Immigrant Woman Gets Fired From FBI Job
After Indicating Some Interpreters Can’t Interpret

By William Finucane

Once there was a Turkish woman who resettled in the United States, used her linguistic talents to get a job with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and through her duties perceived problems that she felt could compromise national security. She reported that some interpreters weren’t skilled in the languages they were interpreting. She was subsequently fired.

Ahh, the FBI.

Thus is one more story in today’s national security web.

Security officals are all too quick to dismiss those who see internal trouble.

Sibel Edmonds is the woman’s name.

She is a naturalized American now.

That, of course, meant she had to actually study American history and government to earn the citizenship. So she knows when she has a duty to point to possible dangers. Apparently, various officials at the FBI do not.

Neither did FBI Director Robert Mueller III.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has even stepped into the matter. According to Ashcroft, virtually everything relative to Sibel Edmonds is, as of now, secret.

In an act of logical impossibility, he made all of her talks with U.S. senators classified, even though her comments, after she had been dismissed by the FBI, had been on the record for as long as two years, available for anyone to see.

Instead of a sweeping CYA, (cover your ass), bureaucratic tactic, this maneuver seems more a CAA,‘cover Ashcroft’s ass,’ approach to a problem.

Oh, but Ashcroft cannot answer that charge because it comes under secret, classified, clandestine, un-discussible material. The concept of, "Oops, gotta make that stuff classified, too," which comes under the seldom used, "state secrets" privilege.

And so, what was public for two years becomes classified.

Whatever the reasons are supposed to be, the result is that now only the administration is allowed to see all pieces of this case. And that leaves all of the citizenry, and all other officials to guess what is going on.

Is Ms. Edmonds a spy?

Is the government – this administration that is, not the whole government – at all justified in shutting her up?

Is she causing all sorts of problems with ongoing FBI investigations without even knowing it? The answer is: who knows?

John Ashcroft has taken all the chips off the table and told us we will just have to trust his judgment on all of this. Sorry, John, that is unacceptable.

Security is, of course, important.

But it cannot overrule truth, either in the short or the long haul.

Whenever the George Bush administration sees situations or information that the word "security" can be applied to, it stops everything and closes all the doors and simply will not talk. This attitude influences everything.

In early July, a Bush-appointed judge, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, dismissed the lawsuit that Sibel Edmonds had brought against the FBI, apparently because Attorney General Ashcroft saw a danger of some sort of security breach.

Whether or not there was even a case to be made by Edmonds, the whistle blower, it was indicated that everything involved would be a security risk.

This illustrates how Ashcroft has gained unchallenged and perhaps unchallengeable power; he controls the courts and muffles the House of Representatives and Senate. Ashcroft declares, "State secrets," and all the rest of government goes dumb, deaf and blind.

Now America will know little of the case; it’s classified.

The result of the Bush Administration’s obsession with secrecy is that there is only one way left for information to get around: rumor. Rumor is a disease. It sets up everybody as a ‘know it all.’ You can read a liberal magazine and get one view. You can read a conservative magazine and get just the opposite view. Of course you cannot get the real story because the president and his officials have it and won’t discuss it: Security.

And when more and more cases and investigations become "state secrets," the truth becomes harder and harder to discern. Eventually, the only truth is the one with the president’s spin on it. True or not true, George W. Bush’s version is the only one that gets out. There are many who would call that the format of a dictatorship. They are right.

Is it strange that this small woman, 5 foot 4 inches tall, now 34 years old, a slight 100 pounds and of Turkish birth, should have the gall to stand up to Bush and Ashcroft and challenge them? Or is this a great example of what American democracy has always meant; that is, anyone can become an American and all that is required is a desire to learn our system, declare an allegiance to it, and live by our ideals. Sibel Edmonds seems to have met that time honored criteria.

She spoke Turkish and Farsi. She did not speak Arabic. But what she discovered and began to report upon was shocking.

There were government personnel who could not translate accurately. One such government employee went to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to translate the interrogations of Turkish-speaking al Qaeda members, people who had been captured after Sept. 11. The FBI candidly admits that he was not fully qualified to do the job. But he still did it, at everybody’s risk.

Another Turkish woman who also worked in the FBI tried to recruit Edmonds into a group that was being investigated. That same woman apparently classified many documents as ‘unnecessary to translate’ when they were in fact pertinent, possibly crucial, to American intelligence.

And there were other problems Ms. Edmonds reported. But they never got passed along to any higher authority.

One superior scolded her for jeopardizing another translator’s credibility. Well, yes, exactly! That was the idea. But of course nothing happened.

So, like any good American citizen, Edmonds wrote a letter to FBI Director Mueller and to the Senate Judiciary Committee. And just like any other concerned citizen might hope to get a fast response, she in fact did. She got canned.

No reason, no explanations, no anything; she just got booted.

She was excluded from a trial brought by parents of the Sept. 11, 2001 victims, because of security concerns. Then she was allowed to talk to the U.S. Senate only in secret session.

And guess what? She is still maintaining FBI silence on all secret matters, so she is not at all a tattletale. But like the rest of Americans, Edmonds would like some real answers to some hard questions.

First, is the Federal Bureau of Investigation simply ill-led or are the problems symptomatic of a bureaucratic malaise going back to the Hoover years? Is the FBI in need of a total rebuilding, immediately?

And most importantly, is there an elected citizen – the president – capable of fixing it? Unless there is a civilian chief officer who can take control, the people who run the FBI, and the other intelligence services – the Central Intelligence Agency and the military secret agencies – will make all the significant calls themselves.

Those calls will always lean toward secrecy at all costs. But the first cost for Americans will be their democracy.

No matter how messy, bloody, or unclear it all might be, the search for truth has to be the primary goal of a democracy. In a democracy there are really only two things worthy of the ultimate sacrifice; first is the right of citizens to know the truth, which as history has shown is worth dying for, and the second of course is the need to defend America’s historically unique open system of government from those who would seek to destroy or overthrow it.