Yesterday I linked to a post by DavidNYC that showed us that that newest investigation into intelligence failures before Iraq suggested that our military’s antidiluvean anti-gay policies were harming national security. As our own Binky Rasmussen noted in a comment, the “Primary Sources” section of the May issue of The Atlantic has more on this issue - and the numbers they have are so troubling that I think merit another post on this matter. They report these facts contained in a GAO report: the Defense Department may have had to spend $95 million to recruit and train replacements for the gays pushed out of the service; 757 of those pushed out had a “critical occupation” like voice interceptor or translator; and 322 of them had knowledge of important languages like Arabic, Farsi and Korean. As Binky noted, there's a lot we still don't know about this. But what we do know is extremely troubling. Keep these numbers in mind (in addition to things like our lack of a response to North Korea reprocessing nuclear fuel, and our frightening policies related to Pakistan) the next time you hear someone say that the president is doing all he can to protect national security.
Posted by armand at April 2, 2005 10:54 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics