Iraq is an inherently dangerous place. While John McCain and his associates love-or at least they did- love to tout the success of the escalation it is not any sane person’s idea of safe. It is even less safe for one special type of person. For those who act as indigenous translators for the American military the danger is extreme. The San Francisco Chronicle recently told the story of one such man, Travis. Travis’ story is one that tells of the real Iraq and not the one contemplating a Disneyland Theme Park.

This letter, in today's New York Times, says it all, but. . . :

November 3, 2007
Letter: Welcome the Translators

To the Editor:

Re "Help Wanted" (editorial, Oct. 31):

Translators, interpreters and others who have helped United States troops and diplomats now want to resettle in the United States. They speak many strategically important languages of the region. The United States does not have an adequate number of interpreters and translators who are proficient in these languages.

Therefore, we need them. Q.E.D.

We need their contribution, and they have demonstrated their loyalty and should not be left to fend for themselves.

Oswald Werner - Albuquerque, Nov. 1, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/...

       Jon Soltz of VoteVets and John Aravosis of AMERICAblog appeared on Paula Zahn’s show on CNN this evening.  Waiting to watch it, I figured the topic would just be another segment on how best to end the war.  Boy was I wrong.
       Instead, the segment centered around the recent news that 40 members of the House are demanding a hearing over why Republican traitors have allowed the Defense Department to fire 58 Arabic translators for being gay, in a time when the military they broke is already suffering from a severe shortage of such qualified linguists.

From the New Yorker:  Betrayed, by George Packer.

Link to the Article

This article is a(nother) heartbreaking story about the lives our President has destroyed; this time, it is Iraqis that have risked everything to assist the US Government's efforts.

Fair Use excerpts and an audio link after the break...

Gen. Pace, you can take a big step to begin to make up for your insensitive remarks about gays by doing the practical thing: Resupply our armed forces with the Arabic/Farsi linguists it desperately needs -- including decorated sergeant Bleu Copas, who volunteered out of patriotism after 9/11 and who was fired despite having the indispensible task of "helping translate intercepted messages from possible terrorists."  First, from Keith Olbermann's Countdown newsletter today:

Senior aides to the chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday that Marine Gen. Peter Pace won't apologize for calling homosexuality immoral - an opinion that gay advocacy groups deplored. "General Pace's comments are outrageous, insensitive and disrespectful to the 65,000 lesbian and gay troops now serving in our armed forces," the advocacy group Servicemembers Legal Defense Network said in a statement on its Web site. (MSNBC)

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has only six (6) fluent Arabic speakers out of 33 who speak Arabic.

I see the tide rising now!   Finally some reason begins to dawn in politics with the discussion turning to COMMUNICATION, which is critical while we are at war. Hmmm... a little late in coming, but hey, ya know, the "Wizard of Rove" all that...
So the firing of translators  according to CBS, which still uses past figures, perhaps hurts the war on terror. Oh, and suddenly now it seems that there were more gay translators discharged than were cited. Instead it seems, almost 30 Middle East Language specialists   and at least 800  
 other critical job specialists have been discharged for being gay.

Um... how exactly does is this helping in fighting the War on Terror?

You are over 10 times more likely to choose a human at random across the planet that speaks Arabic than you are to find an Arabic speaker in the FBI.

FBI Agents Still Lacking Arabic Skills
33 of 12,000 Have Some Proficiency

Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics.

Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words -- including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test -- just 1 percent of the FBI's 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show.

Yes, I think this sums up the war on terror.

To fight this war we need to remove the right of habeas corpus, we need to destroy our moral standing and allow torture, we need to allow warrantless wire tapping - but hire more Arabic speakers - you freaking kidding me?!!??!!

For what it's worth, here's my mull. There's no way that this was done for security reasons. First of all, we don't have enough translators to translate all of these communications. For heavens sake, we don't have enough to translate the legally obtained intercepts.
Secondly, obtaining a warrant from the special, secret court takes less than a day. The NSA can also obtain a warrant after the intercepting has begun, in exigent circumstances. So, any vaguely legitimate reason is easy to make legal by obtaining a warrant. Without a warrant, anything obtained is inadmissable in a prosecution.
This leads to my thought that this surveillance was not related to the prosecution of the war on terrah. I'm old enough to remember Nixon, and the advice of Deep Throat to follow the money.
My hunch is that this was being used to spy on Democratic contributors. Hastert's goofy remarks about Soros are a tip-off, but my gut feeling is that this is the direction the spying went.

You have to read this story, which contains some of the sharpest reporting yet on specific instances of cultural incompetence in Iraq. Just staggering. And we're firing Arabic linguists in the military because they're gay?