1950s was smart enough to train translators in the probable language they’d be encountering in their tasks. Your exercise booklet would more likely have the sentence, “Eight tons of spare aircraft parts will pass through Otpor enroute to Pyongyang by July the eighteenth,” than, “Please help Mr. Brown with his baggage to his room and send up a plate of pirozhki and a bottle of red wine.”
In elementary education they call that teaching to the test and people complain it doesn't educate.
In espionage it can save the republic.
Finally, its time to cut a little slack for the only agencies in government that must account for every failure out loud and at length, but never, absolutely never brag about a success. Gen. Wild Bill Dovovan was the founder of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the predecessor organization of the CIA. The OSS was credited with many major espionage and intelligence triumphs in World War 11. Legend has it that a wealthy and influential society woman in Washington finagled a meeting with General Donovan toward the end of the war and said, “General Donovan, my clubwomen have selected you Washington Man of the Year and we would like to have you come and let us honor you with our award at our annual banquet so we can commend you for the good job you ve done with the OSS.”
“I'm very honored,” replied Wild Bill, “But I must decline.
“You see,” General Donovan continued, “If you know enough about the job I’ve done with the OSS to know it’s a GOOD job, then it’s a BAD job!”
computer translations make perfect sense for skimming through bulk of information
Anything that is worthwhile could then be handed over to a proper linguist for translation.
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