An article in the Feb. 13 issue of USA Today talks about the dire need in the U.S. intelligence community, particularly the FBI and CIA, for Arab speakers.
“In Iraq, the military lacks American translators, forcing reliance on foreigners. At home, an inspector general reported last year that thousands of hours of intelligence tapes remain untranslated.
The military, the FBI and the CIA all have sharply increased recruiting of people who speak the languages used on those tapes, but the supply falls far short of the need, particularly for the most-skilled linguists.
At the State Department, for instance, only 10 of 34,000 employees are rated fully fluent in Arabic.”
With a country full of Arabic speakers, Israel, a perfect source of capable people able to fill this need, is pointedly ignored. Similarly, after 9/11, Americans, both Christian and Jewish who are Èmigres from Arab lands, came forward and were not hired by the same agencies that are in need of them today. In the meantime, documents procured at great cost and effort (and undoubtedly at the cost of lives) sit untranslated. We ignore them at our peril.
Something is wrong here.

–nrg

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