Did FBI Deliberately Slow Translation?

Their headline, not mine.

Just when information from terrorism suspects needed urgent translation right after the Sept. 11 attack, the FBI unit that did that work deliberately slowed down to create a backlog that might win the unit more money and staff.

That’s what a former translator who worked at the FBI tells Ed Bradley on 60mMinutes this Sunday, Oct. 27, at 7 PM,mET/PT.

Sibel Edmonds, hired as a translator of Turkish and other Middle Eastern languages after Sept. 11, has filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the FBI, which she claims fired her for bringing the corruption to light. “Let the documents pile up so we can show it and say that we need more translators and expand the department,” Edmonds says one of her supervisors urged.

When Edmonds wasn’t slowing down enough, that supervisor forced her bydeleting her work, she says. “The next day I would come to work and the translation would be gone,” she tells Bradley. Edmonds says when she confronted the supervisor, “He said, ‘Consider it a lesson and don’t talk about it to anybody else and don’t mention it.’”

It was frustrating for Edmonds, she says, because the agents who needed the translations were working hard. “The first two months after the September 11 event…[The agents] were working around the clock…I would receive calls from these people saying, ‘Would you please prioritize this and translate it?” she says.

Edmonds was fired after bringing these and other charges to the attention of FBI supervisors and a top official in the bureau. She then went to Sen.Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees the FBI.

“She’s credible and the reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story," says Grassley. She’s told her whole story in a private session of Grassley’s committee and the senator believes it’s time to change things.