Slashdot Mirror
Terrorists Move to Cyberspace
Dreamwalkerofyore writes "The Washington Post has an article on how Al Quaeda is now using the 'net for its new HQ. From the article: 'With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.'"
"This is all the more reason the US govt and the CIA need to invest heavily in recruiting and training Arabic translators."
Except it's not that easy. The CIA has been griping since 2001 that, despite the massive upsurge in students taking Arabic, only about 5% of them - if that - end up competent enough to do intelligence work. With the private sector offering obscene money in comparison to a government job, you can pretty much guess what percentage of those 5% want to end up with the CIA.
I see this sort of foolishness in my department all the time. Some ponce show up for Beginning Arabic saying something like "Yeah, wanna learn, you know, 'cause of the terrorists and all". It takes all of about two weeks before they figure out that, hey, Arabic is hard, you have to actually memorize things which aren't even remotely related to English, spend about 3/4 of your study-time mastering vocabulary, and in the end still can't order a cup of coffee in Cairo. I guess we can just ask nicely if the terrorists would mind sticking to the dictionary and reference grammars.
Add to that what the linguist-lads call diglossia. Spoken Arabic has little to do with written Arabic. Want to read a Qur'an? Written Arabic it is, but you can't converse worth a hill of beans. A friend of mine, freshly finished with his M.A. in Arabic, decided to take a trip to Cairo, steps into a cab and decides to practice with a High Arabic "How are You"? The Cabbie just stared at him and blurted out "Sorry, no English".
Want to listen to a wire-tap? What's it going to be then? Cairene Arabic? Yemeni Highland Dialect? Saudi Bedouin Dialects? Palestinian? Moroccan? How about Qwayrish? I've witnessed a 3-hour long argument among an Iraqi, a Yemeni and an Egyptian about the correct Arabic word for watermelon, for Pete's sake. Each one came up with at least three words which the others hadn't even heard of. (We won't even mention that many of the "terrorists" are Iranian, Pakistani, Afghani...)
So yeah, throwing money into recruitment and training or more funding for the Defense Language Institute might help, but not much.
"Oh Bother", said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
Donald Rumsfeld tells the Congress that unreleased torture photos from Iraq are too hot to handle, showing people with electrified wires inserted into their anus, rape of small children, and lots of blood.
Torture, indiscriminate slaughter, and targetted assassination is a way of life in the new Iraqi order.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-