WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Two senior senators Tuesday asked Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft to review a former FBI employee's claims that a colleague may have hindered several cases.

Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish-language translator for the bureau, was fired in March after making the allegations against a fellow linguist identified in a lawsuit as Can Dickerson. In that suit, Edmonds said she suspected Dickerson blocked the translation of intercepted conversations that involved several Turkish acquaintances of Dickerson's who were the subject of FBI investigations.

The FBI, already under close congressional scrutiny for mishandling terrorism information leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, conducted an internal security review of the allegations and found no wrongdoing. However, Edmonds' allegations are the subject of an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general.

In their letter to Ashcroft Tuesday, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said FBI officials confirmed some of Edmonds' allegations during a recent meeting with Senate staff members. The senators also expressed concern that Dickerson was preparing to leave the country when her husband, a major in the Air Force, is transferred to Brussels in September.

"We are troubled that the Department of Justice, including the FBI, may not be acting quickly enough to address the issues raised by Ms. Edmonds' complaint or cooperating fully with the Inspector General's office," the senators wrote.

Dickerson, who recently had a baby and is on leave from her job, called the allegations "preposterous, ludicrous and slanderous."

"Both the FBI and the Department of Justice have conducted separate investigations of her (Edmonds') claims," Dickerson said. "They fired her and, interestingly, they continued my contract. That should give you some kind of clue that I was an honest employee who was trying to do her job."

FBI spokesman Bill Carter said he could not comment on the case but said that director Robert Mueller had turned it over to the inspector general upon learning of it. A spokesman for Ashcroft said he could not comment on the case because it is under review.

Edmonds, 32, and Dickerson, 33, were hired as contract translators following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to Kris Kolesnik, executive director of the National Whistleblower Center, which represents Edmonds. Edmonds was hired in September and Dickerson in November.

Both women are Turkish-speaking linguists in the FBI's Washington field office. The two were reviewing the reams of intercepts and documents that flooded into the bureau after Sept. 11, including material that was gathered using special warrants granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Kolesnik said.

On March 7, Edmonds filed complaints with both the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General, "describing security breaches of which she was aware, as well as the reprisal and retaliation she had suffered," according to court documents. Edmonds was fired two weeks later, a move Leahy and Grassley criticized in their letter to Ashcroft.

"Unfortunately, nearly every person at the FBI who was notified of the situation reacted by questioning why Ms. Edmonds was `causing trouble,'" they wrote.

Edmonds filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against the government in July, alleging that she was fired after making her allegations against Dickerson. Specifically, Edmonds claimed that Dickerson chose not to translate certain transcripts involving people whom she knew; that she steered other workers away from certain intercepts; that she forged Edmonds' initials on work; and that she leaked information from the wiretaps to acquaintances.

The subjects of those wiretaps, Kolesnik said, were involved in public corruption cases in the United States, and one case may have involved espionage. One of the subjects has left the country.

Edmonds' attorneys fear Dickerson and her husband will leave the United States before they can be deposed in the whistle-blower lawsuit. The FBI and Air Force, according to court documents, have raised objections to those depositions, something Leahy and Grassley also noted.

But Dickerson said she and her husband have already agreed to give depositions, and that it is the lawyers who have held things up.

"I'm still around," she said. "I'm still cooperating with the government. I'm even cooperating ... with her lawyers."

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