Whistleblower on the incompetent FBI translation department

Sibel Edmonds details the feuds, corruption, cover-ups and the lack of expertise.

CD: So you're saying that you would see all of the raw data first, and then decide what to do with it and who would see it?

SE: Correct.

CD: And that they [the agents] don't have any way of knowing if you're telling the truth or giving them the right translation?

SE: Correct.

CD: So more or less, the agents are at the mercy of the translator?

SE: Correct. While the FBI's internal procedures say that a second translator should always take a look at every text, to prevent any faulty translations from occurring, that never happens.

CD: Really? Why not?

SE: Well, a lot of the translators would find that offensive, you know, the idea that someone might think they're not good enough and need to be babysat in their translating. It could end up in a fistfight.

The whole place is like that. It's like the Twilight Zone in there – you have to keep the Pakistani translators on one side of the room and the Indians on the other, or they will come to blows. You have to keep the Hebrew translators separated from the Arabic ones, and so on. It's so unprofessional it's ridiculous. Most of the time people spend trying to dig up dirt on one another. Really.

CD: In your October 25 2002 interview with 60 Minutes, "Lost in Translation," you charged the FBI with incompetence and greed – and also of allowing infiltration by foreign intelligence outfits. Some of these charges have also been substantiated by other sources, both congressional and from inside the bureau. For example, there's the Guantanamo Bay Turkish-English translator who actually didn't know either language very well, Kevin Taskasen, I believe? And he worked with you at some point?

SE: Correct.

CD: And also, your bosses told you to work more slowly, in some cases not at all, so that the department's seemingly huge workload would mean more funding the next year, right?

SE: Correct.

CD: Can you provide any more details on these subjects?

SE: Well, as for Kevin – he was this poor little guy who was very nice, his only fault as a translator being that he, well, didn't speak English.

CD: Really! Where was he from? How did he get that job, anyway?

SE: Kevin was from Turkey. He had met an American woman there, married her, and moved to America. But his lower-elementary-school-level English was only enough to get him a job as a busboy/dishwasher in a restaurant.

However, his wife worked in the languages testing center at FBI headquarters in Washington. Hers was the office that takes in the applications of aspiring translators and schedule language proficiency tests.

CD: So in other words, she used her connections to get him a job in the FBI, even though he wasn't qualified?

SE: Correct. There was an Arabic language supervisor in our department, who had about seven or eight family members under his wing, working away in the Arabic language section even though several of them weren't qualified, hadn't passed the proficiency test in either English or Arabic…

CD: So they made a bargain?

SE: Yes, he had made a deal with this woman, Kevin's wife. She had approved all of his extended family members to work for the FBI translations center, and so she then asked to do the same with her poor husband. And I can't really blame him at all, he was just a nice guy who dreamed of opening his own restaurant. But that's not likely to happen when you're working as a busboy for $6.50 an hour.

CD: How much do they pay in the translating department that he was hired to?

SE: The average is $40 an hour.

This soon gets much deeper and darker and more sordid as it goes into bribery, corruption and treason being covered-up by the F.B.I. and John Ashcroft. Read here.