[IP] Translator in Eye of Storm on Retroactive Classification
Begin forwarded message:
From: George Sadowsky <george.sadowsky@xxxxxxx>
Date: July 8, 2004 2:28:38 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Translator in Eye of Storm on Retroactive Classification
Dave,
Don't know if you've seen this .... for IP if you like.
George
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Translator in Eye of Storm on Retroactive Classification
By Anne E. Kornblut
Boston Globe
Monday 05 July 2004
Washington - Sifting through old classified materials in the days
after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, FBI translator Sibel Edmonds said,
she made an alarming discovery: Intercepts relevant to the terrorist
plot, including references to skyscrapers, had been overlooked because
they were badly translated into English.
Edmonds, 34, who is fluent in Turkish and Farsi, said she quickly
reported the mistake to an FBI superior. Five months later, after
flagging what she said were several other security lapses in her
division, she was fired. Now, after more than two years of
investigations and congressional inquiries, Edmonds is at the center of
an extraordinary storm over US classification rules that sheds new
light on the secrecy imperative supported by members of the Bush
administration.
In a rare maneuver, Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered that
information about the Edmonds case be retroactively classified, even
basic facts that have been posted on websites and discussed openly in
meetings with members of Congress for two years. The Department of
Justice also invoked the seldom-used "state secrets" privilege to
silence Edmonds in court. She has been blocked from testifying in a
lawsuit brought by victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and was allowed to
speak to the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks only behind
closed doors.
Meanwhile, the FBI has yet to release its internal investigation
into her charges. And the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees
the bureau, has been stymied in its attempt to get to the bottom of her
allegations. Now that the case has been retroactively classified,
lawmakers are wary of discussing the details, for fear of overstepping
legal bounds.
"I'm alarmed that the FBI is reaching back in time and classifying
information it provided two years ago," Senator Charles E. Grassley, a
Republican from Iowa and a leading advocate for Edmonds, said last
Friday. "Frankly, it looks like an attempt to impede legitimate
oversight of a serious problem at the FBI."
Edmonds, a naturalized US citizen who grew up in Turkey and Iran,
said in an interview last week that the ordeal has made her grow
disillusioned with the "magical system of checks and balances and
separation of powers" that had made her so drawn to the United States.
"What I came to see is that it exists only in name," Edmonds said.
"Where is the oversight? Who is there to stop him [Ashcroft]?"
In a development that legal analysts say is disturbing, a pattern
of retroactive classifications has begun to emerge in recent years, all
of them pertaining to - but not limited to - national security. For
example, Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, is
locked in an ongoing battle with the Defense Department over testing
requirements for a national missile defense system that were made
public in 2000 but have since been declared classified.
Bush administration officials argue that the three-year campaign
against terrorism has required unprecedented levels of confidentiality,
especially inside intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Critics do
not dispute the need for heightened secrecy in the current environment.
Edmonds is careful not to discuss standard classified information, such
as methods the FBI used to obtain the material she translated.
But she and a growing number of her defenders - who include a
government watchdog group, some Sept. 11 families, and Grassley, a Bush
administration ally - maintain that the secrecy imposed on her case has
jeopardized national security. One of Edmonds's assertions to her
superiors included suspicions of espionage within the FBI, which she
said the bureau has not addressed.
"Their [the administration's] mantra seems to be that secrecy
promotes safety, and I don't think that's true," said David Vladeck, a
Georgetown University law professor who is representing the watchdog
group Project on Government Oversight in a lawsuit challenging the
retroactive classification. "At times, I think secrecy breeds
suspicion."
Edmonds's native skills drew her to languages. Born in Istanbul,
raised for seven years in Tehran, with Azerbaijani relatives on her
father's side, she speaks three languages crucial to
intelligence-gathering in the Middle East. She does not speak Arabic.
But her specialty languages were no less important after Sept. 11,
2001, when investigators began tracking Al Qaeda and other terrorist
connections in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran.
She had a job application at the FBI before Sept. 11, and it was
accelerated after the attacks so she could start work Sept. 20. One of
her main assignments, she said, was to expedite requested translations
from field agents, including material that a field agent in Arizona
submitted for retranslation on a suspicion that it had not been
examined thoroughly before Sept. 11.
"After I retranslated it verbatim, I went to my supervisor to say,
'I need to talk to this agent over a secure line because what we came
across in this retranslating is gigantic, it has specific information
about certain specific activity related to 9/11,' " Edmonds recalled.
"The supervisor blocked this retranslation from being sent to the same
agent. The reasoning this [supervisor] gave me was, 'How would you like
it if another translator did this same thing to you? The original
translator is going to be held responsible.' "
In the end, Edmonds said, the field agent who requested a
reinterpretation of the intelligence material "knew there were things
that were missing, and yet he was reassured by the Washington field
office that the original translation was fine."
Edmonds said the intercept jumped out at her because it contained
references to skyscrapers and the US visa application process. Such
references might have triggered suspicions at Immigration and
Naturalization Services before Sept. 11 if they had been correctly
translated, she said, but they seemed unrelated before the attacks, in
part because they were gathered during the course of a criminal
investigation.
A Phoenix FBI agent was the source of a memo before the attacks
warning about Middle Easterners taking flying lessons. Edmonds does not
know whether the same agent is related to her case.
Edmonds said she made another troubling discovery: One of her
colleagues admitted being a member of an organization with ties to the
Middle East that was a target of an FBI investigation. The colleague,
also a Turkish translator, invited Edmonds to join the group, assuring
her that her FBI credentials would guarantee admission. Edmonds
declined to name the organization, because she said it has been under
surveillance.
Two months later, Edmonds said, one of the agents she worked with
found hundreds of pages of translation that her Turkish-speaking
colleague had stamped "not pertinent" and had therefore gone
untranslated.
The agent asked Edmonds to retranslate her colleague's work. "We
came across 17 pieces of extremely specific and important information
that was blocked, and at that point, this agent and I went to the FBI
security department in the Washington field office, and found out my
supervisor had not reported my original complaints," she said.
Edmonds said she was repeatedly warned that she would be opening a
"can of worms" if she kept filing security complaints, but she
continued reporting lapses to ever-higher levels of management until,
in March 2002, she wrote a letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller
III, she said. She also contacted the Senate Judiciary Committee. In
response, the FBI confiscated her home computer, challenged her to take
a polygraph test, which she said she passed, and terminated her
contract.
A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a request for
comment. Previously, officials have said Edmonds was fired for
disruptive behavior on the job.
Over the summer of 2002, the Senate Judiciary Committee requested
and received unclassified briefings about her case by FBI officials, in
which Senate aides said the FBI confirmed much of what Edmonds had
alleged. Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Grassley, the
Republican, wrote letters to Ashcroft, Mueller, and Glenn A. Fine, the
inspector general at the Department of Justice, requesting immediate
attention to Edmonds's case. They posted their letters on their
websites, and Edmonds went public with her story, which was featured in
a segment on "60 Minutes" in October 2002.
Edmonds also filed suit against the Justice Department on First
Amendment grounds. That prompted Ashcroft to invoke the rare "state
secrets" privilege, arguing "the litigation creates substantial risks
of disclosing classified and sensitive national security information,"
a Department of Justice news release said.
Edmonds's lawsuits have since been stalled in court, but other
Sept. 11-related cases, involving the independent panel's investigation
and civil lawsuits involving victims' relatives, have put her saga back
in the spotlight. The Senate Judiciary Committee recently e-mailed
staff members informing them the FBI now considers the information
related to Edmonds classified and warning them not to disseminate it
anymore.
Grassley's and Leahy's offices have removed their letters to
Justice officials from their websites, though the letters are still
available on the Internet.
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