Muslim sensitivity training gone bad…

Gabriel Syme (London) · Middle East & Islamic

This news has been around bits of the blogosphere but it is still shocking enough to write about a week later.

When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.

She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:

“It’s about time they got a taste of what they’ve been giving the Middle East.”

It gets worse.

When Edmonds reported the incident and other breaches in security, mistranslations and potential espionage by Middle Eastern colleagues she was fired “without specified cause”. Edmonds’s supervisor, “a naturalized U.S. citizen from Beirut” reportedly told his employees to take long breaks, to slow down translations, and to simply say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations so that they could go on with their investigations and interrogations of those they had detained.

The FBI, which like the army suffers from a severe shortage of Arabic translators, instated a bureau-wide Muslim-sensitivity training program after 9-11. Edmonds is said to have detailed these allegations further in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month. Edmonds wrote Justice’s Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in a Jan. 5 letter.

I have alleged, and the FBI has confirmed (to Senate investigators), that there are in fact such persons in the language department.

I do not know whether these allegations are true, but I have no reason to doubt their validity. I have no problem believing that a government agency swamped with bureaucracy and with departmental biases can foster such shocking behaviour within its ranks. An allegded shortage of arabic translators seems to have opened floodgates to greedy and hostile behaviour of the Middle Eastern linguists in residence whose allegiances cannot be doubted.

Any chance of a more appropriate ‘sensitivity training’? Once more, without feeling…

Brock

February 16, 2004 at 2:02 pm

The problem with all this PC crap is that some very small part of it is actually helpful and good. And that small percent is used to justify the rest.

Please, PLEASE will someone create a metric that can measure and accurately predict the benefits and costs of these programs.

Hopefully it will not be long when “X sensitivity training” means telling “X” “You’re in American now, and here we work and don’t congratulate terrorists on a job well done!! Be sensitive to that or your ass if fired.”

Dan McWiggins

February 16, 2004 at 2:44 pm

Sorry, Brock, it doesn’t work that way in the Gov’t of the good ol’ US of A. If a lazy, incompetent employee gets hired in the first place, he’s basically got a job for life. If he or she happens to be other than Caucasian, it doesn’t matter if you have video of them committing armed robbery, rape and murder with eyewitness testimony to back up the tape–the best you could hope for, as a supervisor, is to get them transferred. Affirmative action has gone completely insane inside the Federal Government and the inmates are running the asylum. An item like this one doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.