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LOST BEFORE TRANSLATION. This is the sort of statistic that I simply cannot understand:
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.There is, of course, a why here, which has to do with the hiring protocols of the FBI:
Gulotta and other officials said several factors limit the number of foreign speakers who can become agents at the FBI. Special agents, for example, must be U.S. citizens. They also must undergo background checks that are much more difficult to pass if the candidate has relatives or friends overseas.I once met a professor who applied for a government job requiring a significant background check. He'd been something of a globetrotter, taking fellowships and short-term positions in various European countries and doing a fair amount of travel to conferences in foreign lands. He was required to provide multiple references for each and every single area in which he'd lived, and a complete accounting of everyone he had contact with while there. If my memory isn't playing tricks on me, when the number of folks began to mount, his contacts basically told him his chances of passing were nil. Meanwhile, the FBI's two International Terrorism Operation Sections have no proficient Arabic speakers. None. Feel safer?
