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Language barrier hurts U.S. security
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NEW YORK--As a band of trained terrorists plotted to blow up the World Trade Center, clues to the devastation ahead lay under the nose of law enforcement officials.
The FBI held videotapes, manuals and notebooks on bomb-making that had been seized from Mohammed Ahmad Ajaj, a Palestinian serving time in federal prison for passport fraud. There were phone calls the prison had taped, in which Mr. Ajaj guardedly told another terrorist how to build the bomb.
There was one problem: They were in Arabic. And nobody who understood Arabic listened to them until after the explosion at the Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, which killed six people and wounded more than 1,000.
The tale is but one illustration of what intelligence and law enforcement officials describe as an increasingly dire lack of foreign lauguage expertise that is undermining U.S. national security.
In the post-Soviet world, where threats are more diffuse and scattered over the map, American military, diplomatic and intelligence officials are warning of critical shortages in their ability to understand the languages of other nations, and so unravel their secrets.
The reasons are many. With English increasingly becoming the world's lingua franca, the study of foreign languages has suffered. Taxpayer pressure on school districts to cut budgets and focus on the basics of reading and math has shortchanged language courses, and districts that are interested in teaching foreign languages report a shortage of qualified teachers.
At the same time, the need for language proficiency has grown as security threats have fragmented and the ability to eavesdrop has expanded.
But government layoffs and employee buyouts have trimmed foreign language expertise drastically, said Theodore Crump, who is updating a book cataloging the federal government's foreign language needs. These days, most agencies can only hope to catch up with, rather than anticipate, their needs.
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