Remember late last year when the Army fired a bunch of its language translators because they were gay? Even though there was a serious shortage of people who could identify and translate Arabic?
Looks like they could have used them after all.
Federal prosecutors are now acknowledging that the evidence they have against the head of an Albany mosque may not be what they thought it was.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- A key piece of evidence against a jailed mosque leader accused of supporting terrorism has come into question, with federal prosecutors acknowledging that a note found in a terrorist camp may have been mistranslated.
Yassin Muhiddin Aref is charged with aiding a government informant in a sting operation involving a fake plot to buy a shoulder-fired missile to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat.The translation discrepancy stems from a notebook that the FBI said was found in a terrorist camp in northern Iraq last summer. The indictment said an entry in Arabic script referred to Aref as a "commander" and listed his former address and phone number in Albany.
However, FBI translators now have a copy of the original entry and disagree with the earlier conclusion, saying the word was in the Kurdish language, not Arabic, and actually means "brother," prosecutors told the judge in a letter.
We know that government intelligence agencies often have to share translators since there's such a shortage of them. But don't you think it would have been nice, to have in this instance, say, someone on the ground there who could tell the difference between Arabic and Kurdish?
I know, some people have hangups about other people's sexual orientation. I have a hangup, too -- other people's inability to get the intelligence right.
