SIBEL CORRUPTION THE KEVIN TASKASEN AFFAIR
This is a snippet describing the corruption in a small part of the FBI. Many employees take part in the theft. Others know what’s going on, but are afraid to say anything. As a result, the taxpayers foot the bill for money laundering, drug smuggling and the theft of national secrets. No one works to limit the damage.
Incompetence, Corruption and Cover-ups: The Kevin Taskasen Affair
CD: In your October 25 2002 interview with 60 Minutes, "Lost in Translation," you charged the FBI with incompetence and greed – and also of allowing infiltration by foreign intelligence outfits. Some of these charges have also been substantiated by other sources, both congressional and from inside the bureau. For example, there's the Guantanamo Bay Turkish-English translator who actually didn't know either language very well, Kevin Taskasen, I believe? And he worked with you at some point?
Sibel Edmonds: Correct.
CD: And also, your bosses told you to work more slowly, in some cases not at all, so that the department's seemingly huge workload would mean more funding the next year, right?
SE: Correct.
CD: Can you provide any more details on these subjects?
SE: Well, as for Kevin – he was this poor little guy who was very nice, his only fault as a translator being that he, well, didn't speak English.
CD: Really! Where was he from? How did he get that job, anyway?
SE: Kevin was from
However, his wife worked in the languages testing center at FBI headquarters in
CD: So in other words, she used her connections to get him a job in the FBI, even though he wasn't qualified?
SE: Correct. There was an Arabic language supervisor in our department, who had about seven or eight family members under his wing, working away in the Arabic language section even though several of them weren't qualified, hadn't passed the proficiency test in either English or Arabic…
CD: So they made a bargain?
SE: Yes, he had made a deal with this woman, Kevin's wife. She had approved all of his extended family members to work for the FBI translations center, and so she then asked to do the same with her poor husband. And I can't really blame him at all, he was just a nice guy who dreamed of opening his own restaurant. But that's not likely to happen when you're working as a busboy for $6.50 an hour.
CD: How much do they pay in the translating department that he was hired to?
SE: The average is $40 an hour.
CD: So basically, what you had was a nudge-nudge wink-wink thing going on between the woman in the application office and the head honcho in the translation center.
SE: Correct. In light of what she'd done for him, the deal was that he [the Arabic supervisor] would turn a blind eye to her poor husband's incompetence for 3 years. He agreed and in October 2001 it started. Again, I can't blame Kevin. He would be coming to me every five minutes asking, "What does this word mean?" He was really trying, but he was struggling because he just didn't know English well enough. So I ended up having to do his work for him too.
CD: How long did this go on for? Did you alert your supervisors?
SE: Yes. I went to them and asked, "what is he doing here?" But nothing was done and only a few months later, in February of 2002, he was given a TDY [travel assignment] – to translate the testimony of Turkic-speaking detainees at
When told of this assignment, Kevin stood in front of all the other translators. He was crying, and said, "I can't do it, I just can't." I told him to go to the boss – and just say no, if he didn't feel capable. But he didn't.
CD: Come on! One would think that for the marquis interrogation center in the war on terror, the government would send only the best and brightest. Why did they even think of sending him?
SE: Aside from sending Kevin, the FBI had only two options, neither of them good for them. They could send me, as I was the only qualified Turkish linguist, but this raised a red flag considering that I had already started to make a fuss about how the game was being played. Their other choice was to humbly ask the NSA or DIA or another agency to borrow a Turkish-language translator. But they couldn't do this because there is all this intra-agency competition. None of them would ever let it look like their people weren't as good as the other agencies'. So it was partly a matter of pride.
CD: Do you know what happened to Kevin in
SE: He didn't come back till mid-April [2002]. But surely while there he had heard information he wasn't able to convey properly in English. Maybe clues about 9/11, or about future terrorist attacks in the works. Or maybe information proving that some detainees had been wrongfully imprisoned.
That's another thing. What if a military detainee is on trial? You have to, you simply have to double-check the translations that are being used as evidence against the detainee. After all, you might be sending someone to his death based on faulty evidence! But all too often, they just put the stamp of approval on anything that says "FBI translation," because that is supposed to indicate automatically a certain unassailable level of quality.
CD: After coming back, and after the story broke proving he wasn't a qualified translator, what happened then? Did he get fired?
SE: No. After all that, he is back in
CD: Good God! One translator – and an incompetent one at that! Isn't that a national security liability?
SE: Yes, but you have to look at it from their perspective. What if they let him go, and he starts talking about what he knows? Either way, it's about control. If they fire someone, they might either corroborate my story, or even release documents that could prove damning for the FBI … it works out to be more of a liability for them to fire someone than to keep them in the office, where they can continue to compromise our national security.
A full script available at Pogo.org
Antiwar.com conducted many of these interviews.
Sibel Edmonds
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