Europe's war on terror battles language problems

ROME -- It was a few months after the Sept. 11 attacks, and police were spying on Rome's Al Harmini Mosque, cameras pointed at the door, bugs inside the temple. Then one day, listening to a recorded conversation among three Iraqis, they heard something terrifying.

It sounded like bad Italian and was tough to decipher, but a few words came out: "cyanide," "weapons," and locations around the capital.

Police swooped down, arresting the three Iraqis on Feb. 28, 2002, charging them with terrorist-related crimes and holding them for nine months.

However, there was a problem: As court-appointed experts finally pointed out, the suspects had not said any of the words in question -- not "cyanide," not "weapons," nothing. In fact, they were migrants in search of work and had been speaking not Italian but Kurdish, their native language.

It was a grave error in an individual case, but it also highlighted a wider problem: just how much is lost in translation in Europe's war on terrorism.

Europe has had significant successes, with dozens of arrests and several key convictions. But the language problem is weakening investigations, experts say. There are too few translators, many national intelligence and police forces that aren't always eager to cooperate, and no clearinghouse to coordinate information.

Finding qualified translators is a problem. The United States has "a huge leg up in terms of a wide spectrum of languages and dialects," Mulvenna said. "But even there, we have a problem. We just don't have enough of them, and enough that are interested in doing it.

"You take this problem and put it into some of the countries in Europe -- Italy would be one, and Greece would be another -- and you have an even bigger problem."

Especially in local police forces, there are simply not enough language experts.

In January, police in Naples swept up 28 Pakistanis after finding explosives in their apartment. Initially they spoke of an "al-Qaida terrorist cell." But on Feb. 12, a judge ordered them released, saying there was no reason to believe the Pakistanis knew explosives were hidden in an apartment they had rented.

Part of the problem was that police could barely communicate with the suspects and took two days to find a translator.

Asked what police do without interpreters, a Naples police official said: "You try to explain yourself with gestures or with some lingua franca."

The United States is offering a little support in identifying or occasionally providing translators, although an FBI official acknowledged Washington is not offering much language assistance to European allies.

"We have legal-attache offices in a lot of countries where we share information," FBI press officer Paul Bresson said. "In terms of training, we have a significant challenge here at home to bring on board certified language specialists."

The U.S. government has poured millions into identifying and hiring more qualified translators since the Sept. 11 attacks. The CIA even placed newspaper ads, looking to hire Americans of Arab descent.

But of 30,000 applicants since the Sept. 11 attacks, only 466 have been hired, the FBI says.

Michael Swetnam, a counterterrorism specialist at the Washington-based Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, says that the United States is looking to computers for solutions.

"Machine language translation today is not very accurate," he said, "but there's quite a bit of research and money going into improving the accuracy."