A source on politics, war, the Middle East, Arabic poetry, and art.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
A 70-year old retired Air Force officer approached me after my talk last night here in Thousand Oaks. He told me that he received a letter from the Air Force asking for his services because he knows Arabic, and he was "offered" to go to Iraq. He politely declined the offer. A similar offer was made to a UCLA historian (63-year old) who knows Arabic. A student at Georgetown who was studying Arabic was offered a contract to go Guantanamo and serve as a translator. He explained that his Arabic was not that good, he went anyway. A lawyer who visited Guantanamo told me that many errors have been found in the cases against the prisoners based on errors of translation and mistranslation. Say Fa-la-Fil.