But we've only had five years to get any Arab linguists...

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Regarding yesterday's post about the FBI's lack of agents with advanced Arabic skills, Sullivan quotes White House spokesperson Tony Snow:
"You don't snap your fingers and have the Arabic speakers you need overnight."
Yes. It probably takes years to learn Arabic well. And we've only known we need better Arabic skills since last night. Becuase you know, time actually stopped and it is really September 12, 2001. Everything that has happened since then has been a delusion fostered on us by the Demiurge (I wish). We're living in Phillip K. Dick reality...speaking of whom I just found this quote from his famous essay "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later":
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly. But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups — and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener.
I wish we could resurrect Dick so he could write about George W. Bush, because it takes someone who can grapple with insanity and warped reality as deftly and compellingly as Dick to do this administration justice. Of course, being Dick, I'm sure he already did write the book about this administration. I just haven't yet remembered which one it is.

Comments

grishnash said…
Now, I'm only remembering what one of my professors once told me years ago, so I may be off on the details, but I remember we were discussing how many years of study were necessary for the federal government to consider you "fluent" in that language for intelligence, diplomatic and other various purposes. I remember that Arabic was one of the ones requiring more study: 6 years if I recall correctly.

So, if you accept the premise that we had no one with any Arabic knowledge on September 10, 2001, and they all immediately began studying on September 12, 2001, it might be reasonable to accept that the first "graduates" wouldn't be produced until September 12, 2007.

But, of course, training existing agents in Arabic is only one way to go about this. You can also make a concerted effort to recruit people with knowledge of Arabic, and train them to become agents. According to the FBI website, this takes 18 weeks. So, after January 2002 or so, "we haven't had time yet" doesn't really cut it.

Even if you accepted that every Muslim was just a potential terrorist who wouldn't make a trustworthy agent, you could probably find at least one Christian Arab or non-Arab with an academic background in Arabic per state. That method and success rate would give us more than 8 times the number of Arabic speaking FBI agents than we apparently have.

Also, interestingly, I've heard that six is also the number of fluent Arabic speakers we have in the gigantic U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Maybe there's a secret Executive Order that defines seven Arabic speakers in the same room as a terrorist cell or something....
9:00 AM, December 07, 2006
Anonymous said…
Nevermind the 6 Arab linguists that were fired within a year AFTER Sept. 11th simply for being gay. (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/14/attack/main529418.shtml)
I'll bet you could snap your fingers and have a few back right there.
6:07 PM, December 07, 2006
Zachary Drake said…
Thanks for your comments, Grishnash and anonymous. I'd forgotten about the gay firings. Were those military or FBI?
9:05 PM, December 07, 2006
Anonymous said…
Let's see:
* Muslims
* Academics
* Gays
* Liberals

Do you know how hard it is to find Arabic translators who don't want the terrorists to win?
10:57 PM, December 07, 2006
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