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Appeals court backs dismissal of fbi suit { May 7 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/07/politics/07whistle.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/07/politics/07whistle.html
May 7, 2005
Appeals Court Backs Dismissal of Suit on F.B.I.
By JOHN FILES
WASHINGTON, May 6 - A federal appeals court agreed with the government on Friday that a suit by an F.B.I. translator who was fired after accusing the bureau of ineptitude could expose government secrets and jeopardize national security.
The decision, by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, effectively ends the suit by the translator, Sibel Edmonds.
Her lawyer said, however, that she planned to take the case to the Supreme Court.
Ms. Edmonds, a contract linguist for the bureau for about six months, translating material in Azerbaijani, Farsi and Turkish, was trying to revive the lawsuit she filed after being was fired in 2002.
She had repeatedly complained that bureau linguists produced slipshod and incomplete translations of important terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. She also accused a linguist in the Washington field office of blocking the translation of material that involved acquaintances who had come under suspicion and said the bureau had allowed diplomatic concerns to affect the translation of important intelligence.
Ms. Edmonds's suit was dismissed in July after Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked a rarely used power and declared that the case fell under "state secret" privilege.
The judge who issued that ruling, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court, said he was satisfied with government statements that the suit could expose intelligence-gathering methods and disrupt diplomatic relations.
The case has become prominent among civil liberties advocates. They say the bureau retaliated against Ms. Edmonds and other whistle-blowers who have sought to expose management problems related to the antiterrorism campaign.
The A.C.L.U. joined Ms. Edmonds's cause in January, when it asked the appeals court to reinstate her suit against the government.
A lawyer for Ms. Edmonds, Ann Beeson, said in a telephone interview: "This vast expansion of the state secret privilege by the government makes us less safe, not more. If government employees cannot report security breaches without retaliation, then American national security suffers."
The Justice Department had urged the appeals court to affirm Judge Walton's decision, saying: "The district court correctly recognized what the classified declarations in the record establish: the privileged information here is fundamentally implicated by Edmonds's allegations, and the case cannot be litigated without disclosure of that information, which would damage national security."
The inspector general of the Justice Department said in January that the F.B.I. had failed to investigate forcefully Ms. Edmonds's accusations of espionage and fired her in large part for raising them.
In a report that the department sought for months to keep classified, the inspector general issued a sharp rebuke over the handling of those accusations. But it reached no conclusions about whether her co-worker had engaged in espionage, and it did not give details about the espionage accusations because they remain classified.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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