On Sept. 10, 2001, the National Security Agency picked up suggestive comments by al Queda operatives, including, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” The tape of the conversation was not translated until after 9/11. Soon after, as Newsweek reported, FBI Director Robert Mueller established a 12-hour rule: all significant electronic intercepts of suspected terrorist conversations must be translated within 12 hours. A year ago, several reports indicated that it wasn’t going well — something about not having enough trained linguists who can translate the intercepted Arabic messages.
Have matters improved? Not so much.
Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics.
Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words — including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test — just 1 percent of the FBI’s 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show.
The numbers reflect the FBI’s continued struggle to attract employees who speak Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and other languages of the Middle East and South Asia, even as the bureau leads a fight against terrorist groups primarily centered in those parts of the world. The same challenge is facing the CIA and other agencies as the government competes with the private sector for a limited number of applicants with foreign-language proficiency, according to U.S. officials and experts.
In one disconcerting study, released last week, officials discovered that “three terrorists housed at a federal prison in Colorado were able to send more than 90 letters to fellow extremists overseas, in part because the prison did not have enough qualified language translators to understand what was happening.”
Moreover, as Daniel Byman, a Georgetown University associate professor who heads the school’s Security Studies Program, noted, this isn’t just a problem of translating intercepted messages, the shortage also hurts the bureau’s relations with immigrant communities and makes it more difficult to gather intelligence on extremist groups. Those proficient in language skills are “more sensitive to nuance, which is what investigations are often all about.”
The next question is what to do about it. I have an idea.
It just so happens, there are several dozen well-trained, patriotic linguists, very proficient in Arabic, who are anxious to serve their country and help prevent terrorist attacks. They just happen to be the same linguists the U.S. government got rid of because they’re gay.
[T]he Pentagon continues to dismiss trained linguists — people whose skills are desperately needed in Iraq and elsewhere around the world — for being gay. In fact, newly obtained data from the Department of Defense reveals that these firings were far more widespread than previously known. Between 1998 and 2004, the military discharged 20 Arabic and six Farsi language speakers under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The new data are not broken down by year, but additional figures from other reports suggest that about half the Arabic discharges came after September 11.
We know, of course, that number has gone up at least a little since 2004.
Now, to be sure, 30 or so linguists kicked out of the military for no good reason doesn’t sound like a lot of people, but if the FBI hired all of them, the number of proficient agents who could help would grow by 100%.
It’s certainly possible these linguists would harbor some hard feelings towards the government, given the way they were treated. It’s why I’d recommend the FBI approach them with a formal apology — and lots of money.
It seems so simple, doesn’t it? The Justice Department needs well-trained linguists. The military has fired a bunch of well-trained linguists. Put them together and we have a safer country.
See? I’m a problem solver….