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This was the call on Randi's show yesterday.
6/29/05; Randi Rhodes Show; 3:47:52 time from whiterosesociety.org
"Randi: H.M. in Denver
H.M.: I’m a veteran of the army as well as the navy, I’m an Arabic linguist and I used to work for NATO intelligence back in the ‘90’s. After 9/11 myself and my friends that were veterans we all volunteered to go translate for Operation Enduring Freedom. And we wound up basically working for the contractors in Washington D.C. And it’s an unbelievable mess--because I tried to contact Senator McCain, I tried to organize all these former veteran linguists together because it’s a phenomenal resource to the country and I contacted the Armed Services Committee as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee and I was told that I had to go through contracting companies in order to serve my country as a civilian. So I got hired over the phone by a contracting company in Huntington California. They in turn--they never tested me--they in turn subcontracted me to a company in Tyson’s Corner Virginia. They, in turn, subcontracted me to the U.S. Intelligence Community.
Nobody would guarantee any of us a contract that we actually had a job and they required us that we move within a week to Washington D.C. We sold our houses and dropped out of college and we left and we went to D.C. and when we got there we actually had to fight to get our jobs.
There were not enough people there to make a softball team. All of the wealth of information coming out of Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom was translated--basically 3,500 documents was what we were able to process a month. But from that point it was insane because the contracting company had no interest in what we were doing for national security. It was constantly about billable hours and billable hours.
And then my best friend and I volunteered, we went to the Gulf to support counter-terrorism operations directly and once we got there all hell broke loose. What they were doing had nothing to do with our national security or terrorism.
R: what were they doing?
H.M.: they were actually training a series of troops to work counter-terrorism in another sovereign Muslim country. But I really can’t go into too much detail but it wasn’t what they were saying. And the way they were treating the natives was horrible.
They promised us, my best friend and I, that we would have body armor as well as weapons (?? Talk about weapons training). The second we got over there they reneged on the bonus money they were going to pay us, they reneged on the body armor, they reneged on the weapons, and they stuck us in a combat situation.
I have P.T.S.D. and a wealth of other medical problems that I had from that episode. But when my friend and I actually stood up and asked the Intelligence community to come and actually provide what they had promised they basically gave us the option to find our own way out of the country or put up with it. Then we went to the contracting company--they were pissed off at us for upsetting their client and so they docked our pay by half--they kept the other half. They kept charging the government the full price and then they were paying us exactly half of what we were making.
Randi: comments (there was a time and a place when you could tell me this story and I would not be able to follow it…etc.)
H.M.: once we did actually confront the intelligence community they cut us loose. They left us in a foreign country with foreign nationals and told us to find our own way out. We had to evade a kidnapping, we were shot at several times, we barely made it out of the country with our lives
Randi: Can I ask you were you were?
H.M: Yemen.
Randi: Yemen? They left you in Yemen?
H.M.: Yes. I’ve had five surgeries since I’ve been over there from all the bacteria I collected--they told me I was on a light camping trip. The ineptitude that happened on both sides, the contracting companies as well as the intelligence community was unbelievable.
Randi: Have you tried to call a Democratic. Senator on this or thought I need to tell somebody that works on these issues.
H.M.: I was told that when we left if we mentioned it basically we needed to forget it because they would not forget us--is what the intelligence community told us, and then they left us a four in the morning in the capitol of Yemen without anyway to get home.
(Randi tells him to contact Waxman, Durbin and Dorgen of North Dakota.)
H.M.: I’ve got one other thing I’ve been wanting to talk about for a long long time and it’s basically the organization of these terrorist organizations--not being released into the news as to how organized they are. They have identity cards--they have I.D. cards that are laminated that look like college identification cards with the picture of the person, their name, their rank in the organization, what their meal privileges are and what terrorist camps they can get into. They have application forms to get into these terrorist organizations that require a picture, their name, their hobby, what are your favorite books you read, and why you’re joining the jihad. The actual establishment and network between these groups is immense and a lot of it is government supported.
Like for the Islamist jihad in Pakistan they have (?fax?) forms that have their street address, their phone number of their headquarters in Islamabad. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where these people are located. It’s crazy. It’s in Burma, it’s in Pakistan, Afghanistan. Throughout the middle east they are overt and they are blatant about it. But their recruiting methods-it’s just unbelievable the amount of detail. We went through thousands and thousands of these applications from Philippino terrorist organizations, Burmese, Malaysian, all across the world. It’s just unbelievable how detailed they are and how organized they are. Everything you see in the western press about these organizations--most of it is wrong. And it’s wrong from the point of view that they want everybody to believe they’re ignorant and they’re stupid and they’re sleeping in caves.
And it just bothers me so much, you know. They had an incredible team of linguists together--most of them were very good friends of mine. We weren’t enough to make a softball team but we busted our asses. We did this sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. We gave up so much to do this and it mattered nothing about national security.
Now all of us have returned to our private lives and we listen to the news and our stomachs are nauseated, we don’t know how to help, we don’t know how to get involved, and nobody seems to give a damn."
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