Mon Oct 25, 2004 04:04 PM ET
By Caroline Drees, Security Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. government quest for Middle East linguists for the "war on terror" is failing to find enough recruits because of competition from private sector firms paying much more money for the same scarce skills.
The CIA, FBI, military and other agencies want the specialists to help thwart another attack like Sept. 11 or to stabilize Iraq. Highlighting the needs, the government says its backlog of tapes in languages linked to terror cases stands at over 123,000 hours, despite hundreds of new hires since 2001.
Gail McGinn, U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for plans, said the military was eager to hire more people with language skills critical to the war on terror, but said there were too few qualified candidates, no matter the salary.
[But] Some candidates were […] put off by invasive background checks for government jobs which can delay employment for a year or more.
In particular, the Defense Investigative Agency, which conducts background investigations, had to be explicitly told to stop refusing clearance for persons who "talk foreign." The investigators, most of whom barely speak English, reportedly became confused and defensive when spoken to in other languages, and frequently reported a concern that they were being laughed at.
The problem only got worse when the Pentagon began to suspect that its current staff of interpreters was somehow in cahoots with the new recruits. "We'd ask the old guys to translate what the new guys were saying, and they'd jabber at each other for ten minutes," said one frustrated NCO. "Then the old guy would turn around and say 'OK, he say OK.' I mean, what the heck was that all about?"
One attempt to solve the problem fell flat. Candidates would be shown an Arabic videotape, and then subjected to forty-eight nonstop hours of beatings and sleep deprivation before being asked "So, what did they say?" Unfortunately, the most common answer ("Go Defile yourself, You Whose Sister Is Of Uncertain Honor") was not the correct answer-the tape in fact showed an excerpt of a Popeil Pocket Fisherman commercial dubbed into Arabic.
Even those that passed the test faced further screening to weed out any who were not "clean living heterosexual-Americans." The details of the screening procedure were not disclosed, but digital photographs of it are currently circulating on the internet. The translators being tested are the ones wearing the dog collars-the testing staff are the ones with the whips.
Even when translators can be found and trained, problems continue. "You cannot believe what a pain in the ass it is to tell your translator 'Announce that we're going to bomb that pointy building over there' only to get half an hour of arm-waving back-talk about how it's some kind of local church," said one experienced platoon leader in Fallujah. "Didn't look like no church to me."
In the end, the Army is hoping that the issue largely goes away as a new generation of Iraqis grow up learning English as a second language. "The little kids can already say 'Yankee Go Home!' and tell us we're unclean because we eat pork," said the NCO. "After 10-15 more years of occupation, we won't need any translators."
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