Ashcroft faces whistleblower secrets probe:

"The federal government's secrecy watchdog is conducting an inquiry into whether Attorney General John Ashcroft acted properly in classifying information relating to a lawsuit brought by a whistleblower from the FBI's translation unit.

Sibel Edmonds, a contract translator who blew the whistle on mismanagement, inefficiency and serious security problems, is suing the Department of Justice for violating her First Amendment rights by quashing her claims against the FBI with the rarely invoked 'state-secrets privilege.'

Her case relates to the way the translation unit in the bureau's Washington field office was run immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Edmonds has made shocking allegations about incompetence, lax internal security and deliberate efforts to frustrate the unit's work -- some of which have been acknowledged to be true by the FBI.

The translation issue goes to the heart of the pre-Sept. 11 failure of the FBI and the intelligence community in general to catch the attackers and stop the plot that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Secrecy experts say the affair appears to be part of a pattern of behavior by the Bush administration: the abuse of classification procedures to stifle public debate about politically sensitive aspects of the war against terrorism."