TNR-The FBI Silences Dissenters

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http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040607&s=risen060704
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THE FBI SILENCES DISSENTERS.
'Nuff Said
by Clay Risen

Post date: 05.27.04
Issue date: 06.07.04
In the aftermath of September 11, the FBI hired Sibel Edmonds--and hundreds of others who, like her, were fluent in Middle Eastern languages--to translate thousands of hours of backlogged wiretap transcripts and other documents. Edmonds didn't stay at the FBI for very long, though. In March 2002, after she complained to her supervisor about poor management, slow progress, and even a possible spy within the translators' department, she was fired. In response, Edmonds filed a wrongful termination suit, went on "60 Minutes," and even sat down with staffers for Senators Charles Grassley and Patrick Leahy, who have pushed the FBI to respond to her claims--a response that, two years later, has yet to arrive. Edmonds's case, Grassley charged last week in a Senate hearing with FBI Director Robert Mueller, is evidence that the Bureau is refusing "to face up to its problems with translation."

Last week, the Justice Department, which oversees the Bureau, finally took action--by announcing that all the information it had provided to Grassley and Leahy about Edmonds and her accusations, even seemingly mundane details, such as which languages she speaks, had been "reclassified." Copies of follow-up letters sent by Grassley and Leahy to the FBI have been removed from the senators' websites, and their staffs are now prevented from talking about what was, until last week, public knowledge. The Justice Department refuses to discuss the matter, even to verify that information has in fact been reclassified. "I think it's ludicrous, because I understand that almost all of this information is in the public domain and has been very widely available," Grassley said during last week's hearing. "This classification is very serious, because it seems like the FBI would be attempting to put a gag order on Congress."

Indeed, the Edmonds "reclassification" is only the latest attempt by the FBI to hide, rather than confront, its problems. "We worry that you have not solved some of your most basic problems," Leahy told Mueller last week. "Your information-technology systems are hopelessly out of date. The FBI is not much better off today than it was before 9/11." And, when people inside the Bureau try to point this out, they are routinely brushed aside: For months, the FBI ignored Coleen Rowley, a Minneapolis agent who claimed the Bureau had missed prior evidence of the September 11 plot. After John Roberts, a unit chief in the Bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility, discussed the FBI's shortcomings with "60 Minutes" in October 2002, he was verbally disciplined by his supervisor. And other whistleblowers have faced retaliation for discussing everything from lapses in the Oklahoma City bombing case to evidence theft by Bureau agents at Ground Zero. But the Edmonds case is the most ham-handed attempt to stifle damaging evidence so far--not only because reclassification of such publicly available information is next to impossible, but because the government violated its own rules in order to do it.

Edmonds says that a Turkish woman hired by the FBI as a translator, Can Dickerson, asked to translate all the documents pertaining to a particular foreign organization--the name of which has always been classified--that was under investigation by the FBI. According to Edmonds, Dickerson then tried to recruit her into that same organization. Edmonds says she reported Dickerson to her supervisor but was told to drop it. Soon after, the FBI terminated Edmonds's contract, citing "disruptiveness." Nevertheless, when Bureau officials sat down with Senate staffers a few months later, they verified most of Edmonds's claims--even though, according to a follow-up letter from Grassley and Leahy to the Bureau, "the FBI downplayed the importance of this matter."
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Clay Risen is an assistant editor at TNR.



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