More on misspelling the underwear bomber’s name

Posted By Josh Rogin Friday, January 8, 2010 - 4:50 PM Share

Transliterations of names from languages with non-Roman alphabets being somewhat subjective, there's no firm rule for how a foreign surname should or shouldn't be written out in English. So it's somewhat unfair to be a Monday-morning quarterback when looking at the State Department's handling of the information for underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

But in Washington, fair is a four-letter word, and the State Department is scrambling to explain why the president's just-released review of the Christmas day incident calls out State for failing to realize that the 23-year old Nigerian had a visa to travel to the United States when the department reported its suspicions of him to the National Counterterrorism Center using the "Visas Viper" process.

State called an impromptu press briefing late Thursday evening to address the issue. The tone of the briefing was combative, as reporters pressed the "senior administration official" for details about the misspelling that he seemed not to want to give up. But here's what we learned.

Someone (they won't say who) at the State Department (presumably at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria) did check to see if Abdulmutallab had a visa (they won't say exactly when). That person was working off the Visas Viper cable originally sent from the embassy to the NCTC, which had the name wrong.

"There was a dropped letter in that -- there was a misspelling," the official said. "They checked the system. It didn't come back positive. And so for a while, no one knew that this person had a visa." (They won't say for how long)

Abdulmutallab's father came into the embassy on Nov. 18 or 19 and the embassy sent the Visas Viper cable on Nov. 20. So when did this checking for the visa happen?

"No one may have checked for a visa until Christmas Day," the official admitted.

Of course, had the visa been discovered earlier, that still wouldn't have stopped the attack because the evidentiary standards for pulling visas were too high. "To revoke a visa, you have to find that someone's ineligible," the official explained.

So the State Department and the intelligence community had the wrong spelling of the underwear bomber's name for more than a month, which would have been a problem in finding out he had a visa, had anybody decided it was worth it to check.

Everybody got that?

As the Danger Room blog points out, another way to solve this problem would be if the State Department or intelligence community had discovered the magic of Google.

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KAYKURI

6:58 PM ET

January 9, 2010

Fair, but incomplete

As a linguist (no ME languages, however) with a lot of natural language processing experience, I agree with your assessment here.

Transliterations of names from languages with non-Roman alphabets being somewhat subjective, there's no firm rule for how a foreign surname should or shouldn't be written out in English. So it's somewhat unfair to be a Monday-morning quarterback when looking at the State Department's handling of the information for underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

This is true and generous of you to point out, although I would add without details of the "misspelling" it is still not clear to me from reading this, the Wired article, or the TPM article (linked in the Wired article) whether we are talking about a valid spelling variation or a simple typo.

For the uninitiated, simply think about the number of different spellings of Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda that you have seen in recent years. GlobalSecurity.org lists 3 alternate spellings for OBL besides the one above that do not involve his "full name". I am not an expert on Arabic scripts, but my understanding is that the Arabic script (Hebrew too?) does not include vowels. It's all a string of consonants. So when transliterating to our alphabet the insertion of vowels becomes somewhat subjective. I am sure someone around here can clarify this better than I.

BUT: that's neither here nor there in my opinion. To be fair... the quite frustrating failing is that this is still a problem 8 years after 9/11. The Wired article gets at this a bit, except that they shallowly just point to Google, as usual. There is a great deal of good work and further potential out there in the fields of natural language processing and computational linguistics, if only there were serious and ongoing respect for and investment in the "human terrain".

Or--and here's a radical idea--you could just have people on each end of these interactions who could read Arabic. Maybe we need a program to fast-track homosexual Arabic linguists who are booted out of the military into State or the IC. Crazy I know, but I'm a dreamer.

DANIEL

10:09 PM ET

January 9, 2010

Your right, no one should be

Your right, no one should be blamed for misspelling the bomber's name. But if creating a uniform spelling is impossible for these names, it wouldn't be that hard at all to include code in a computer system that took care of this. For instance, a computer could easily be programmed so that it brought up possible misspellings of an entered name like the logitech lapdesk does. The staff doing the look-ups should at least be trained to search alternative spellings. Even Google can do this for you.