The homosexual translator menace (hurl alert!)

If the newest warnings of a calamitous attack by al-Qaeda come true, you can blame the antigay policies of the U.S. government for the military’s failure to detect the details of the latest onslaught before it occurs. According to our government’s brilliant policy, you can be a gay assistant secretary of Defense (like former Pentagon spokesman–turned–NBC correspondent Pete Williams) or a gay CIA agent serving in the same foxhole as a Special Forces officer in Afghanistan. But the one thing you cannot be is a gay member of the uniformed armed forces.

Well, as a matter of fact—making this whole scenario even more reminiscent of The Twilight Zone—according to a recent feature in this magazine [“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Go,” November 26], sometimes a gay service member can stay in, as long as his commanding officer considers him butch enough to avoid routine harassment.

But the one thing you can absolutely never be is a gay member of the group most needed to forestall the next terrorist attack: the Army-trained Arabic linguists who might actually understand one of the hundreds of thousands of conversations and E-mails that the government is now authorized to scrutinize under the USA PATRIOT Act, which—believe it or not—is actually an acronym for the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” Act. Don’t you feel safer already?

The shortage of Arabic speakers in the FBI and the CIA was one of the most conspicuous failures leading to the government’s inability to connect the dots before the catastrophes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A few days after September 11, I ran into Robert Morgenthau, the legendary Manhattan district attorney. Morgenthau mentioned that he had one Arabic translator on his staff whom his federal colleagues in New York were constantly trying to borrow because they had no full-time Arabic translators before the attacks.

But as far as the Army is concerned, it’s better to have no Arabic translators than to have gay ones. News of the Army’s latest effort to protect us from the homosexual translating menace was broken in The New Republic by Nathaniel Frank, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, the superb think tank run by Aaron Belkin at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Frank reported that within one two-month period last fall, “seven fully competent” Arabic linguists had been discharged from the Army’s elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., because they were gay. In fact, the number of gay students there may have contributed to a false sense of security among those students. Frank wrote that the institute’s Northern California location attracted “a large number” of gay linguists. “There were way too many gay people at DLI for anybody to fear the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” Frank quoted a gay former student as saying. “Sometimes we lived on halls that were more than 50% homosexual.”

All of which may explain why Alastair Gamble, who was a star student at DLI, felt comfortable enough to invite his boyfriend and fellow student to spend the night with him after he had completed more than 30 weeks of intensive Arabic training. Unfortunately, that was also the night of a surprise “health and welfare” inspection at 3:30 a.m., and the two men were caught in bed together. Both of them were discharged.

Of course, even if you are as fervently in favor of openly gay people serving in the military as I am, you may still think Gamble went too far by going to bed with his boyfriend. In that case, think again. Israel and every original member of NATO except Portugal and the United States now allow gays to serve openly in their armies. And the Spanish Civil Guard, founded by Francisco Franco, has just announced a new policy: Any gay couple who have been together for at least two years can sleep together in the guard’s barracks.

Frank reported that within one two-month period last fall, “seven fully competent” Arabic linguists had been discharged from the Army’s elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., because they were gay. In fact, the number of gay students there may have contributed to a false sense of security among those students. Frank wrote that the institute’s Northern California location attracted “a large number” of gay linguists. “There were way too many gay people at DLI for anybody to fear the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” Frank quoted a gay former student as saying. “Sometimes we lived on halls that were more than 50% homosexual.”

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Air Force colonel suspended after bad-mouthing Bush
Associated Press
June 4, 2002
By Kim Curtis
San Francisco - A U.S. Air Force colonel who called President Bush “a joke” and accused him of allowing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to happen because “his presidency was going nowhere,” has been suspended and could face a court-martial.
The letter from Lt. Col. Steve Butler, who was vice chancellor for student affairs at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, was published May 26 in The (Monterey County) Herald.
“He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism,” Butler wrote. “His daddy had Saddam and he needed Osama. His presidency was going nowhere. ... This guy is a joke.”
Butler, who called Bush’s alleged silence “sleazy and contemptible,” was suspended from his position on May 29 pending the outcome of an investigation into his remarks, Air Force spokeswoman Valerie Burkes said Tuesday. He remains assigned to the Defense Language Institute.
Butler, who entered active duty in April 1979, was a navigator during Desert Storm, Burkes said. His wife, Shelly, told The Herald that Butler plans to retire in a few weeks.
Military law specifically prohibits “contemptuous words against the president” and other political leaders. The prohibition against anti-government speech goes back to 1776, when soldiers were forbidden from using “traitorous or disrespectful words.” The rules were updated several times and “traitorous or disrespectful” changed to “contemptuous.” The president, vice president, Congress and state governors also were specifically banned as targets of bad-mouthing.
In 1950, Congress enacted the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the prohibition against contemptuous language survived intact as Article 88, and, for the first time, applied only to commissioned officers.
The maximum punishment under Article 88 is dismissal, forfeiture of all pay and allowances and confinement for one year.
The only known Article 88 court-martial took place in the mid-1960s, according to an article by Lt. Col. Michael J. Davidson published in the July 1999 edition of “The Army Lawyer.”
In that case, 2nd Lt. Henry Howe was charged with using contemptuous words against the president and conduct unbecoming an officer. On Nov. 6, 1965, Howe, dressed in civilian clothing during off-duty hours, left Fort Bliss and went to nearby El Paso, Texas, to participate in a demonstration against the Vietnam War.
Howe, who was turned in to military police by a gas station attendant who noticed an Army sticker on his vehicle, carried a sign that read “Let’s Have More Than a Choice Between Petty Ignorant Fascists in 1968,” and “End Johnson’s Fascist Aggression in Vietnam.”
He was convicted and sentenced to dismissal, forfeiture of all pay and allowances and confinement at hard labor for two years.
“This kind of thing has happened repeatedly,” Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, a Washington-based nonprofit group that advocates improvement in the military justice system, said Tuesday. “Clinton was repeatedly bad-mouthed.”
In fact, an Air Force general was fined, reprimanded and forced into early retirement for referring to Clinton as “gay-loving,” “womanizing,” “draft-dodging” and “pot smoking,” Ryan said.
Another Air Force general was reprimanded for telling an inappropriate joke about Clinton at an Air Force base in Texas. Two Marine Corps officers also were administratively punished for published letters to newspapers that were disrespectful of the president. That led to military officials warning military members against engaging in similar conduct.

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