Friday News Dump? U.S. Had Intel on Chemical Strike Before It Was Launched

[markpkessinger]

92. Are you seriously suggesting . . .

. . . that the NSA and CIA are unable to rapidly translate Arabic, when we have been fighting a "War on Terror" for eleven years against terrorists who communicate chiefly in Arabic?

Hell, EVEN I could point them to some folks, some of whom work right here in NYC at the U.N. Indeed, I knew someone -- the partner of one of my closest friends -- who worked as a mid-level diplomat at the U.N. His name was Rick Hooper. He held a doctorate in Arabic Studies from Georgetown. Sadly, Rick was killed on August 19, 2003, when the U.N. offices at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad were hit with a car bomb. Rick, who was born in Idaho and raised in California, was fluent in speaking, reading and writing Arabic. He spoke five separate dialects of Arabic, each one like a native speaker (he also spoke six other languages as well). In a memorial service held for him at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York, a Palestinian man, whose release from an Israeli prison Rick successfully negotiated with the Israeli government during the first Intifada spoke, and said of Rick: "He spoke my mother tongue as well or better than I do." But Rick wasn't the only one. In the wake of his death, I had the privilege of meeting and talking to many of his colleagues, who were likewise involved in MIddle East issues for the U.N. Most were not, themselves, of Middle Eastern descent: some were Brazilians or other South American nationalities, some were from African countries, some were from Europe. But they all could read and write fluently in the languages of the countries in which they worked.

What Sybil Edmonds explained after 9/11 may well have been true then, but U.S. intelligence agents have now had a dozen years to find those with the needed language skills, particularly in Arabic. Hell, they've had time to "grow their own" if necessary. So if it were true that 12 years on they STILL don't have employees with the requisite language skills, that's an argument for firing the entire staff of those agencies for gross incompetence.