Desperate for interpreters
The latest reports from Washington have shown that the US Intelligence Community, as well as other Law Enforcement organisations are so short of decent translators of Arabic, Farsi and Pashto, that they have resorted to the never before sanctioned measure of recruiting immigrants to fill these posts. Until very recently, the recruitment of any first generation American with family ties abroad was strictly forbidden, however, such is the desperate need for these interpreters that the bar on using such personnel was rescinded earlier this year.
The great problem faced by the US establishment is that Arabic especially, is a very complex language for people outside of the Arabic Diaspora and is made all the more difficult because there is no modern standardised spoken form that spans the Arabic speaking world, so that a Somalian that happened to speak Arabic, might well not be understood by a Qatari that spoke ostensibly the same language. Additionally, even within an Arabic speaking country, there are likely to be a great dialectic variation; the only really common ground within Arabic is the ubiquitous knowledge of the specific type of Arabic used within the Koran.
This problem is readily acknowledged by US Security Organisations, who openly admit that their own non Arabic translators are very often completely thrown by variations in dialect, by the use of slang, by references to the Koran and by general cultural references of which they are totally ignorant. The Security Services also stated that they would be actively looking to recruit from the children of first generation immigrants, who in their opinion provided an even more promising pool of potential recruits.