Arab translators cheered Sept. 11

[Human Subject]

Good thing the FBI polys everybody.  They were so proud to tell me they polyed even the janitor.

It keeps the riff-raff out.  I know they really dodged a bullet when they DQed me...

Here's a tip to anybody who wants into the FBI: get yourself a job as a busboy at a Middle Eastern restaurant and claim you speak Turkish (see below).

DAY OF INFAMY 2001
Arab translators
cheered Sept. 11
FBI whistleblower: 'Questions of loyalty' taint interpretation of al-Qaida chatter

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: January 7, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Paul Sperry
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

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.

Such prejudice has been borne out at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where two Army translators have been arrested on suspicion of espionage. They were assigned to interpret information collected from al-Qaida and Taliban detainees.

Edmonds notes the FBI has sent an unqualified translator to Gitmo to translate interrogations of Turkish-speaking al-Qaida members captured after 9-11. She says the translator, Kevin Taskesen, failed a Turkish proficiency test and a basic English proficiency test. She says he previously worked as a busboy at a Middle Eastern restaurant.

Phone calls to Taskesen's FBI office were not immediately returned.

Both Lavey and Edmonds note 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.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36492

[Jake_B]

Ah yes, your source is WorldNetDaily.com, a paragon of unbiased news reporting!  Translation:
"Oh please!"

[Human Subject]

OK, 60 Minutes covered this.  Does that make it more true?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/25/60minutes/main526954.shtml

There's a nice color picture and everything for you.

And here's a tip: there's no such thing as unbiased news reporting.  Everyone carries biases, and it's better to recognize that (and perhaps to correct for it) than to uncritically swallow information fed from your chosen "unbiased" news source.  Think whatever you want about WorldNetDaily, but the story is full of names and other specifics that are easily verifiable.

[Skeptic]

OK, 60 Minutes covered this.  Does that make it more true?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/25/60minutes/main526954.shtml

There's a nice color picture and everything for you.

And here's a tip: there's no such thing as unbiased news reporting.  Everyone carries biases, and it's better to recognize that (and perhaps to correct for it) than to uncritically swallow information fed from your chosen "unbiased" news source.  Think whatever you want about WorldNetDaily, but the story is full of names and other specifics that are easily verifiable.

It's probably a good idea to do just that.  While it's true that "there's no such thing as unbiased news reporting", this hardly means that all news outlets are equally trustworthy.  World Net Daily has a well-deserved reputation for being a news source one should probably take with a grain of salt.  Same goes for NewsMax, Weekly World News, etc.

Unfortunately, these days even bastions of "tell-it-like-it-is" journalism are probably worthy of double-check, though...

Skeptic

[Human Subject]

Weekly World News, etc.

Don't go trashing Weekly World News!  When Batboy flunks a poly I'll be the first to post the story.

[Human Subject]

According to this article...

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12138

...Edmonds is scheduled to give a briefing to the 9/11 commission today.

Once again I gotta say good thing the FBI DQed me!  I wonder how many of these jokers passed their polys.

[George W. Maschke]

Human Subject,

I know Mike Feghali, the supervisor mentioned in the FrontPage magazine article by Paul Sperry you linked to ( "Celebrating 9/11 at the FBI"). Sperry describes Feghali as having been an FBI employee for "several" years, but he has, in fact, worked with the Bureau for a good many years. I worked with Mike at the Washington Metropolitan Field Office in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War, where he gave me my initial on-the-job-training, and met him again at the New York field office in Manhattan after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. I always knew him to be friendly and cheerful.

I'm very skeptical of the whole premise of Sperry's article, that is, that the Middle East linguists at the Washington FBI office were "celebrating 9/11."  As I recall, Mike Feghali also brought date-filled cookies to the office on several occasions while I was there in 1991 (the office was then at Buzzard Point). There was no special occasion. He was just being sociable.

I was with Mike Feghali at the New York field office on 13 September 1993 when the meeting between the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat arranged by President Clinton was televised. I recall that Mike was moved to tears as the two shook hands for the first time. I have a very hard time picturing Mike "celebrating" anyone's death.

Even the comment allegedly made by someone else in Mike's presence ("It's about time they got a taste of what they've been giving the Middle East"), if true, more likely reflects bitterness over U.S. foreign policy than joy over the deaths of fellow Americans. (All FBI linguists are U.S. citizens.)

Sperry also engages in blatant yellow journalism by attempting to associate the following unrelated points:

Sources say Feghali is planning to move back to Lebanon.

A key player in the 9-11 plot and the likely pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, the suicide plane that crashed apparently en route to the U.S. Capitol, was Ziad Samir Jarrah, a Lebanese.

I think the more serious charges Edmonds has made are that Mike Feghali ordered a work slowdown after 9/11 and deleted almost completed work from her computer.

Other serious charges Edmonds has made and that Sperry does not address in this article are associated with an alleged attempt by a fellow FBI employee to recruit her as a member of an organization whose communications the Bureau was monitoring, and the Bureau's failure to seriously investigate the matter. See the message thread, A Polygraph-Beating Double Agent in the FBI?

[Human Subject]

George, I agree, especially regarding the quality of that last article I cited.  The "Lebanese connection" was especially embarassing.

My main intent was to point out that this employee was set to testify yesterday.  I don't know if this occurred, or where I'd look for confirmation.  I should have found a better source before posting anything.

Someone's doing something wrong, whether it's Edmonds fabricating charges, or the FBI's translators dragging their feet (or worse).  They're all FBI.  And presumably they've all been through the polygraph at least once.  I can't imagine how anyone who's heard an FBI polygrapher's "integrity" lecture and then been told they are "not within acceptable parameters" despite never having engaged in any disqualifying behavior whatsoever can read stories like this and not just seethe.