Making use of information

With terrorism back on the front pages this month, here's a little reminder that the Bush administration's focus on Iraq is diverting attention from real intelligence issues:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's backlog of untranslated terrorism intelligence doubled last year, and the time it takes the bureau to hire translators has grown longer...

(T)he F.B.I. "has no assurance" that some 8,300 hours of untranslated material does not include information that could be critical to terrorism investigations.

In addition, the bureau told the committee that its long-delayed effort to overhaul its computer system and allow agents to search terrorism files more easily would not be completed until 2009 at the earliest...

The F.B.I. met its hiring targets in fewer than half of 52 languages examined, and the average time it takes to hire a linguist grew from 13 months to at least 14 months, according to the bureau's data. The inspector general's office said its assessment showed that the average time was 16 months, with much of the delay blamed on applicants "waiting in queue" because of bureaucratic slowdowns.

Almost makes you wonder whether the FBI could have made any use of people fired because of prejudice. Or whether $200 billion could have been used to reduce the hiring backlog.