Army recruiting Korean linguists

WASHINGTON -- Not surprisingly, the U.S. Army is hard-pressed to recruit Arabic translators to help intelligence officers interrogate the thousands of Iraqi soldiers captured during the war.

But the Army is also looking for linguists fluent in Korean and Indonesian dialects, WorldNetDaily has learned.

Bush has named North Korea, which last week for the first time admitted possessing nuclear arms, as part of the so-called "axis of evil." The communist state is also on the State Department's terrorist blacklist.

In his televised address last night aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush warned that any regime that harbors terrorists and develops weapons of mass destruction "will be confronted" by the U.S.

Indonesia, home to some al-Qaida operatives, earlier this year was added to a Justice Department list of Muslim countries whose visitors will be fingerprinted and monitored as part of an anti-terrorist tracking system.

"Individuals with proficiency in Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish (Sorani, Kurmanci and Bedini) are needed to perform interpretation and translation duties," said the recruitment notice recently posted on the Army's internal web board.

The posting went on to say: "Additional languages may be required in the future."

"Individuals with skills in Korean, Filipino, Tagalog, Tausag, Cebuano, Ilocan and Ilonggo are also encouraged to apply so that your information and expression of interest is on file," said the notice, which was posted on Army Knowledge Online, a password-access-only portal for active Army, reserve and National Guard personnel.

The posting lists Lynne McCann, an Army intelligence official, as point of contact, and is titled: "Seeking Arab Speakers Among Army's Civilian Workforce for Reimbursable Detail to Army Positions in Support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Other CONOPS, (concepts of operations)."

The shortage of Arabic-speaking interrogators in the military has become a serious issue during Operation Iraqi Freedom. U.S. intelligence still needs to question thousands of POWs and displaced Iraqis about the whereabouts of regime leaders, including ousted president Saddam Hussein, and possible weapons of mass destruction.

A PERSCOM, or U.S. Total Army Personnel, official recently estimated the Army would need about 850 Arabic-speaking interrogators to get the job done. Yet the Army has only about 70 Arabic-speaking interrogators (and oddly enough, not all have been deployed to the Iraqi theater of operations).

"The situation for linguists is so desperate that CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command) personnel are trying to get Kuwaiti soldiers to act as interpreters," which raises loyalties issues, a U.S. intelligence official told WorldNetDaily.

Many linguists working for Army intelligence require classified clearance of Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information. Personal background investigations have slowed the recruiting process.

The Army also has decided to contract out for linguists. Worldwide Language Resources, for one, charges the government a minimum $80,000 per contractor for linguist support, informed military sources say.

The U.S. intelligence official, who wished to go unnamed, said recruitment could get expensive, since Iraqi regime change "is slotted for 10 years."

Phone calls to Army headquarters here were not immediately returned.