It’s hard not to be disappointed by a new report showing that 770 people were discharged from the U.S. military under the nonsensical “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. There are, however, three points that jumped out at me.
First, with growing concerns over the number of active troops available during a time of war, it seems unusually stupid to reject 770 well-trained volunteers, who are anxious to serve their country, because of their sexual orientation. As the AP noted, these aren’t exactly easy-to-replace personnel.
Hundreds of those discharged held high-level job specialties that required years of training and expertise, including 90 nuclear power engineers, 150 rocket and missile specialists and 49 nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare specialists.
Yeah, they sound completely expendable right now. Better to leave their posts unattended than allow these capable men and women to serve admirably.
Second, I find it curious that the number of troops discharged under the policy keeps going down.
[The 770 figure] is significantly lower than the record 1,227 discharges in 2001 — just before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Hmm. The military has been pulling troops from around the world to meet demands in the Middle East and suddenly, as push has come to shove, the principles that insist that gays never serve aren’t as strictly enforced as they are during peace time. In fact, we learned a few months ago that dismissals under “don’t ask, don’t tell” have reached a nine-year low. What a coincidence.
But what I found particularly troubling was one sentence in the AP report:
Eighty-eight linguists were discharged, including at least seven Arab language specialists.
This is impossible to justify or rationalize.
There was a disturbing report about military linguists in Newsweek last October that shows how misguided it is to let any of them go, worse yet Arab language specialists.
To fight the war on terror, the FBI desperately needs translators. Every day, wiretaps and bugs installed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) record hundreds of hours of conversations conducted in Arabic or other Middle Eastern languages like Farsi. Those conversations must all be translated into English — and quickly — if investigators are to head off budding Qaeda plots against the United States. Today, more than two years after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI is still woefully short of translators. FBI Director Robert Mueller has declared that he wants a 12-hour rule: all significant electronic intercepts of suspected terrorist conversations must be translated within 12 hours. Asked if the bureau was living up to its own rule, a senior FBI official quietly chuckled. He was being mordant: he and every top gumshoe are well aware that the consequences could be tragic.
[…]
A shortage of Arabic speakers has plagued the entire intelligence community. Though U.S. intelligence was using all the best technology — spy satellites, high-tech listening posts and other devices — to listen in on the conversations of possible terrorists, far too often it had no idea what they were saying. A congressional inquiry after 9/11 found enormous backlogs. Millions of hours of talk by suspected terrorists — including 35 percent of all Arabic-language national-security wiretaps by the FBI — had gone untranslated and untranscribed. Some of the overseas intercepts contained chillingly precise warnings. On Sept. 10, 2001, the National Security Agency picked up suggestive comments by Qaeda operatives, including “Tomorrow is zero hour.” The tape of the conversation was not translated until after 9/11.
So let me get this straight: the need for linguists has reached a desperate level and translations may literally help save countless American lives. We can’t keep up with the flood of information that needs translating now, but yet we’re asking well-trained linguists, including Arab language specialists, to stop working and leave the military. It’s a simple question of national security vs. a gay-free military — and the government has decided to back the latter.
And taking the opposing view:
Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative advocacy group that opposes gays serving in the military, said the loss of gays and lesbians serving in specialized areas is irrelevant because they never should have been in those jobs in the first place.
Brilliant. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.