More than 120 000 hours of wiretapped conversations between terrorist suspects and sympathisers since the September 11 attacks have not been translated because of the FBI’s lack of linguists, according to an official report.
The report, by the justice department’s inspector-general, also found that many sensitive intercepts have been wiped automatically from the memory of the FBI’s outdated computers to save hard-drive storage space.
An 18-page executive summary of the report says that the FBI, criticised for its failure to track down the al-Qaeda plotters before they struck three years ago, is still struggling to come to terms with its new role as a counterterrorist agency.
The report also represents a glitch for President George Bush’s election campaign, which is built on the promise to keep Americans safe.
”What good is taping thousands of hours of conversations of intelligence targets in foreign languages if we cannot translate promptly, securely, accurately and efficiently?” Patrick Leahy, a Democratic senator, was quoted as asking in the New York Times.
The justice department’s inspector-general, Glenn Fine, depicted the FBI as overwhelmed by its switch from crime investigation to terrorism prevention.
”The FBI cannot translate all the foreign language counter terrorism and counterintelligence material it collects,” Fine concluded in his report.
”In fact, despite the infusion of more than 620 additional linguists since September 11 2001, the FBI reported that nearly 24% of ongoing FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] counterintelligence and counterterrorism intercepts are not being monitored.”
The linguistic problem applied even to wiretaps carried out as part of specific al-Qaeda investigations. Under FBI policy, these are supposed to be translated within 12 hours, but the justice department found that the translations did not meet that deadline more than a third of the time.
In 50 cases, it took more than a month.
Intercepts of terrorist suspects’ conversations on September 10 2001, which included comments like ”tomorrow is zero hour”, were not translated until several days after the attacks.
The FBI director, Robert Moeller, said he agreed that ”more remains to be done in our language services programme, and we are giving this effort the highest priority”.
An FBI statement insisted the bureau had made progress in recruiting qualified linguists.
However, it added: ”It is difficult to identify and recruit linguists who qualify for security clearance and who have sufficient competency.” – Guardian Unlimited Â