From The Boston Globe, 7/5/04:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/07/05/translator_in_eye_of_storm_on_retroactive_classification/
Translator in eye of storm on retroactive classification
By Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff
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.
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You'd almost think the Reichsfuehrer was hiding something, eh?
Harry
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