Sibel Edmonds' claims of incompetence, malfeasance, and possible espionage in the FBI's translation unit have received sporadic attention since she first aired them widely in a 60 Minutes report in October 2002--not least because of the veil of silence that the Bush Justice Department has tried to draw over the case. In July of this year, a Bush-appointed judge dismissed Edmonds' lawsuit against the FBI on the grounds that the case would necessarily expose state secrets. Judge Reggie Walton's logic parroted that of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who in May 2004 issued an order retroactively classifying all the information that had been presented to Congress in her case because of its alleged national security sensitivity.

But l'affaire Edmonds is heating up again. Last week Edmonds filed a new lawsuit seeking to compel release of the documents in her case under the Freedom of Information law. And Tuesday's page one New York Times story about the 120,000-hour backlog of untranslated intelligence tapes the FBI is presently sitting on lent additional credence to her charges. (Some al Qaeda communiques, the Times reported, were automatically deleted by the overloaded computer system in the department before they could be translated.)