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 Editorials | Opinions | January 2005 
The Price of Homophobia
 New York Times
Don't ask, don't tell - just scream in frustration: it turns out that 20 of the Arabic speakers so vitally needed by the United States have been thrown out of the military since 1998 because they were found to be gay.
 It is hard to imagine a more wrongheaded rebuff of national priorities. The focus must be on the search for Osama bin Laden and his terrorist legions, not the closet door. The Pentagon's snooping after potential gays trumps what every investigative agency in the war on terror has admitted is a crucial shortage of effective Arabic translators.
After the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993, government agents revealed an alarming shortage of Arabic speakers. Key notes, videotapes and a phone call pertaining to the attack were later found in a backlog of untranslated investigative data. The shortage continued right up to and well beyond the 9/11 attacks. Three years after the towers were destroyed, the F.B.I., rife with translation problems, admitted it had an untranslated backlog of 120,000 hours of intercepts with potential value about looming threats. At the State Department, a study showed that only one in five of the 279 Arabic translators were fluent enough to handle the subtleties of the language, with its many regional dialects.
The military's experience is no more encouraging, with intelligence results muddied at times by a rush, as one inquiry put it, to recruit Arab convenience store owners and cabdrivers, who couldn't handle the task. The military is right to rely more on its language schools, but it can take several years to produce fluent graduates. The folly of using "don't ask, don't tell" policy against such precious national resources amounts to comfort for the enemy.
When President Bush was asked last week by The Washington Post why Osama bin Laden had eluded capture, he replied, "Because he's hiding." So is the Pentagon - it's hiding from reality. |
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