Wed Aug 18, 2004 03:28 PM ET
By Ellen Wulfhorst
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors have found a possible translation error in a key piece of evidence against two leaders of an upstate New York mosque accused of supporting terrorism, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
U.S. authorities had previously said an address book found in what they called a terrorist training camp in northern Iraq in June 2003 referred to the defendant as "the commander" in Arabic, but the Justice Department spokesman said FBI translators now thought the word was Kurdish and actually meant "brother."
The original translation was done by the Defense Department.
A Department spokesperson defended the translation efforts of its personnel. "The terrorists have a different word for everything, and we're only just starting to decode their secret language. My God, they don't even write normal-it's all squiggles and dots. This is complicated stuff for a bunch of NCOs who have a limited enough vocabulary in English." Reminded that the Department had fired several language trainees earlier this year for being members of what the Pentagon calls 'the prevert-American community,' the spokesman angrily denied that there were any problems with the military's linguistic programs. "The important thing is that our translations are done by honest, God-fearing, heterosexual, Americans," he said. "Who cares if we get a word wrong here or there? The difference between 'brother' and 'commander' is a matter of nuance. The important thing is, you know he's a terrorist because his name was written in that curvy terrorist lingo. Real men don't care about nuance any more than they care about waging a sensitive war."
In a related announcement, the Department of Defense today announced that a few other translation mistakes had been made recently, including reading the phrase "Mashed Figs" as "Anthrax Spores," and "thumbscrews" as "Uranium centrifuges."
A Justice Department spokesman denied that the commander-brother mistake altered the fundamentals of the case. "We still have the evidence of their actions here, and we still have the fact that their names were found in an address book in a terrorist training camp," said one official. Asked how the government could be sure of the identity of the camp, given the problems with language already encountered, the official said "Look, it had a big sign over it saying 'Terrorist Training Camp.' Or possibly 'Mujal's Auto Repair' or maybe even 'Ali Baba Academy of Tonsorial Arts.' The point is, it had a sign using that funny wiggly writing the terrorists use."
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