I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view

Geat post. I added you to my blog roll!

Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin..

I am not saying I don’t agree with setting up these programs I am just raising questions as to the fesability given today’s global information climate. I posted this link hoping you would read it. It specifically talks about the shortage of translators and ways on how to increase the recruits.

http://www.nationalreview.com/ comment/ boulet200310080856.asp

I think it’s a huge part of the problem especially for Arabic or Muslim men and women and given today’s easy access to personal information that was not even avaliable to anyone back in the 1940s. As far as setting up public language schools, you assume that today’s American citizen would feel the need to actually participate in these classes given that it could only be VOLUNTARY and considering that there are so many that don’t actually even consider this “war on terror” to even be a war or anything like the the U.S was engaged in during WW2.

BTW if we are talking about using all the possible tools at our disposal to try and prevent terrorism, then why isn’t the outdated and impractical FISA law not being dropped in favor of a new one that reflects the current threat?

You don’t think that they are having trouble recruiting because potential candidates are fearful of their own lives if it were revealed that they were helping the U.S. government…do you?

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/boulet200310080856.asp

This article was posted in 2003. What is the current situation now? Do you have some links to recent articles citing this problem?

You need to read a little further than the first few of paragraphs.

“After some deliberation the Saudi Monarch refused bin Laden’s offer and instead opted to allow United States and allied forces to deploy on his territory. Bin Laden considered this a treacherous deed. He believed that the presence of foreign troops in the “land of the two mosques” (Mecca and Medina) profaned sacred soil. After speaking publicly against the Saudi government for harboring American troops he was quickly forced into exile to Sudan and his Saudi citizenship was revoked.

Shortly afterwards the movement which came to be known as al-Qaeda was formed.”

“The origins of al-Qaeda can be traced to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when a cadre of non-Afghani, Arab Muslim fighters joined the largely United States and Pakistan-funded Afghan mujāhidÄ«n anti-Russian resistance movement. Osama bin Laden, a member of a prominent Saudi Arabian business family, led an informal grouping which became a leading fundraiser and recruitment agency for the Afghan cause in Muslim countries; it channelled Islamic fighters to the conflict, distributed money and provided logistical skills and resources to both fighting forces and Afghan refugees.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 many committed veterans of the war wished to fight for Islamic causes elsewhere. The invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 saw US and coalition troops sent to Saudi Arabia in preparedness for expelling Iraqi occupying forces from Kuwait. Al-Qaeda was strongly opposed to the secular regime of Saddam Hussein and bin Laden had offered use of his fighters’ services to the Saudi throne, but the deployment of ‘infidel’ forces to Islamic sacred territory was seen as an act of treachery by bin Laden. He placed the grouping in militant opposition to the United States and its allies. Al-Qaeda came to claim the U.S. military presence in several Islamic countries (particularly Saudi Arabia), the U.S. support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and more recently the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq as reasons for militant action.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are senior members of al-Qaeda’s shura council, and are believed to be in contact with some of al-Qaeda’s other cells.”

Why ever do you provide a link to a page that refutes your argument? Perhaps, you hope that others will not open the link.

“The Mujahideen WAS a terrorist organization – they fought the soviets, much like they fight us in Iraq now.”

A terrorist is someone who intentionally kills civilians for a political purpose. The Mujahideen didn’t make a habit of killing civilians to advance their Soviet resistance cause in the 1980s. Those in Iraq who engage U.S. forces, I don’t consider to be terrorists; however, when they blow up mosques and markets killing innocent civilians, then they are terrorists.

“The modern Al Queda is in fact the SAME Mujahideen we TRAINED and FUNDED in Afghanistan”

Bin Laden took various elements of the Mujahideen after the Soviets left and formed today’s al Qaeda AFTER the first Gulf War in 1991. This is when bin Laden adopted the use of blind civilian killing as a tool to wage his war against the “infidels”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda

“After speaking publicly against the Saudi government for harboring American troops he was quickly forced into exile to Sudan and his Saudi citizenship was revoked. Shortly afterwards the movement which came to be known as al-Qaeda was formed.”

Comment by Unemployment Rate – 4.7%

To Dubious Unemployment Rate,
Even if the Bush administration is wiretapping terrorists only (which I personally doubt), the undisputed fact is that the various US intelligence agencies
are sorely lacking in translators/interpreters capable of rendering their messages from Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, etc. into English. There are already hundreds of thousands of hours in backlog of intercepted messages that remain untranslated. As long as the Bush administration shows no interest in developing a program to teach intelligence agents Arabic and other languages likely to be spoken by Muslim terrorists the way FDR did with Japanese-language training almost immediately after Pearl Harbor, even if significant messages are picked up, they will probably get translated too late, like the message intercepted on 9/10/2001 that referred to “tomorrow as a day of glory” but which wasn’t put into English until well after 9/11.
I wish one of you reichwingers would offer a decent explanation of who is going to translate all those wiretapped messages.