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Orlando Sentinel - July 6, 2005
Arabic translation key to Al Arian trial
By Pedro Ruz Gutierrez
For more than a year, two aging retirees met weekly in a quiet room on the fourth floor of Orlando's federal courthouse to review hundreds of hours of secretly taped conversations in Arabic.
Both men, a chemist and an electrical engineer, grew up speaking Arabic in Palestine before the creation of Israel.
They are now at the center of what the government calls the most significant terrorism-related trial since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
Khaled Diab and Kamal Yunis, two Orlando-area court interpreters hired by the Federal Public Defender's office, have scrutinized the government's translations in the ongoing trial of fired University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian and three others in Tampa.
Sometime in the next few months, Diab, 78, and Yunis, 72, are expected to testify about one of the more crucial issues in the trial: the significance of hundreds of Arabic-language documents and conversations culled during a decade-long wiretap investigation.
According to court documents, the two Orlando linguists have offered "counter translations" and are listed as witnesses for Hatem Naji Fariz, a Spring Hill resident and former Chicago-area Muslim leader.
Al-Arian, 47, Fariz, 32, Chicago businessman Ghassan Ballut, 43, and former USF instructor Sameeh Hammoudeh, 45, are on trial on charges of conspiracy to commit racketeering, murder civilians in Israel and provide material support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The four, along with five more defendants who are abroad, were indicted in February 2003 and are accused of using Islamic charities, a think tank and a school as cover to raise funds for the terror group. They could face up to life in prison, if convicted.
Of the more than 20,000 hours of conversations secretly taped by FBI intelligence agents from 1993 to 2003, fewer than 300 hours are deemed relevant to the case.
In counterstatements, defense attorneys said the government's accounts often misidentified speakers, while some lacked context. In the coming months, both sides are expected to differ over idioms, syntax and other language nuances in Arabic……
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/volusia/orl-locvalarian06070605jul06,0,2588261.story?coll=orl-news-headlines-volusia
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