More on Edmonds

     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.


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