For years, the very idea of gay soldiers serving their country in the U.S. military was an insane suggestion to conservatives. It’s bad for morale, we were told. It undermines discipline, they said. It damages unit cohesiveness, it was argued.
But when push comes to shove, and the military is desperate for volunteers, suddenly those principles just aren’t as important, are they?
The AP is citing an interesting report from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which compared the number of gay service men and women dismissed from the military before our recent efforts in the Middle East and after. The results were disappointing, but not surprising.
The number of gays dismissed from the military under the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has dropped to its lowest level in nine years as U.S. forces fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a report by an advocacy group.
The military discharged 787 gay men and lesbians last year, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. It attributed the decline to the importance of U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The figure marks a 17 percent decrease from 2002 and a 39 percent drop from 2001, just before the conflicts began in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Hmm. So if I’m following the administration correctly, gay soldiers have to be dishonorably discharged, unless we could really use them, in which case it’s fine for them to serve their country.
“You have to ask yourself, and you have to ask the Pentagon, why are the discharges going down?” said C. Dixon Osburn, executive director of the advocacy group and one of the report’s authors. “When they need people, they keep them. When they don’t, they implement their policy of discrimination with greater force.”
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.
No, of course not.
As long as the administration is getting in touch with its desperate side when it comes to this issue, maybe now would be a good time to ask if the Pentagon would be willing to re-hire the nine highly-trained linguists who were dishonorably discharged because they admitted to being gay.
Six of them were proficient in Arabic, and it seems to me, especially in light of the overwhelming strain on the existing corps of translators, we could probably use their help right now to help protect against terrorist threats.
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.
As long as the military isn’t particularly assiduous about “don’t ask, don’t tell” right now, I’d feel a lot better if the Pentagon gave these discharged Arabic-speaking linguists a call to see if they’d come back to work. After all, when it’s national security vs. a gay-free military, is the choice really that difficult?