Remember all the furor over the lack of qualified translators after 9/11. Well, 9/11 changes a lot of things, we got war, the Patriot Act, Excessive Ashcroft...etc...it seems that the one thing it did not change was the FBI culture of ummmm...do nothing. Now, believe me, the FBI is not a do-nothing organization, there are some out-freaking-standing FBI agents out there, who like all Law Enforcement professionals keep us safe at the risk of their own lives, and never ask anything in return other than to be able to go back to work tomorrow and do it all over again.

Then there are the desk-bound careerists, who carry badges, guns and live to be government bureaucrats. They make stories like this possible. I thought maybe they were "getting gone", but apparently not...they are in fact, winning.

An FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, was hired to translate Turkish intel (documents and wiretaps) and found not only spying inside our government, but that one of her co-workers might have been "co-opted" by Turkish Intelligence. She also was too efficient, getting an entire eight hours work done and turned in within her eight-hour day, only to find it all erased by her supervisor, who did that so he could show "a need for more translators, and hence a requirement for a bigger budget" because of a "backlog". This was likely vital intelligence, National Security stuff, not the answers to the NYT crossword.

Edmonds says that to her amazement, from the day she started the job, she was told repeatedly by one of her supervisors that there was no urgency - that she should take longer to translate documents so that the department would appear overworked and understaffed. That way, it would receive a larger budget for the next year.

“We were told by our supervisors that this was the great opportunity for asking for increased budget and asking for more translators,” says Edmonds. “And in order to do that, don't do the work and let the documents pile up so we can show it and say that we need more translators and expand the department.”

Edmonds says that the supervisor, in an effort to slow her down, went so far as to erase completed translations from her FBI computer after she'd left work for the day.

“The next day I would come to work, turn on my computer and the work would be gone. The translation would be gone,” she says. “Then I had to start all over again and retranslate the same document. And I went to my supervisor and he said, ‘Consider it a lesson and don't talk about it to anybody else and don't mention it.’”
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Take the case of Jan Dickerson, a Turkish translator who worked with Edmonds. The FBI has admitted that when Dickerson was hired last November the bureau didn't know that she had worked for a Turkish organization being investigated by the FBI's own counter-intelligence unit.

They also didn't know she'd had a relationship with a Turkish intelligence officer stationed in Washington who was the target of that investigation. According to Edmonds, Dickerson tried to recruit her into that organization, and insisted that Dickerson be the only one to translate the FBI's wiretaps of that Turkish official.

“She got very angry, and later she threatened me and my family's life,” says Edmonds, when she decided not to go along with the plan. “She said ‘Why would you want to place your life and your family's life in danger by translating these tapes?’”

Edmonds says that when she reviewed Dickerson's translations of those tapes, she found that Dickerson had left out information crucial to the FBI's investigation - information that Edmonds says would have revealed that the Turkish intelligence officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon.
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What kind of information did she leave out of her translation?
“Activities to obtain the United States military and intelligence secrets,” says Edmonds.
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Sibel Edmonds was fired. The FBI offered no explanation, saying in the letter only that her contract was terminated completely for the government's convenience.

But three months later, the FBI conceded that on at least two occasions, Dickerson had, in fact, left out significant information from her translations. They say it was due to a lack of experience and was not malicious.

Director Mueller, the American Public is calling: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE?