(Washington, DC) - U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens/L.I.) today called on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to consider hiring linguists fired by the Pentagon for being gay. Ackerman made the suggestion during Secretary Rice’s testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee regarding the State Department’s annual budget request.

Despite a critical shortage of linguists specializing in Arabic, Farsi and other foreign languages critical to the war on terror, the Pentagon, applying  its “don't ask, don't tell'' policy—which prevents openly gay individuals from serving in the military—has fired numerous homosexual translators specializing in these dialects.

Noting the Secretary's concerns about having insufficient linguists at the State Department, Ackerman, a senior member of the committee asked Rice “Why can’t the State Department look to pick-up all the people fired from the military--because you do not have such a policy?”

“I’m not aware of the availability of people but will certainly look” Rice replied. “We will look at it.”

Ackerman a long-time opponent of the "don't ask, don't tell policy" mocked the Pentagon's misplaced priorities. “For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are [of] terrorists” Ackerman said at the hearing. “They’re very brave with the terrorists. If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they could get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad.”

Ackerman noted to Rice that the terminated linguists already completed several weeks of training and have presumably passed the necessary security clearances.

The following is a transcript of the exchange:

Ackerman: I was intrigued that you spent so much time talking about the foreign language deficit we have and how greatly it’s needed. It seems the Defense Department has a don’t ask, don’t tell policy when it comes to homosexuals. You don’t have such a prohibition in your agency, do you?

Rice: No, we do not.

Ackerman: Good for you. It seems that the military has gone around and fired a whole bunch of people who speak foreign languages such as Farsi, Arabic, etc. after they trained them in their foreign language school for 63 weeks and presumably they all passed all kinds of security clearances. Many of them told on themselves and were fired. For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists. They’re very brave with the terrorists. If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they could get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad. The affirmative suggestion I would make is why can’t the State Department look to pick up all those people that were fired from the military because apparently you don’t have a policy and put these three dozen or so Farsi and Arabic people to work doing what your suggesting would cost a lot of money to do in training, etc. because we have them. Can we marry up those two or maybe that’s the wrong word. Can we have some kind of union of those two issues?

Rice: “I’m not aware of the availability of people but will certainly look. What we’re doing right now, we have quadrupled the number of people in the critical languages area. One of the problems we’re trying to deal with, again it’s a budget request this time, is that we’d like to train people to higher levels of competence. Right now because of just needing people in the field, we are getting people to what’s called three-three and then getting them out the door. We’d like to get them to higher language levels but that requires having a number of people that we can train (last word inaudible).

Ackerman: Maybe you might find some of those competent people among those who were recently unemployed over the past several years.

Rice: Yes, we’ll look at it.
 

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