Secret Suggestion Made in Guantanamo Case

WASHINGTON (AP)--An Air Force officer has made a secret recommendation of what charges should be pursued against a translator accused of espionage at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for terrorist suspects, the translator's lawyer said Tuesday.

The report from Col. Anne Burman suggests to Air Force officials which of the 32 charges against Senior Airman Ahmad I. al-Halabi should go to trial. Air Force generals will decide whether al-Halabi will face a court-martial on the espionage and other charges--and whether military prosecutors can seek the death penalty if al-Halabi is convicted of the most serious counts.

Burman's entire report is classified, said Maj. James Key III, one of al-Halabi's appointed military lawyers. Key said keeping such a report secret is unusual in the military justice system. Al-Halabi's defense team will challenge the secrecy, Key said.

``It looks like it's going to be a fight from here until the end to keep this as an open process,'' Key said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Al-Halabi, who worked for about nine months as an Arabic translator at the prison camp, was arrested in July. He's accused of gathering secret information about the prison camp and collecting more than 180 messages from prisoners with plans to give those secrets to Syria and an unidentified enemy.

Al-Halabi is the only one of three men arrested in an espionage probe at Guantanamo Bay to be charged in military court. A Muslim Army chaplain, Capt. Yousef Yee, is being held without charge after being arrested last month. Last week, federal agents arrested a civilian translator at the base, Ahmed F. Mehalba, when they allegedly found secret documents from the camp on a compact disc Mehalba was carrying back to the United States from Egypt.

One laughs because otherwise one would cry.

Speculating that Yee got turned by some of the inmates questioning his islamic bonafides. Then he goes to the head mosques in DC/VA for counseling on his bonafides. Whatever he's told there, point is it's a Saudi funded mosque with enough smoke from its jihadi connections. From there its a small step to conveying innocous messages to more pertinent intelligence.

Bet no one expected the inmates to question and convince the imams and even the translators of their islamic inadequateness. Assuming that they weren't all jihadis beforehand.

That EO by Clinton definitely needs to go. We've gone mad.

You hit the nail on the head. Our perennial lack of qualified linguists remains a real Achilles heel for the intelligence community. We have never entered a conflict with enough linguists for a particular region, because our training system remains geared for the last conflict.

Consider these examples: during the first Gulf War, organizations like the Defense Language Institute (DLI) were still producing large numbers of Russian linguists. The number of Arabic and Farsi linguists increased in the early 1990s, but there was no effort to train more linguists in Creole (the native tongue of Haiti), or the various dialects of Somalia. As a result, we had to scramble to find translators for both of those operations.

When operations began in the Balkans, the intel community had to ramp up production of Serbo-Croat linguists, at the expense of the Arabic and Farsi programs. That left us with a shortage of those linguists for the most recent Gulf War. See a pattern here?

Until we get a handle on the linguist shortage, we'll be forced to rely on DOD personnel and outside contractors who are fluent in Arabic or Farsi. The danger, of course, is that most of these people have undergone only a rudimentary background check, and few hold anything higher than a SECRET security clearance. BTW, a secret clearance is based on the result of a National Agency Check (NAC), essentially a review of police records in places you lived, and a credit check. If you pay your bills on time and have managed to stay out of legal trouble, you'll pass your NAC with flying colors. f

Always playing catch-up and never succeeding?

Thanks for your informative post, since you seem more knowledgeable than I am on the subject.

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