I have chosen former FBI translator and whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds as the subject of my hypothetical public relations campaign. First I will discuss the positioning of my client in relation to external publics. Then I will write a statement to the press, and evaluate its benefits and risks.
The case of Sibel Edmonds is a Byzantine one that is difficult to sum up in a few words. As Edmunds herself says "my case is so messy and complicated" (antiwar.com). But in spite of all the complex detail of her case and allegations, she is as close to a perfect candidate for a successful public relations campaign as it is possible to conceive.
First it is important to understand some background about her case, as well as the scope of her allegations and the nature of her adversaries.
Edmond's father was an Azerbaijani doctor who moved back and forth several times between Iran to Turkey. Sibel learned to speak Azerbaijani, Turkish, and Farsi, the language of Iran, and she added English when she came to study criminal justice at George Washington University in the United States in 1988. She later worked for the Alexandria Juvenile Court, and eventually applied for a job as an agent with the FBI.
In a foretaste of the incompetence she found to be endemic when she finally came to work for the agency after 9/11, her application was lost, and several years passed. But three days after the jets struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon the FBI offered her a job as a translator, bending over backward to accommodate her objections in their desperation to hire qualified translators for languages spoken in areas of concern as potential hotbeds
At the FBI's largest translation facility in Washington, D.C. she found bureaucratic incompetence as well as corruption on all sides. Departmental rules for hiring and determining the qualifications of translators were routinely ignored. A Saudi man in the Arabic section had managed to get a numbe...