[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 19726-19727]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          TRANSLATION BACKLOG

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I want to extend the remarks of the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel) where he talked about what this 
Congress has been doing. I think we also

[[Page 19727]]

should be afraid of what this Congress is not doing. I would like to 
talk this evening for just a few minutes about an Inspector General's 
report which has been issued that looked at the behavior of the FBI and 
their translation of intelligence tapes that they were gathering since 
September 11.
  Now, we found out on September 10, 2001, the day before the 
horrendous attacks in New York and Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon, 
that a couple of conversations that were intercepted by the National 
Security Agency had a couple of messages. One said ``Tomorrow is zero 
hour.'' Another said, ``The match is about to begin.''
  The problem, Mr. Speaker, is that these messages were not translated 
into English to be analyzed by the FBI until several days later. So 
this Congress and this President decided to slightly increase the 
funding for interpreters and linguists to be able to help gather some 
of this information because if we were able to gather the information 
and translate it, we would know what the enemy was thinking.
  So the FBI Inspector General did a report analyzing where we are 
today, several years later. Checked us out. Mr. Speaker, 120,000 hours 
of tape, of potentially valuable terrorism-related recordings, have not 
yet been translated. Now potentially valuable terrorism-related 
recordings means languages associated with terrorism, 120,000 hours not 
even looked at.
  A computer, several computers, supposedly systematically erased some 
of al Qaeda's recordings. We are erasing them before we even look at 
them. There is 500,000 hours for all languages not yet translated. That 
is 30 percent, and 20 percent of the total of the 120,000 hours of 
potentially valuable terrorism-related recordings.
  The rule at the FBI is that audio recordings related to al Qaeda must 
be reviewed in 12 hours. We obviously learned from what happened on 
September 10 and September 11 and made this rule that within 12 hours 
we want all of this translated. The fact of the matter is after the 
IG's report, 36 percent of al Qaeda recordings were not translated 
within 12 hours. In fact, there are 50 cases where we missed the 
deadline of translation by a month.

                              {time}  2115

  Why is this important? Obviously because of what we learned on 
September 10. This President and this Congress says that the central 
battle, the central front on the war on terrorism was Iraq, and we are 
stuck in a quagmire with over 1,000 dead soldiers, thousands of wounded 
soldiers, thousands of dead Iraqis, innocent Iraqis. But another 
component of this major war on terror was that we were going to 
overhaul governmental translation capabilities and we have not done it. 
Those of us who did not think it was a good idea to go to war were 
saying spend $200 billion securing our ports, securing our airports, 
making sure we check the cargo that is going in the planes, make sure 
we hire enough linguists, make sure we are translating all of these 
tapes. And we are not doing the job in the United States of America.
  This is not brain surgery. They are communicating with each other 
over faxes, e-mails, telephone conversations, cell phones. Why would we 
not hire enough FBI agents to figure out what they are saying? Because 
this President had to go to war. This was not glamorous enough for this 
President, in the trenches, doing what it takes, day by day by day. One 
hundred twenty thousand hours of tapes that were not even translated. 
We spent $48 million trying to increase the number of people we hired, 
and we only hired 300 more, but we have $1.3 billion spent every week 
in Iraq. Our priorities are screwed up.

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