Mohammed Yousry never imagined that he would see the inside of a jail cell. An adjunct lecturer at the City University of New York, Yousry was completing his doctoral dissertation in Middle Eastern Studies when a series of events upended his quiet academic life.
In 1993, Yousry received a job offer to work as an Arabic translator for the defense team of Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh.” Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the Egyptian militant group Gamaa Islamiya, had been arrested earlier that year on accusations of plotting terrorist attacks against public landmarks in New York City.
In 1997, the Federal Bureau of Prisons placed Abdel Rahman under “special administrative measures,” or SAMs, a legal regimen that restricts certain prisoners from communicating with the outside world.
First established 20 years ago, in May 1996, SAMs were designed to prevent alleged gang leaders and terrorists from maintaining contact with their followers outside prison. In the years since 9/11, the controversial measures have been used extensively in terrorism cases. A 2014 report by Human Rights Watch found that the number of prison inmates subjected to SAMs more than tripled between 2001 and 2013. As of 2013, a total of 55 prisoners were held under SAMs; roughly 30 were “terrorism-related inmates,” while the remainder were mostly inmates jailed on organized crime and espionage charges.
After 9/11, Mohammed Yousry, an Egyptian-American professor who opposed political Islam, was branded as a supporter of terrorism. Interview and Video Editing: Razan Ghalayini
“The premise behind SAMs is that there is a certain class of prisoner so dangerous that even solitary isn’t enough. They need to be kept so under wraps that a special regime is necessary where their communication with the outside world is completely shut down,” says Wadie Said, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and expert on terrorism prosecutions. “The problem with these types of extraordinary measures, however, is that when you start putting them in the hands of government bureaucrats, the rationale starts to break down and they are enforced more liberally.”
That is precisely what happened to Yousry. Lynne Stewart, the defense team’s lead attorney in the Abdel Rahman case, was charged with violating the SAMs by disseminating her client’s political statements to the media and surrogates of a terrorist group. But in an unprecedented move, the government also decided to prosecute the legal team’s translator, who had never signed the SAMs order.
Yousry suddenly found himself accused of supporting a terrorist. He and several others involved in Abdel Rahman’s defense are the only people ever to have been prosecuted by the federal government for violating the SAMs. Police and firefighters inspect the bomb crater from an explosion that tore through an underground parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, Feb. 27, 1993. Photo: Richard Drew/AP
Mohammed Yousry was born in 1955 in Cairo, Egypt. At a young age, Yousry developed what would be a lifelong infatuation with studying, spending hours immersed in books by Arab, American, and European writers. After graduating from Cairo University and completing his compulsory military service, at 24, he immigrated to the United States, eventually settling in New York City.
Yousry spent many years working a variety of odd jobs and taking college courses at night, while nursing dreams of a future in academia. During this time, he also met his future wife, a fellow student and naturalized immigrant from the Dominican Republic. She was a devout Christian, something that Yousry, as a non-practicing Muslim, didn’t see as an obstacle. The couple fell in love, got married, and soon after had a daughter.
In 1990, Yousry was admitted to New York University for a graduate program in Middle Eastern Studies. Around that time, New York City was facing an acute shortage of court translators, including those with knowledge of Arabic, and Yousry found part-time work translating for lawyers and news agencies.
Two years after Yousry started his graduate research, a truck bomb detonated in the parking garage of the World Trade Center’s north tower, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand others. The bombing triggered chaos throughout lower Manhattan and alerted law enforcement to the threat of terrorism posed by extremist groups. Searching for possible links to the attackers, investigators cast a wide net on the city’s Arab and Muslim communities, seeking out connections to radical movements.
Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind leader of Gamaa Islamiya, was among those who attracted the FBI’s attention. Though he lived in the United States, he remained an influential figure in Egypt, where his group was fighting an insurgency against the government. Copies of his sermons inveighing against the oppression of the Mubarak government were widely disseminated in Cairo and Alexandria. A few months after the 1993 bombing, Abdel Rahman was arrested and accused of conspiring in a separate plot to attack city landmarks.
After the arrest, Yousry was hired by Abdel Rahman’s legal team, headed by Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer with a reputation for taking controversial cases, and asked to work as an Arabic translator. As a scholar of contemporary Middle Eastern history, the potential controversy of working with such a client gave him pause. But after speaking with academic advisers and deciding it could provide useful experience for his future dissertation, he decided to accept.
For the next year and a half, Yousry translated reports, news articles, and phone conversations for Abdel Rahman and Stewart’s legal team.
The first time he actually met with Abdel Rahman, Yousry was surprised to find that the image he had of the cleric, whose Gamaa Islamiya movement had killed thousands of people in Egypt, did not comport with the prisoner’s ironic personal demeanor. “He had a certain charisma that stemmed from his blindness and his very profound sense of humor,” Yousry said, even comparing him to the legendary Egyptian comedian Adel Imam. The two disagreed vociferously on politics, but over time developed a reasonable working relationship.
In 1995, Abdel Rahman was convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. While Stewart continued to represent him during the appeals process, bringing Yousry back on as a translator in May 1997, the restrictions placed on Abdel Rahman were about to make the case much more perilous.
Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” inside an iron cage at the opening of a court session in Cairo, Egypt, Aug. 6, 1989.
Photo: Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images
Stewart signed the SAMs agreement, legally precluding her from publicly disseminating her client’s statements. Stewart chafed under these restrictions and over time began to openly rebel against them. As a translator, Yousry was never asked to sign the order. “The lawyers worked out a system in which they’d review communications and determine what is consistent with the terms of the SAMs,” Yousry said, adding that it was his understanding that regardless of what tactics Abdel Rahman’s legal team employed, as a translator he would not be targeted under the SAMs regulations.
Over time, Stewart became so sympathetic to her client that she came to support the Gamaa Islamiya’s goal of overthrowing the Egyptian regime. Yousry, who grew up in Egypt, never shared this opinion, viewing the Gamaa as simply another evil within Egypt’s political milieu.
“Gamaa Islamiya and Omar Abdel Rahman advocated violence against the totalitarian Egyptian regime, which, to be clear, also employed heinous violence against Egyptian citizens,” Yousry said. “I would have chosen the regime as a lesser evil, however. Mubarak was a dictator but the Gamaa were religious extremists and I thought they would set Egyptian society backwards if they came to power.”
Not long after the SAMs went into effect, the leaders of Gamaa Islamiya reached a truce with the Egyptian government. Declaring that violent confrontation with Egypt’s rulers had served no constructive purpose, the Gamaa pledged to cease its struggle and integrate into Egyptian political life.
In return for an end to violence, the government promised to release key Gamaa leaders from prison and ease pressure on their families. The truce caused divisions within the group. When it seemed as though the government was not holding up its end of the bargain, Gamaa supporters sent a letter to Abdel Rahman, through his legal team, asking for his opinion on maintaining the cease-fire.
Any public comment on the cease-fire from Abdel Rahman could constitute a breach of the SAMs. However, Stewart decided to take a risk and disseminate a public statement on the issue by Abdel Rahman.
In his statement, Abdel Rahman told Yousry in Arabic that the cease-fire should be maintained, but that public rhetoric against the Egyptian government should be escalated over the its failure to uphold agreements with the Gamaa. “Abdel Rahman had supported the initial cease-fire and had never changed his view on that,” Yousry said.
On June 13, 2000, Stewart spoke to a Reuters reporter based in Cairo, Esmat Salaheddin, and communicated something different: that the sheikh had effectively nullified the cease-fire. The next day, newspapers in the region were reporting that the leader of Gamaa Islamiya had called for a resumption of hostilities in Egypt, triggering a major controversy.
Initially, the government did not file charges for violation of the SAMs order. Behind the scenes, however, a criminal investigation was initiated into the entire legal team.
Then, on September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes flew in the World Trade Center towers in New York. The highly aggressive law enforcement posture that followed the attacks immediately heightened the sensitivity of the Abdel Rahman case. Attorney Lynne Stewart speaks to the news media after leaving the United States Courthouse in New York City, April 9, 2002. Photo: Robert Mecea/Getty Images
“Two days after September 11, two FBI agents came to my house,” Yousry says. For over an hour, the agents probed him with questions about Omar Abdel Rahman, Stewart, and his own political views, and asked him to become an informant inside the legal team — an offer he refused. Before leaving the house, Yousry recalls one of the agents telling him that she was giving him “one final opportunity to jump on board the train.”
“I’m already on the train,” Yousry replied. “I don’t have anything to do with violence or radicalism. I’m just doing the job as a translator that I was hired for by the government.”
On April 9, 2002, roughly seven months after the FBI’s initial visit, agents came back to Yousry’s house to arrest him. Lynne Stewart and two other co-defendants were placed under arrest that same day. The four were charged with multiple terrorism offenses, including conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism, soliciting acts of violence, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Yousry’s bail was set at $750,000, significantly higher than Stewart’s bail, set at $500,000.
The case was soon caught up in the broader fight against global terrorism. In an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said, “We simply aren’t going to allow people who are convicted of terrorism to continue to achieve terrorist objectives by sending messages and directing the activity from their prison.”
In the trial of Yousry and his co-defendants that began in the summer of 2004 and lasted nearly eight months, the prosecution focused on the terrifying specter of Omar Abdel Rahman and the Gamaa Islamiya, suggesting that his legal team had helped support a terrorist who was planning to “kill Americans everywhere.”
Ahmed Abdel Sattar, second from left, Mohammed Yousry, Lynn Stewart, and Stewart’s attorney Susan V. Tipograph appear before Judge John Koeltl, left, at the United States Courthouse in New York, April 9, 2002.
Drawing: John-Marshall Mantel/AP
Asked by the prosecutor about his knowledge of the restrictions, Yousry replied:
I believed in general that the SAMs were imposed on the client to restrict his communication with the outside world. However, I also believed that the lawyers were in charge of implementing these administrative measures. They are the one who understand the legality of it. They are the one that signed the affidavit. They are the ones who were responsible for telling me what to do. So I took guidance from them.
While prosecutors portrayed Yousry’s co-defendants as active supporters of terrorism, they were forced to concede that the translator was different. Yousry, the bookish, wine-drinking academic, was a hard person to portray as a supporter of Islamic extremism. “Mohammed Yousry is not a lawyer. He is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist,” said prosecutor Anthony Barkow. “He is not a supporter of Abdel Rahman or of the Islamic Group.”
Yet, the government argued that by translating the communications between Abdel Rahman and Stewart, Yousry had supported a conspiracy. “[Yousry] doesn’t need to know that he violated any particular law,” the prosecutor said. “He needs only to be aware of the generally unlawful nature of what he did.”
When the convictions came down on February 10, 2005, Yousry was stunned. “During the sentencing, while the judge was reading his verdict, I was sure at the end that he was going to vacate my sentence or give me probation,” he recalled. “I honestly couldn’t believe I was being sent to jail by the government for translating a court case, the job they’d hired me to do.”
Released in 2011 after spending 16 months in prison, today Yousry is free, but his criminal record has prevented him from finding employment. “Never in a million years did I imagine that anything like this could happen,” Yousry reflects years later. “Not only was I sent to prison, but my academic career, my translation career, and my research career were all destroyed by the government.”
Of the dozens of prisoners believed to be detained under SAMs today, some of them are people with deep links to international terrorism, like World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. But others are younger men like Fahad Hashmi and Mahdi Hashi, whose cases are far murkier, but who nonetheless are held under the same draconian regime. A number of individuals whose cases are still in pretrial, such as 30-year-old Muhannad al-Farekh, are also being held under SAMs today.
Lawyers and human rights advocates claim that the restrictions and surveillance the SAMs impose make defending clients in such cases nearly impossible. “SAMs completely undermine the concept of attorney-client privilege and the relationship of trust necessary for a lawyer to do their job,” says Khurrum Wahid, a lawyer who has defended clients subjected to the measures. “It creates a conflict of interest between an attorney and their client. Instead of focusing on zealously defending them, many lawyers end up being concerned that they might say something inartfully that could get themselves into trouble.”
While Stewart’s prosecution raised some alarm within the legal community, it was the prosecution of her translator that stands out as a particularly gross example of government overreach. “The prosecution of Yousry was really ugly,” says Said.
“It sent a message to translators that even if they didn’t sign any agreement, they can still be held legally responsible for SAMs violations,” he continued. “Although the government has not prosecuted any lawyers or translators for SAMs violations since this case, the fact that they did it even once set a precedent that is really chilling.”
In the years since Yousry’s arrest and trial, the U.S. government has struggled to find competent Arabic-language translators. In sensitive legal cases, like the ongoing military-court hearings at Guantánamo Bay, the inability to find such translators has often proven disastrous. “In practice, Arabic interpreters [at Guantánamo] often not only flunk the accuracy test, but sometimes even fail to competently understand or communicate in the detainees’ native language,” says Omar Shakir, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights representing clients at Guantánamo Bay, who describes the shortage of capable Arabic translators as a systemic issue.
Yousry was in many ways the ideal prototype for a U.S. government translator. Fluent in both Arabic and English, a scholar of Middle Eastern history, and deeply committed to his adopted country, he could navigate both Western and Arab cultures with ease. But because of his criminal record, his services are no longer available to the United States.
In the collective mania prompted by 9/11, Yousry, a soft-spoken Egyptian-American professor with a visceral opposition to political Islam, was branded in the media and the courts as a supporter of terrorism. And in its zeal to find enemies, the American government targeted someone whose services it could have used most.
Speaking to him today, Yousry expresses a quiet resignation about his case, as well as the demise of his academic career. “I’m 61 years old now and my health is not what it was before all this started. I’m not trying to build a future, nor is that really possible anymore.”
Yousry believes that little has changed in the 12 years years since his trial. The government, he maintains, is still pursuing people “undeserving of prosecution” in its efforts to demonstrate that it is fighting terrorism.
“To try and project strength to the public during a period of uncertainty,” he says, “sometimes the government decides that people have to suffer.”
Top photo: Mohammed Yousry: John Marshall Mantel/AP
Very simple solution to prevent Arab translators from materially supporting terrorists. Hold the trials in Arabic with Arabic speaking judge, lawyers and jurors.
But then the entire court will be terrorist! We can’t allow Sharia law here!
As long as they’re Good Christians or Upstanding Jews, that’s fine — in fact, it’s better because they’ve demonstrated a clear desire to change and be rational. What we can’t have are those dirty non-Bible-readers.
[Yes, I’m being sarcastic. But my point is, it’s not enough to be Arabic-speaking. For a country where people are supposed to get a ‘jury of one’s peers’ it’s rare for people to get a jury with even one or two people at all like them.]
I have lost my confidence. I am both ashamed and diminished. It is an ongoing challenge. The battle is really between the fantasts and the realists. I smell a new day every morning. The others don’t. Let’s break on that shall we?
Well, the problem with realism is that it is so useless. Realistically, what use is there for six billion lower-class people who can readily be replaced by AIs and convinced to suicide themselves and be ground up for high-end celebrity pet food? What hope is there for democracy in an age when a few people control computers that can listen and even talk in all the conversations? What chance is there even of preserving the Earth from destruction when the harsh dictates of war by other means command every nation and every people to say fuck it? So realism gives you all kinds of nifty tools with which you can do absolutely nothing. Fuck it — we’ll embrace fantasy because it’s all there really is.
Realism can be useful, but it is necessary to set realistic goals. Encryption will be essential to democracy, so help the EFF.
The biggest problem with this article is exemplified by the author’s failure to put quotes around phrases like “the broader fight against global terrorism” or to include the word “supposedly” or “allegedly” in the statement that “SAMs were designed to prevent alleged gang leaders and terrorists from maintaining contact with their followers outside prison.” And there’s the complete failure of the author to question the official narratives regarding so-called “terrorist” events, as in the claim that the 1993 WTC bombing, in which the involvement of an FBI agent is public knowledge, “alerted law enforcement to the threat of terrorism posed by extremist groups”, and “some of [the people held under SAMs] are people with deep links to international terrorism, like World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.”
The Intercept should not be publishing without skeptical framing such repetitions of the government’s “war on terror” line.
If those are the biggest problems, I think we can call the piece a nearly-unqualified success. ;^)
And, if you’re concerned about the author’s or publisher’s skepticism about the “GWOT” and its mechanisms and machinations, or about the understanding thereof by regular readers, let me be the first to lay your concerns to rest. ;^)
Anyone using the phrase ‘official narrative’ in conjunction with ‘World Trade Center’ is obviously channeling the 9/11 Truthiness nonsense; that BS narrative is that the U.S. government conducted all attacks on the WTC themselves (perhaps in alliance with the International Jewish Conspiracy?). People who spew that nonsense are either gullible fools or sleazy provocateurs.
Ramzi Yousef is worth discussing in this context, however, because he was pursued and captured and tried in a U.S. court of law. He was not renditioned to a CIA black site in Poland or Thailand or Diego Garcia; he was not sent before a military tribunal in Guantanamo; nor was he assassinated by an Obama drone strike. So why not use that approach – capture and prosecute in public trials – with all terrorism suspects?
Yousef’s case is detailed in Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, the most essential single reference for anyone interested in the rise of Islamic radical groups during the 1980-2000 period, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the Saudi role in financing the bin Laden organization, Al Qaeda. In particular:
“From the start the plan was to try Yousef in open court. Mary Jo White, the US attorney overseeing terrorism investigations in Manhattan, presented evidence against Yousef to a federal grand jury. As these and related investigations unfolded, the FBI and CIA gathered new facts about Yousef’s multinational support network. Among other things, they discovered that in the two years since the World Trade Center attack, Yousef and his co-conspirators had focused heavily and airplanes and airports.”
“The evidence of these aerial plots surfaced for the first time in the Philippines. Police responded to a fire at the Tiffany Mansion apartments in Manila on January 7, 1995. The apartment belonged to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Baluchi Islamist who was Yousef’s uncle. . .”
So if we ask, why are people like KSM held in secret detention and not give trials in open courts in the United States, the most likely answer is that such trials would reveal the involvement of the Saudi Royal Family in financing bin Laden’s network. Furthermore, it would bring up the issue of the fairly extensive warnings given to the Bush Administration in July and August of 2001, about impending hijackings of airliners, which they responded to with – nothing. Silence. Wait and see what happens. Could be useful, some terrorist attacks. Rice, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney – put them under oath, right?
What did you know, and when did you know it, and why did you take no action to stop it? Bush and Cheney don’t want to answer that question in a court of law.
The entire 9/11 Truthiness BS was cooked up by PR operatives to divert people from these more substantive questions about the role of the Saudi Royals and the Bush Administration in financing the attacks and ignoring the warnings from the FBI and CIA about them, respectively.
And what we have now, are a bunch of invented cases, show trials of people who were coaxed into ‘terrorist activity’ by cash-hungry informants and their careerist FBI handlers out to get promotions – while the FBI and CIA carefully avoids any investigation into say, Saudi financial support for ISIS or Boko Haram or the Taliban – because Wall Street-owned arms dealers like Lockheed Martin sell a lot of arms to the Saudis, deals now overseen by Obama, Clinton, Kerry, etc. The heads of the FBI and CIA want those cushy post-retirement board positions with Wall Street, so they toe the line.
Rampant gross corruption in government is what it really is; these are some seriously sleazy, treasonous and sociopathic people, from the Wall Street executives to the government agency heads to the (s)elected politicians.
You have your own version of “9/11 Truthiness” which claims a lot more certain knowledge about what happened at and around that day than I would claim. Yours exonerates the neocons, with their Israeli connections, and implicates the Saudis, while there is not sufficient publicly available evidence either way on either of them.
My approach, OTOH, is to point out as many holes and weak points in the official story as possible in order to undermine the use of that story to justify the GWOT, and to put the government, the neocons/Zionists, the Saudis, et al. on the defensive.
Murtazza Hussein, thanks for this report.
This kind of overreach is – as some here noted – INSANE. They’re letting paranoia and prosecutorial hubris take over.
Remember the Penn prof questioned because he was doing MATH and someone next to him “thought” it was some terrorist jottings in Arabic? Oh yeah, you have to watch out for us Mathies :-)
Take a breath, folks, and use something called COMMON SENSE!
It was Arabic. Arabic numerals. And if you want to know whether it’s terrorism, just ask a bunch of math students.
Math and physics are used to calculate and engineer weapons, ergo all math and math-based sciences should, until proven otherwise, be dealt with as though they might be used to help build better weapons.
The way this story is told is unfair to Lynn Stewart . Not that the treatment of Yousry doesn’t seem more egregious. On the surface it does seem so, but is it? Really it is part of the same practice of scoring political and career points by destroying a competent legal defense for those prejudged as guilty of terrorism with bonus points for jailing anyone with an arabic sounding name. The ruthlessness with which attorney client privilege is undermined reverses a long history of precedent and conveys the message that lawyers willing to defend these clients risk jail if they challenge the bizarre legal notion of special administrative measures. Where is that shit in the constitution?
The more we move the line away from the constitution and a consistent legal system, the less we can expect anything like human rights.
You sound real educated and all but the dribble you posted is pure shit. Lynn Stewart knew she was breaking the SAMs agreement. The translator translating lawyer-client conversations should have never even been considered in this pursuit of justice. Her conveying what the terrorist said to the media was the wrongdoing, and it was shown to trigger a reaction. I would have liked to hear what sentencing the terrorist lawyer got though.
Good work on this story.
I found this interesting CoIntelPro document in the archive, sheds some light on the FBI’s mentality on finding Muslims to persecute these days:
“In 1969 the FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover that his investigation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) revealed that in his city, at least, the Black nationalists were primarily feeding breakfast to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying the career ambitions of the agent were directly related to his supplying evidence to support Hoover’s view that the BPP was “a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means”.
-FBI document, 27 May 1969, Director FBI to SAC San Francisco, available at the FBI reading room”
Little has changed since then, indeed. And before anyone says anything about 9/11, note that the FBI refuses to investigate Saudi Royal’s involvement in financing real terror groups like ISIS (and about those 28 classified pages?) because the Saudi Royals are a lucrative arms purchaser from US arms manufacturers; so instead they find scapegoats like Yousry to harrass for PR purposes. Corrupt and shady from the head down, that’s our FBI.
This matches the defense position, but NAJIT tells it a bit differently: http://www.najit.org/publications/Proteus/Yousry%20Case.pdf Now to be clear, the whole notion of trying to keep prisoners incommunicado is so far off the goddamned reservation for a democracy that such a case is bound to be an injustice, but I’m not sure I’d stay that close to the defense position on the narrow legal issue at hand.
Actually, NAJIT tells it very differently, concluding with:
Have you seen this, Murtaza?
Thanks for this. Ms Kristy, is a splendid example of a spineless bureaucrat mindlessly supporting the system. She claims to have no idea whether Mr. Yousry was guilty or not, but provides a list of translation faux pas, such as saying ‘she says …’, rather providing a direct translation, which in her opinion might have influenced the jury to believe he was not an impartial translator.
However, the way the jury actually decided the case, did not appear to be based on such fine technical considerations:
In addition, according to the same juror:
Personally, I believe the jury made the correct decision. Anyone who takes too long to finish their dissertation is obviously a terrorist.
It is a remarkable linguistic contortion. Of course, had we spent as much time and effort on the study of linguistic contortion as Ms. Kristy, I’m sure our accomplishments would be comparable.
I have to disagree about the delayed completion of the dissertation. When three members of your committee have to clear comments and revision notes with Langley, it just naturally slows things down.
Mr. Yousry was not a professional attorney and it appear this was his first case as an interpreter. He was recruited for the job and took it with reservation. As Director of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators, for all the readers know you are reacting to the following paragraph: ” In the years since Yousry’s arrest and trial, the U.S. government has struggled to find competent Arabic-language translators. In sensitive legal cases, like the ongoing military-court hearings at Guantánamo Bay, the inability to find such translators has often proven disastrous. “In practice, Arabic interpreters [at Guantánamo] often not only flunk the accuracy test, but sometimes even fail to competently understand or communicate in the detainees’ native language,” says Omar Shakir, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights representing clients at Guantánamo Bay, who describes the shortage of capable Arabic translators as a systemic issue.” This appears to be very severe criticism of your Association. To hold a new interpreter to standards he had no opportunity to internalize professionally and to expect his to not react as a human being makes me question your professional qualifications and your motive for writing this. Did you even read this article thoroughly before writing this? Very few professions would allow a new practitioner to work on such and important case and few still would issue this kind of professional critique. Do you not provide professional support? Does your code of ethics require that you do any policing of what goes on at the practice level? I suspect not as your comments include no references to any actions your group might have take. It is no excuse not to have the resources or to say an interpreter was handed a manual. Save you opinion for your professional journal. The rest of us have no way to evaluate it professionally.
I’m sorry that a combination of the formatting of a long quote and our traditional sarcasm here confused you.
Both Il Duce and I agree with you that Little Miss NAJIT is way outside the bounds of her professional expertise and the conventions of simple fairness.
Sounds like NAJIT just doesn’t like to see amateurs stealing their jobs.
Thanks for this, Murtaza.
I knew about the Stewart conviction, of course, and although I find the SAMs seriously problematic and, probably, unconstitutional, I also understood that Stewart had crossed boundaries both reasonable and ethical.
Somehow, I never learned about Yousry and the utterly heinous treatment he has received at the hands of our government. There’s no excuse for it, I’m deeply ashamed of it, and I wish I could apologize for all of us in some meaningful way.
Someone step up and give the man a job.
The US government is beyond corrupt. It is insane – all three branches. If we replaced all the people in DC with monkeys, we should be much better off. Monkeys would do less harm.
USG throws specialists they hire in a very specific field into prison for doing their jobs and then wonders why it can’t find any specialists in that field. Pfeh.
The SAMS LAW is a good law BUT,
the implementation of it may be a giant cluster fuck.
“The problem with these types of extraordinary measures, however, is that when you start putting them in the hands of government bureaucrats, the rationale starts to break down and they are enforced more liberally.”
Yet, the government argued that by translating the communications between Abdel Rahman and Stewart, Yousry had supported a conspiracy.
16 months in prison???
Wallstreet thieves immunity
Wallstreet home theft immunity
Wallstreet document fraud immunity
Wallstreet investor fraud immunity
Dumya & cheney WMD fraud immunity
Dumya & cheney torture immunity
Dumya & cheney invasion immunity
Dumya & cheney precipitation of death immunity
Dumya & cheney fraudulent oil contracts immunity
Cheney theft of billions via haliburton immunity?
IRS disallowance of expense for legal marijuana
BP immunity for poisoning the gulf of mexico
Obama immunity for drone deaths of innocent persons
Obama immunity for lending support fot the genocide of Palestinians
Obama immunity for lending support for the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in egypt
Obama immunity for occupation of and deaths of Americans in Afganistan which has never been conquered in the history of the planet
There’s a saying that goes, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”.
The USG has a revision on that, “Don’t fuck us, we’ll fuck you.”.
I’m glad to see the Global War on Translators is finally making some progress.
The real target though should be Google, since their automated translation service has probably been used by scores of terrorists. So while I may sleep marginally more soundly tonight, I’m still acutely aware of the large number of translators who aren’t safely behind bars. Perhaps the US can pass a law to facilitate prosecution of these translators – otherwise I imagine it could take centuries to round them all up and put them in prison.
Absolutely! Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to understand. Translation should be outlawed just in case there is that 1 terrorist talk-about that could get out of hand. And if our guardian of censorship Diane Feinstein had a real sense or smarts, she would outlaw the english talk – and writing – which is automatically understood and mandate that free speech be done in Aramic! It’s the christian thing to do.
But it’s made blaming North Korea, Russia and China for any and every cyber-attack so much easier. It’s attributional nirvana.