NYT: F.B.I. Said to Lag on Translations of Terror Tapes

[BeyondGeography]

By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times

Published: September 28, 2004

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 - Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, more than 120,000 hours of potentially valuable terrorism-related recordings have not yet been translated by linguists at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and computer problems may have led the bureau to systematically erase some Qaeda recordings, according to a declassified summary of a Justice Department investigation that was released on Monday.

The report, released in edited form by Glenn A. Fine, the department's inspector general, found that the F.B.I. still lacked the capacity to translate all the terrorism-related material from wiretaps and other intelligence sources and that the influx of new material has outpaced the bureau's resources.

<snip>Congressional officials who have been briefed recently by the F.B.I. on the translation issue said the report offered a much bleaker assessment than the bureau has acknowledged, and leading senators from both parties denounced what they described as foot-dragging in fixing the problem.

<snip>With $48 million in additional financing since the Sept. 11 attacks, the number of linguists at the F.B.I. rose to 1,214 as of April 2004 from 883 in 2001, with sharp increases in the number of translators of Arabic, Farsi and other languages considered critical to counterterrorism investigations. But Mr. Fine's report made clear that the expansion had not eliminated the management and efficiency problems that dogged the bureau even before Sept. 11.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/politics/28fbi.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1096344397-kBk6l9/oTaXeSBG2X+prdQ

[whistle]

1. That must be something they want future generations to....

...work on, perhaps beginning in the year 2489, sort of like the Dead-Sea Scrolls, Bush-style.

[RevCheesehead]

2. A "delay?"

"..and computer problems may have led the bureau to systematically erase some Qaeda recordings.."

HA! Anyone remember the 20 minute Nixon gap?

Golly, it really IS 1973 again!

my cynical voice is suggesting that perhaps they were trying to translate a * speech, and didn't realize it was in English. Funny, neither did I.

[bahrbearian]

3. Chimpy and English are 2 separate synapse's.

[Hekate]

4. Fire the whistleblowers, fire the gays, fire people whose parents are...

...Middle Easterners, fail to do simple upgrades on systemwide desktop computers, work for an administration that controls all three branches of federal government and really does not want any information to get out... So sorry, John Q. Public, nothing can be done about this problem.

:argh:

Hekate

[Nordic]

5. gosh, I suddenly feel so much safer!

with Bush at the helm, everything is peachy!

[baby_bear]

6. How can Ridge justify any adjustment to color alerts?

I am not being snide here. If there are hundreds of unread messages, how can Ridge pretend to be on top of the alert system, adjusting it from yellow to orange, when we don't even have a handle on the "chatter" that we always hear them (Bushies) talk about?

This scares the heck out of me because it indicates that there is NO intelligence in this administration. All of it is made up on the fly, probably in some inner office of Rove or Rice.

I sure would like to see this brought up Thursday at the so-called "debate." But it won't. This will get swept under the rug, along with all the other damning evidence against this failure of an administration.

s_m

[shraby]

7. 120,000 hours equals 5000 days.

5000 days divided by 365 days in a year, that's 13 years of backlog. Houston, you do have a problem.

[krkaufman]

8. "Sibel Edmonds" '60 Minutes' segment from a few weeks back...

... hit on this point, I believe. IIRC, the FBI was accused of intentionally undermanning the translation staff, in order to make the case for more resources. Ms Edmonds related that completed translations disappeared from her computer overnight, requiring her to then start over.

This even after 9/11.

What the heck took the NYTimes so long to pick the story up?

edit: Ah, I see that the NYT writer lightly references Sibel Edmonds in the closing paragraph, but fails to mention her charges of deliberate productivity sabotage by the FBI.

[krkaufman]

9. Transcript of '60 Minutes' Sibel Edmonds interview

From the '60 Minutes' transcript....

Edmonds says that to her amazement, from the day she started the job, she was told repeatedly by one of her supervisors that there was no urgency,- that she should take longer to translate documents so that the department would appear overworked and understaffed. That way, it would receive a larger budget for the next year.

“We were told by our supervisors that this was the great opportunity for asking for increased budget and asking for more translators,” says Edmonds. “And in order to do that, don't do the work and let the documents pile up so we can show it and say that we need more translators and expand the department.”

Edmonds says that the supervisor, in an effort to slow her down, went so far as to erase completed translations from her FBI computer after she'd left work for the day.

“The next day, I would come to work, turn on my computer, and the work would be gone. The translation would be gone,” she says. “Then I had to start all over again and retranslate the same document. And I went to my supervisor and he said, ‘Consider it a lesson and don't talk about it to anybody else and don't mention it.’

"The lesson was don’t work, and don’t do the translations. ...Don't do the work because -- and this is our chance to increase the number of people here in this department."

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

Feel free to forward this info to the NYT writer.

[krkaufman]

10. Bush priority: religious fundamentalism over national security...

... as reflected by the post-9/11 firing of gay translators.

---

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/14/attack/main529418.shtml

Gay Linguists Get The Boot

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 14, 2002

"It's not a gay-rights issue. I'm arguing military proficiency issues - they're throwing out good, quality people."
-- Alastair Gamble, Former Army Specialist

(AP) Nine Army linguists, including six trained to speak Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay.

The soldiers' dismissals come at a time when the military is facing a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism.

...

[Moderator]

11. dupe

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=868688