The numbers reflect the FBI's continued struggle to attract employees who speak Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and other languages of the Middle East and South Asia, even as the bureau leads a fight against terrorist groups primarily centered in those parts of the world. The same challenge is facing the CIA and other agencies as the government competes with the private sector for a limited number of applicants with foreign-language proficiency, according to U.S. officials and experts.

The shortage of agents with foreign-language skills also shows the extent to which the FBI has focused on translators since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in part because officials believe it is more valuable to have specially trained linguists.

In a recent deposition filed in an employee lawsuit, a senior FBI official testified that the bureau's two International Terrorism Operations Sections (ITOS) do not require any agents to know Arabic, even though the sections coordinate all foreign terrorism investigations. Only four agents in ITOS have any familiarity with Arabic, and none of them are ranked above elementary proficiency, documents show.

"There are no agent positions, at any level, in either ITOS I or II that utilize the Arabic language as part of their ITOS duties or responsibilities," Michael J. Heimbach, head of ITOS I, testified in his deposition. ". . . As such, knowledge of the Arabic language is not a skill set utilized by either ITOS I or II."

FBI officials said it is not crucial for agents working in the ITOS sections to know Arabic or other foreign languages, because they rely primarily on documents or interviews already translated by FBI linguists. As for agents in the field in the United States or overseas, FBI officials say translators are readily available when needed by investigators, usually within 24 hours.

But Daniel Byman, a Georgetown University associate professor who heads the school's Security Studies Program, said the FBI's continuing failure to attract Arabic-speaking agents is "a serious problem" that hurts the bureau's relations with immigrant communities and makes it more difficult to gather intelligence on extremist groups.

"With any new immigrant communities, they need these language skills, whether it's Vietnamese or Pakistani or Arabic," Byman said. "It also often gives you extra cultural knowledge and sensitivity. It makes you more sensitive to nuance, which is what investigations are often all about."

Margaret Gulotta, chief of the FBI's language services section, said in an interview that the bureau has made significant progress since 9/11 in increasing the number of translators who speak Arabic and other foreign languages. The number of translators proficient in Arabic has grown from 70 in September 2001 to 269 as of July -- an increase of nearly 300 percent -- while the overall number of linguists has nearly doubled.

The FBI also has a "very aggressive training program" of foreign-language instruction for agents and other programs that make it easier to hire candidates with foreign-language ability, Gulotta said. In fiscal 2005, she said, more than 1,600 agents took classes.

"Do we need more Arabic-speaking agents? By all means we want more Arabic-speaking agents," Gulotta said. "But admittedly it's a very difficult group of people to recruit and hire. . . . We've been a lot more successful in recruiting and hiring contract linguists and language specialists."

More than 1,400 agents have at least a limited working proficiency in a foreign language, including nearly 900 who speak Spanish. Other languages include Russian, Farsi, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese, the FBI said.

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.

"It is easier to get a security clearance if you don't have any interaction with foreigners, which is not what you want if you want better interaction with foreigners," Byman said.

Some of the new information about language abilities at the FBI has emerged in connection with a lawsuit by one of the FBI's highest-ranking Arabic speakers, Special Agent Bassem Youssef, who sued the Justice Department and the bureau alleging retaliation after he complained that he was cut out of terrorism cases after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Youssef, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Egypt, is one of only six FBI agents who scored a 4 for "advanced professional proficiency" in Arabic on standardized speaking tests administered by the Interagency Language Roundtable for federal agencies.

Youssef's attorney, Stephen M. Kohn, said the statistics indicate that most FBI agents have no way to gauge the accuracy of translated materials and must rely on linguists or other third parties for their information.

"How do you fight a war with that kind of disadvantage?" Kohn asked.

Gulotta and other experts note that the FBI is not alone in its struggle to attract qualified job candidates who speak Arabic or other foreign languages.

A study released last week, for example, found that three terrorists housed at a federal prison in Colorado were able to send more than 90 letters to fellow extremists overseas, in part because the prison did not have enough qualified language translators to understand what was happening.

The Bush administration early this year unveiled a "National Security Language Initiative" aimed at encouraging more instruction in "critical" languages in elementary schools, secondary schools and universities.

The lack of such programs hurts "national security, diplomacy, law enforcement [and] intelligence communities," said a fact sheet accompanying the initiative's launch.

Steve Ackley, director of communications for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Alexandria, said the FBI and other agencies are faced with a serious challenge, because language instruction is so undervalued in U.S. schools.

"American society in general does not put a huge premium or value on multilingualism," Ackley said. "Until the general public . . . recognizes that this is an area that the government in general and agencies like the FBI and CIA have to invest in, this is not a problem that's going to get better."

Arabic-Speaking Agents
The FBI has made little progress since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in attracting Arabic-speaking FBI agents. Only 129 out of more than 12,000 agents are listed as having some familiarity with Arabic, and only 33 of those are ranked as having at least a limited working proficiency with the language. . .

According to the indictment, Gadahn appeared in a series of al Qaida videos broadcast in the United States and elsewhere between October 2004 and September 2006.

In the videos, Gadahn acknowledged that he had joined al Qaida and declared "the streets of America shall run red with blood, casualties will be too many to count, and the next wave of attacks may come at any moment," McNulty said.

Gadahn, 28, "is an American citizen who made a choice; he chose to join our enemy and to provide it with aid and comfort by acting as a propagandist for al Qaida," he said.

The videotape messages praised the Sept. 11 attacks, threatened violence against the families of American soldiers and other civilians, and called on American soldiers to join al Qaida, McNulty noted.

Gadahn's last known address was Orange County, California, and was now a fugitive and believed to be living overseas, he said

The FBI has been seeking Gadahn since 2004, and added him to its most wanted terrorist list on Wednesday.

The State Department would pay 1 million U.S. dollars for information leading to Gadahn's arrest, said Joe D. Morton, director of the department's Diplomatic Security Service.

The book's title is "9/11 and American Empire: Muslims, Jews, and Christians Speak Out." It is on the syllabus for Barrett's course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Moira Megargee, publicity director for the Northampton, Mass., publisher Interlink, said the book is due out at the end of November and the editing isn't finished.

"It is not final and for all we know that essay may not be in the book or may be edited," she said.

Barrett is a part-time instructor who holds a doctorate in African languages and literature and folklore from UW-Madison. He is an active member of a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. The group's members claim U.S. officials, not al-Qaida terrorists, were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

"Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies," he wrote.

Barrett said Tuesday he was comparing the attacks to the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.

"That's not comparing them as people, that's comparing the Reichstag fire to the demolition of the World Trade Center, and that's an accurate comparison that I would stand by," Barrett said.

"Hitler had a good 20 to 30 IQ points on Bush," he added, "so comparing Bush to Hitler would in many ways be an insult to Hitler."

The university's decision to allow Barrett to teach the course sparked a controversy over the summer once his views became widely known.

Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and his Republican challenger, Mark Green, have both said they believe Barrett should be fired.

The university's chief academic officer, Provost Patrick Farrell, decided to retain Barrett for the course after reviewing his plans and qualifications. He said Barrett could present his ideas during one week of the course as long as students were allowed to challenge them.

He later warned Barrett to stop seeking publicity for his personal political views.

Farrell said he has not seen the essay, but faculty can assign readings that may not be popular to everyone.

"I think part of the role of any challenging course here is going to encourage students to think of things from a variety of perspectives," he said.

The announcement, made by the federal attorney of southern Florida, added new measures are being taken involving numerous governmental agencies and other instances "to punish lawbreakers."

The group is formed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Department of the Treasury, the FBI, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Commerce, the Coastguard, and border protection units.

That huge mobilization of resources, to stiffen the anti-Cuba blockade and include threats of substantial fines and up to ten-year imprisonment sentences, is taking place less than a month before the UN General Assembly will once again pronounce on the issue.

The new US move demonstrates that for the Bush administration, the rejection of the anti-Cuba blockade expressed by the international community at the UN clearly has little value.

But it's reaching new heights, so to speak, with the pending publication this January of Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. This is not just another Regnery mass-sales job, the publisher is Doubleday. D'Souza, despite a career built on some dubious racial theories, is nonetheless a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute and a frequent guest on the cable gabfests.

James Wolcott regales us with some appropriate samples from the manuscript, including this capper:

"There is no way to restore the culture without winning the war on terror. Conversely, the only way to win the war on terror is to win the culture war. Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home."

As Wolcott says:

We're not the enemy, and if you engage us as the enemy, all you'll be doing is starting yet another war you can't win.

D'Souza's is something of a fresh variation on the standard theme against liberals, one voiced unmistakably a little while ago by Michael Barone:

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

But D'Souza expands on this theme to suggest that the very source of Muslim radicals' hostility is the same liberalism to which he and his fellows on the right are nearly as hostile themselves.

Michael Berube earlier gave us a heads-up about this book, and quotes from the press release:

D'Souza shows that liberals-people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore -- are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy -- including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror-contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom-from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D'Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left's attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.

OK, suppose we take for granted D'Souza's logic: We liberals are the source of the cultural animus to which the jihadis are violently opposed.

Doesn't that, by the same logic, place right-wingers like D'Souza and the whole range of conservative ideologues on the side of Al Qaeda?

Isn't he essentially saying that the terrorists are right to have this animus?

Isn't his solution -- suppressing liberalism -- essentially a capitulation to the anti-democratic "Islamofascism" everyone else on the right has been steadily denouncing?

I'm looking forward to reading the book so I can figure this out for myself. Though, knowing D'Souza, I'm guessing there will be some handy bits of sophistry that let him leap over the hard rocks of logic.

The work is being carried out at a new research centre, based at University College London, set up to find technological solutions to crime.

Other projects include scanners for explosives and dirty bomb radiation.

Dr Paul Brennan, an electrical engineer, is leading the tagging project, known as Optag.

He said: "The basic idea is that airports could be fitted with a network of combined panoramic cameras and RFID (radio frequency ID) tag readers, which would monitor the movements of people around the various terminal buildings."

The plan, he said, would be for each passenger to be issued with a tag at check-in.

He said: "In our system, the location can be detected to an accuracy of 1m, and video and tag data could be merged to give a powerful surveillance capability."

Civil liberties

The tags do not store any data, but emit a signal containing a unique ID which could be cross-referenced with passenger identification information. In the future, added Dr Brennan, this could incorporate biometric data.

The project still needs to overcome some hurdles, such as finding a way of ensuring the tags cannot be switched between passengers or removed without notification.

The issue of infringement of civil liberties will also be key.

But potentially, said Dr Brennan, the tags could aid security by allowing airports to track the movement patterns of passengers deemed to be suspicious and prevent them from entering restricted areas.

It could also aid airports by helping evacuation in case of a fire, rapidly locating children, and finding passengers who are late to arrive at the gate.

The "proof of concept" of the system is about to be tested at Debrecen airport in Hungary. If successful, claimed Dr Brennan, it could be available elsewhere within two years.

The new centre will also be investigating a range of other airport security tools.

Professor Robert Speller has been developing scanners to detect explosives and drugs. The devices could be used at airports or other ports of entry.

Scattered photons

The scanners work by firing an x-ray at an item and then detecting how light particles called photons are scattered.

Tag reader (Paul Brennan)
A reader would detect where the passengers were located

Different materials, he said, produce unique patterns of photon scattering, and this can be used to identify whether an explosive or type of drug is present. The scanners, he said, could be incorporated into the machines being used by airports to scan bags.

He is also developing a prototype "Compton camera".

This portable device, he said, could be used if a suspected dirty bomb had been exploded. It is able to detect if any radiation is present, and if so, its precise location.

He said it would help the emergency services identify dangerous areas, and would aid the possible clear-up operation.

The UCL Centre for Security and Crime Science, which opens on Friday, works across many different areas in science and is investigating a number of security and crime issues.

Professor Gloria Laycock, director of the centre, said: "Security is a major issue in today's society and can take many forms.

"We've got rising crime across the developing world, and that has been linked to rising opportunities for crime. The most effective means of tackling this is by tackling those opportunities. Science and technology can help us to do this."