You Got No Skillz

FBI Agents Still Lacking Arabic Skills:

Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics.

Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words -- including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test -- just 1 percent of the FBI's 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show.

Can you already predict what I’m going to say? Maybe the FBI could use the services of the fifty-five Arabic linguists dismissed by the Army for being gay. Or are they not asking and not telling these days, too?

The thing that really got me about this article, though, was the FBI’s defense of its dearth of Arabic-proficient agents:

FBI officials said it is not crucial for agents working in the [International Terrorism Operations Sections] to know Arabic or other foreign languages, because they rely primarily on documents or interviews already translated by FBI linguists. As for agents in the field in the United States or overseas, FBI officials say translators are readily available when needed by investigators, usually within 24 hours.

So they can get translators within 24 hours, hmm? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the oft-repeated reason that investigators need to be able to torture people is because the ability to extract information from them immediately saves lives. If there’s a bomb about to go off in a subway station, we don’t have time to namby-pamby around with straight interrogations. We need to stick those bitchez on waterboards and make ’em talk now. But if there are no agents on-site who can translate, how, pray tell, do we know what they’re saying?

Some traitorous liberal who hates America might suggest that sort of undermines the argument of immediacy. But not me. No sir. I’m a great American patriot, so I shall ignore all information that might undermine my unfaltering support of Dear Leader.