Sunday, January 23, 2005

To go with the absurd SpongeBob-is-gay item making the rounds thanks to the lunatic Christian right-wing folks, in catching up with old reading I find the following in The New Republic:
The Pentagon continues to dismiss trained linguists--people whose skills are desperately needed in Iraq and elsewhere around the world--for being gay. In fact, newly obtained data from the Department of Defense reveals that these firings were far more widespread than previously known.
<...>
National security experts have identified the shortage of Arabic linguists as contributing to the government's failure to predict the September 11 attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report's assessment of the nation's preparedness for those and future strikes indicated that the government "lacked sufficient translators proficient in Arabic and other key languages, resulting in a significant backlog of untranslated intercepts." A 2002 General Accounting Office study concluded that staff shortages in Arabic and Farsi "adversely affected agency operations and compromised U.S. military, law enforcement, intelligence, counterterrorism and diplomatic efforts." And an October 2001 House Intelligence Committee report found that "thousands of pieces of data are never analyzed, or are analyzed 'after the fact' because there are too few analysts, even fewer with the necessary language skills."
Oh, the irony. Recall the religious leaders who stated at the time that America deserved what happened on 9/11 due to depravity, homosexuality, etc. Closer to the truth: 9/11 occurred more so due to a lack of tolerance and acceptance.

Irony and hypocrisy just never stops with the hateful right-wingers.

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