Secret Suggestion Made in Guantanamo Case

AP ^ | oct 7 2003

[swarthyguy]

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.

[Fred Mertz]

That is quite difficult to believe. Thanks for the link.

[FlatLandBeer]

Doesn't the military still use death by hanging? If so IF he is convicted and IF he gets the death penalty then build the gallows in front of the cells in Gitmo.

[Spook86]

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

[george wythe]

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?

Always playing catch-up and never succeeding?

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