  Wow. How could this have been pulled off? urlLink The New York Times is reporting that senior U.S. officials, after arresting a number of people at the Guantanamo camp where Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners are being held, are looking into a possible conspiracy. A conspiracy by Arabic speakers to improperly translate the words of American interrogators and the prisoners being questioned.
The interrogators couldn't speak the language, so the whole effort could have been in vain. More than anything, this shows how absolutely necessary it is to have Americans qualified as fluent speakers of the languages most relevant to the War on Terror: Arabic, Dari, Pashto, Urdu .
. . .
among others. I just noticed on urlLink OxBlog urlLink a nice factoid : there are only 54 fully qualified Arabic speakers in the State Department.
One can only guess how poor that means the capabilities are within the other parts of the U.S. military/intelligence/foreign policy establishment. This reminds me of the cover story by urlLink Mark Bowden in The Atlantic, which profiles a top-notch Israeli interrogator, now retired, who prided himself on his very good colloquial fluency in several different Arabic dialects. How long will it be until the U.S. has a corps of interrogators who are fluent enough in Arabic that we won't need translators who we unfortunately cannot trust? 
