Posted on 01/07/2004 4:43:49 AM PST by Diogenesis
Arab translators cheered Sept. 11 [.... while the FBI kept the FBI free of Jews]
By Paul Sperry
WASHINGTON – In a shocking revelation, an FBI whistleblower claims some
Arab-Americans translating Arabic intercepts for the FBI spoke approvingly
of the terrorist attacks on America more than two years ago.
Former FBI translator Sibel D. Edmonds says translators of Middle Eastern
origin working for the FBI's Washington field office maintain an
"us"-versus-"them" attitude that's so strong it may be compromising al-Qaida
investigations.
She cited examples of mistranslations and security breaches within the FBI's
language division, where translators with Top Secret clearance interpret
sensitive terror-related information for agents.
"The issues and problems within the FBI's translation units range from
security failures to questions of loyalty to competence of translation personnel
to systemic problems within their low-to-mid-level management practices,"
Edmonds said.
She made the explosive charges Monday in a letter to the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, an independent
panel investigating the 9-11 attacks and U.S. intelligence leading up to them.
WorldNetDaily has obtained a copy of the 9-page letter.
Edmonds, a translator who worked closely with FBI counterterrorism and
counterintelligence agents at an office within blocks of the Washington field
office, said she overheard some translators express sympathy for the 9-11
terrorist attacks.
"During my work with the bureau, I was seriously taken aback by what I
heard and witnessed within the translation department," she said. "There
were those who openly divided the fronts as 'Us' – the Middle-Easterners who
shared certain views – and 'Them' – the Americans who were the outsiders
[whose] arrogance was now 'leading to their own destruction.'"
Not long after the attacks, Edmonds said one translator said: "It is about time
that they get a taste of what they have been giving to the rest of the Middle
East."
She says the remark was made in front of the unit supervisor, also of Middle
Eastern origin.
"These comments were neither rare nor made in a whisper," Edmonds said.
"They were open and loud."
She says such attitudes call into question "the integrity and accuracy" of
information Arabic translators are feeding agents.
Edmonds says agents who don't speak Arabic have no way of knowing
whether the information they receive from translators is tainted.
"They simply have to trust the information given to them by translators," she
said, "and based on that, decide to act or not act."
Decisions to release terrorist suspects taken into custody are also based on
translations of interviews with those suspects, she argues.
Remarkably, agents don't even have direct security access to the translation
unit, Edmonds says. They have to be escorted into the area by translators.
She says she caught a Turkish translator intentionally blocking intelligence
from being translated by labeling it as "not pertinent." The translator also
intentionally mistranslated documents and other information, she says. And
she alleges the same linguist, Melek Can Dickerson, was granted security
clearance by the FBI despite ties to targets of FBI investigations.
After she brought the alleged breaches to the attention of her supervisors,
Edmonds was fired by the FBI. Her termination letter does not state a reason.
Edmonds filed a lawsuit, but Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI
Director Robert Mueller got a federal judge to block it by asserting the
extremely rare claim of "State Secret Privilege."
And her lawyers say Justice's inspector general is slow-walking an internal
review of her case, even though the office has criticized the FBI for security
lapses in recent reports, some related to the language program. In fact, a Nov.
15, 2002, IG report states: "A language specialist was dismissed for
unauthorized contacts with foreign officials and intelligence officers, receipts
of things of value from them and lack of candor in his convoluted and
contradictory responses to questions about his contacts."
Most of Edmonds' charges have been confirmed by Sen. Charles Grassley,
R-Iowa, and other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who have
quizzed the FBI about her case. Edmonds sent a copy of her 9-page letter to
Grassley, one of the FBI's biggest critics on the Hill.
The FBI blamed the security lapses on a chronic shortage of Arabic translators,
which has forced it to hire mostly immigrants from the Middle East, which
makes background checks more difficult.
The Washington field office did not return repeated phone calls seeking
comment.
But the chief of the FBI's language section, Margaret Gullota, has insisted in
congressional testimony that the FBI hasn't loosened its standards in recruiting
Arabic-speaking translators since 9-11.
Edmonds isn't the only one complaining, though.
John Cole, program manager for the FBI foreign intelligence investigations
covering India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, told Congress about what he
believed to be a security lapse regarding the screening and hiring of
translators.
And Donald Lavey, who worked in counterterrorism for 20 years at the FBI,
recalled loyalty issues with a former Arab translator in the FBI's Detroit office.
He said wiretap translations by Mideast-born agents should have a "second
opinion," because their backgrounds may "prejudice" their interpretation and
analysis.
Both he and Edmonds note that translators often exclude large sections of
Arabic dialogue as irrelevant to the investigation, when in fact, they may be
relevant.
"There are thousands of translated documents/information and documents
that were labeled as 'not pertinent to be translated' by certain translators
before and after Sept. 11, that need to, and have to, be retranslated and
re-examined," Edmonds wrote in her letter.
Also, she says some Arab-American translators, including a supervisor,
threatened to sue the FBI for discrimination after complaints were filed
against them.
"In one case, a certain individual ended up getting a supervisory position,
even though initially he was refused due to his questionable past,
incompetence and fraudulent invoices" for expenses, Edmonds said. She
declined to reveal his name.
Edmonds says she is working with some families of 9-11 victims to lobby the
9-11 Commission to investigate the Arabic translation department at the FBI.
That is just the cosmetics of the problem. I have been bilingual all my life with Spanish (a relatively trivial language), and am continually amazed and surprised at the errors in meaning that subtle historical meanings of words have with identical roots with English. There's transliteration and translation, and it goes far beyond looking up the words in a dictionary. Subtle shades of differences have major consequences. I can just imagine the difficulties with a language as alien as Arabic, and its hundreds if not thousands of idioms, variants and slang words.
A very important concept that we refuse to deal with.
But it was one thing that was certainly understood by the Egyptian translator/interpreter at the first WTC bombing trial, who went up to the crazy blind sheik afterwards and APOLOGIZED for not being able to help him more with his translation! And was so proud of himself for doing this that he actually boasted about it (and was applauded) at a translation organization meeting I attended last year.
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey has been doing this for decades, 22 languages including Arabic. Most of the programs are about a year. A friend - 100 percent American - trained in Russian there and became a translator.
NSA certainly has a wealth of trained analysts and translators who hold clearance.
So why is the FBI hiring security risks rather than training cleared personnel?
More unbelieveable incompetence in the management ranks at the agency.
I'll believe it when I see it independently in an outlet other than WND.
Well, that's another idea...of course, they've also had problems with their Arabic interpreters at Gitmo, so maybe that wouldn't work, either.
This accent business is a red herring. Like making sure the deck chairs on the titanic are geometrically perfectly arranged. The critical and essential part of the training is accurate comprehension of regional dialects and double meanings. The elegance of our own language that is unconscious and that we take for granted. How the words are pronounced by the translator is irrelevant.
If this is true, and I suspect it is, then both Ashcroft and Muller, by supporting translators that supported the 9/11 terrorist attacks, also supported the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Both of these people need to be fired by Bush. If G.W. doesn't fire them, then G.W. is also supporting the people that make terrorism, such as 9/11, real in this country.
You had better believe it. The smug antiSemitism is real. Only now Americans die under their smirks.
I understand and expect bias from translators, especially if they are sympathetic to the targets. It would be naive to expect otherwise. The most egregious offense would be the mismanagement of those translators by the various agencies (all under the Bush administration by the way). That would be unforgivable. After September 11, there is no excuse. The Bush Administration should not tolerate antiSemitism in any of these agencies. Some of these agency people should stand trial when Americans die.
I have not heard Yasmeen Bleeth in quite awhile. What does she do now? I don't watch enough TV or movies to know if she is current. I enjoyed her on 'Nash Bridges'. What does she speak?
Who is Salma Hayek?
President Bush is responsible now. We can't blame Clinton for this now.
This would vary according to the language and the particular person's strenghths, of course. I probably could have gotten to the where I could have translated Spanish literature into English for a living long before I would have ever been able to pass myself off as a native speaker. Chinese would be much harder to get good at translating.
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