"unravel their secrets"

[Kerim Friedman]

Considering the longstanding relationship between anthropology and spying (Boas was one of the first to speak out against it - to his own detriment), I thought this article from the NYT would interest list members. I personally find it interesting that they complain about the shortage of people majoring in foreign languages, but make no mention of the number of foreign language speakers who live in the US that have strong English skills. I guess the implication is that they aren't trustworthy . . .

kerim

"officials are warning of critical shortages in their ability to
understand the languages of other nations, and so unravel their secrets."


Washington Cites Shortage of Linguists for Key Security Jobs


By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO



s a band of trained terrorists plotted to blow up the World Trade
Center, clues to the devastation ahead lay under the nose of law
enforcement officials.

 The F.B.I. held videotapes, manuals and notebooks on bomb making
that had been seized from Ahmad Ajaj, a Palestinian serving time in
federal prison for passport fraud. There were phone calls the
prison had taped, in which Mr. Ajaj guardedly told another
terrorist how to build the bomb.

 There was one problem: they were in Arabic. Nobody who understood
Arabic listened to them until after the explosion at the Trade
Center on Feb. 26, 1993, which killed six people and injured more
than a thousand.

 The tale is but one illustration of what intelligence and law
enforcement officials describe as an increasingly dire lack of
foreign language expertise that is undermining national security.

 In the post-Soviet world, where threats are more diffuse and
scattered over the map, military, diplomatic and intelligence
officials are warning of critical shortages in their ability to
understand the languages of other nations, and so unravel their
secrets.

 The reasons are many. With English increasingly becoming the
world's lingua franca, the study of foreign languages has suffered.
Taxpayer pressure on school districts to cut budgets and focus on
the basics of reading and math has shortchanged language courses,
and districts that are interested in teaching foreign languages
report a shortage of qualified teachers.

 At the same time, the need for language proficiency has grown as
security threats have fragmented and the ability to eavesdrop has
expanded.

 But government layoffs and employee buyouts have trimmed foreign
language expertise drastically, said Theodore Crump, who is
updating a book cataloging the federal government's foreign
language needs. These days, most agencies can only hope to catch up
with, rather than anticipate, their needs.

 "Back in 1985 the terrorist thing didn't really come up," he said
of the year he first prepared the book. "Now, when you have the
possibility of someone coming in with a weapon of mass destruction
in a suitcase, it changes the whole picture."

 While the cold war's end has brought waves of immigrants with
knowledge of obscure languages to the United States, law
enforcement and intelligence agencies have been reluctant to hire
great numbers of them, citing a weakness in English and,
frequently, difficulties in gaining security clearances for them.

 According to testimony last September before a Senate
subcommittee, roughly half of the State Department's diplomatic
postings are filled by people lacking necessary foreign language
skills.

 The F.B.I. must translate a million pages and untold hours of
intercepted conversations a year and faces a mounting backlog that
undermines its ability to prevent some crimes and investigate
others.

 Intelligence agencies say they are frequently caught short in
times of crisis, lacking a sufficient pool of agents and analysts
with needed languages, from Arabic to Korean and — most recently —
Macedonian.

 Thousands of scientific and technical papers also go untranslated,
depriving analysts and policy makers of vital information about the
state of foreign research in a range of areas, the Senate heard.

 Robert O. Slater is director of the National Security Education
Program run by the Defense Department, which offers grants to
promote the study of foreign languages and cultures. Mr. Slater
said that in the last decade, the linguistic shortfalls had gone
from an episodic to a chronic problem. "It's now affecting the
ability of federal agencies to address their missions," he said.

 A sobering illustration came in 1998, with the nuclear tests in
Pakistan and India, said Richard D. Brecht, who runs the University
of Maryland's National Foreign Language Center. Official documents
on the failure of United States intelligence to translate
information that could have warned policy makers of the explosions
"remain classified, but you can rest assured that those surprised
people," Mr. Brecht said. The explosions, he added, "should not
have been surprises."

 According to government figures, American colleges and
universities graduated only nine students who majored in Arabic
last year. Only about 140 students graduated with degrees in
Chinese, and only a handful in Korean.

 These days, only 8.2 percent of American college and university
students enroll in foreign language courses — nearly all in
Spanish, French and German, said Phyllis Franklin, executive
director of the Modern Language Association.

 That figure, she said, has remained essentially unchanged since
1976. But the demand for language speakers has ballooned.

 Many of the lapses in essential translation skills remain
invisible to the average citizen, who seldom learns of the
linguistic flubs and risks that could have been avoided. But
sometimes they spill into the public realm.

 In November the publicly accessible version of the C.I.A.'s
Foreign Broadcast Information Service, its roundup of foreign news
reports, translated an article in a Palestinian newspaper accusing
Israel of using weapons containing "phlebotomized uranium" — which
does not exist — instead of depleted uranium.

 "If such a wild mistranslation by F.B.I.S. is not a private joke,
then it is an embarrassing sign of incompetence," said a report on
the slip-up in the Secrecy News, an electronic newsletter put out
by the American Federation of Scientists.

 Mr. Brecht, co-author with William P. Rivers of "Language and
National Security in the 21st Century," likened the current period,
with its recognition of foreign language deficiencies, to the late
1950's, when the Soviet launching of Sputnik triggered a nationwide
mission to raise the level of science and mathematics training.

 This time it is the end of the cold war that is spurring the sense
of crisis. The Soviet Union required knowledge of one language,
Russian, for analysts and diplomats. Its map has broken up into a
linguistic jigsaw puzzle of 15 official languages, from Armenian to
Ukrainian to Kazakh to Belarussian, and more than 100 ethnic
enclaves.

 The State Department has had to provide staff for 22 new posts in
republics of the former Soviet Union, a region once covered with
Russian speakers in Moscow. The linguistic fragmentation is
reflected on the political and military fronts as well.

 "It's not that the Department of Defense or anyone else has been
neglectful," Mr. Brecht said. "It's just that requirements have
exploded and budgeting for language is not the easiest thing to
do."

 There is no single solution.

 A number of government agencies, including the Defense Department,
are using computers to take a first pass at reducing the load of
material for translation.

 The Justice Department is exploring the use of a pool of
translators with security clearance who could work for a number of
agencies. The State Department increased language training for
junior officers ninefold between 1997 and 1999.

 The Defense and State Departments run the largest factories for
training foreign language speakers in the country. Ray Clifford,
provost of the Defense Language Training Institute, notes that the
languages the military considers critical are not those generally
taught in universities, so the military for the most part does its
own training.

 "The largest number of enrollments in the school system is
Spanish," Dr. Clifford said. "Our No. 1 enrollment is in Arabic."
The military has more students learning Arabic, Chinese, Korean and
Russian than it does Spanish, he said.

 Compared with the nine students majoring in Arabic last year in
colleges, his institute graduated 409. It graduated 120 students in
Farsi. Dr. Clifford said he could not even find figures on Farsi
among colleges and universities.

 For the first time, the military is planning to set quotas for the
recruitment of so-called heritage speakers — the children of
immigrants.

 Advances in technology have multiplied the ability to eavesdrop
and, consequently, the material requiring translation, Mr. Crump
said.

 Margaret R. Gulotta, the F.B.I.'s section chief for language
services, said court-sanctioned wiretaps have to be translated as
conversations take place. The expertise needed is high, with
suspects frequently using coded language.

 And in investigating the bombing of the American Embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the bureau came across a tape recording
in an esoteric language. Eventually, the bureau was able to
identify the language, but found nobody with the required security
clearance who could translate it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/16/world/16LANG.html?ex=988411880&ei=1&en=8724869165f28729
________________________________________________________
P. KERIM FRIEDMAN
			Anthropology, Temple University
			<mailto:kerim.friedman at oxus.net>
			<http://kerim.oxus.net>
________________________________________________________