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.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/070704A.shtml
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