Tales from the Trail

FBI translation troubles appear in Danish terrorism case

Jeremy Pelofsky

Oct 27, 2009 17:28 EDT

It was just yesterday that the Justice Department’s Inspector General Glenn Fine issued a scathing report about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation was behind in its efforts to translate foreign language documents and audio recordings in terrorism and criminal investigations.

And now a day later, it became public that an ongoing investigation apparently has been impacted by those troubles — a plot by two men to attack a newspaper in Denmark over its publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed including one in which he is wearing a turban with a bomb in it.

U.S. authorities arrested the two Chicago area men earlier this month and unsealed the complaints against them on Tuesday that detailed how they communicated over email and by telephone to develop the plot.

In those documents, however, an FBI agent acknowledged that the translations from Urdu to English had not yet been finalized (and some of them dated back to late 2008).

“While translators have attempted to transcribe the foreign language conversations accurately, to the extent that quotations from these communications are included, these are preliminary, not final translations,” the affidavits said.

The Justice Department inspector general report said that the FBI had lost 3 percent of its translators since 2005, falling to 1,298, and it was taking an average of 19 months to hire new ones. Additionally, millions of foreign language electronic files have gone unread and scores of hours of recorded conversations had not been heard, including some involving top priority terrorism cases.

While the authorities stressed that an attack was not imminent in the Danish case, it provided a glimpse into the real-time challenges the FBI is facing when suspects speak a foreign language.