Monday, September 27, 2004
Remember this cute little story from a little while back?
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.
Now it seems we have a little problem at the FBI.
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.
Well, we may not be safe from Al Qaeda but at least we got the pink menace on the run.
How lame is our government anyway? A billion dollars a day to defend us and they can't find anyone to translate Arabic?
This lack of Arabic translators reminds me of the mysterious crash of Egypt Air flight 990 (2 years before 9/11). A jumbo jet takes off from NY bound for Cairo with a bunch of high ranking Egyptian military on it when suddenly, we are told, the co-pilot decides to commit suicide by crashing the plane into the Atlantic, killing all on board.
An airplane crash is serious business so everyone was eager to find the cockpit voice recorder since there was no warning of trouble prior to the plane disappearing from radar. When it is found the world waits, and waits and waits for an indication of what happened. Our government asks for patience and explains to us that this is going to take some time because the voices on the recorder are "speaking Arabic". The government official saying this at the press conference informs us of this shocking development as if he were talking about a dead language spoken only by long deceased aboriginal people deep in the heart of the Amazon rain forest that has never had contact with the civilized world. My first thought was that in the time it took for this guy's underling to write this lame speech they could have found 10 cabbies to help them out with the translation without breaking a sweat. "Either we suck big time, or this is a coverup." I said to the dog.
The amazing thing about this whole story is it doesn't seem like anyone in the mainstream media (or the government) has ever thought to revisit this little airplane terror killing in light of 9/11. Weird, huh?
