Unfriendly Fire
Page 33
A surgical technician in the navy said it was more important to be “true to [people] at the origins,” so they would not find out later and feel deceived. “I think it would bother them more if you say you’re straight and they find out you’re gay and feel like you should have let them know before,” he said. He explained that some people who remain intolerant of homosexuality prefer to know who is gay so they can feel better able to protect their privacy. He added that the requirement to conceal sexual orientation can distract gays and lesbians from their mission: “I think it hurts the unit itself if you don’t tell who you really are because if you can’t focus on what you need to focus on because you have other things in your head, then you’re wasting time because you’re not putting 100 percent into it.”38
The army JAG officer explained how “don’t tell” shortchanged not only gays and lesbians, but her straight coworkers. “One of the ways I concealed was to become more detached, more cold, which is not a good thing in the military because we’re supposed to be laying our lives down for one another,” she said. “It’s so ingrained in military culture to bond on a social level that it takes away a fundamental stress release and a fundamental bonding experience to have to hide who you really are. Either you become a cold, detached person or you’re a liar. It’s such a disservice to do that to other service members.”39
Austin Rooke, who was trained in counterintelligence, echoed that the policy burdens not only gay troops but members of the force at large. Rooke came out to a few coworkers to a very positive response. But when friends of gay troops know of a soldier’s homosexuality, either through a direct acknowledgment or through informal signs, statements, and innuendo, the straight service members become accomplices. “When you come out to someone,” Rooke said, “you put them in an uncomfortable position, you burden them, because they now have knowledge that you are serving illegally.” This means gay troops are forced to choose between bonding effectively at the cost of burdening their comrades and shutting down as the cost of effective bonding. Rooke said that when he was stationed in Qatar, the gag rule “definitely prevented me from feeling like I could make a connection with the people I was working with.” He struggled with whether or not to come out to his roommate, who he thought might be accepting but who had apparently not been exposed to many gays before. He decided not to tell him he was gay, but recalled a need to have “that kind of human connection when I was away from my support network.”40
Many people do not initially appreciate what the policy will require them to do throughout the duration of their service. As one soldier explained, the policy prohibits gays from revealing or discussing their sexuality even to one another, depriving them of one of the essential sources of support—which other members of minority groups enjoy. He went further, saying the ban effectively hampers all kinds of bonding among members of the same sex. “We’re not allowed to experience any sort of relationship with people of the same gender,” he said, including nonsexual intimacy, which could raise suspicions. “It requires a conscious effort to avoid the situation where that [sexual orientation] would come up,” said another, “or it requires outright deception.”41
But in addition to the misguided rationale for the “don’t ask” and “don’t tell” clauses of the policy, the very concepts are, upon careful thought, nonsensical. “There is no such thing as ‘don’t ask,’” said the army JAG officer, or “don’t tell” for that matter, because the most basic conversations entail questions about friends, lovers, spouses, and family that, if answered fully and honestly, could reveal one’s sexual orientation. Another soldier pointed out that “don’t tell” is never a genuine option. “Using the policy in defense to not answer the question is basically the same as admitting guilt.”42 And even when soldiers faithfully follow the law, it is rarely fully under one’s control to totally conceal one’s sexual orientation, since unconscious codes, signals, and mannerisms frequently mark a person or raise suspicions, thus giving a form of knowledge to straight soldiers who do not know what to do with it.
This difficulty of defining what it truly means to “ask” or “tell” lies at the root of endless problems with the policy. The law requires a discharge (subject to the notorious rebuttable presumption) when a service member “has stated that he or she is a homosexual or bisexual, or words to that effect,” leaving a gray area in the definition of “tell.” As we’ve seen from the string of earlier examples, such action need not be verbal or explicit. One sailor in the Pacific Fleet, for instance, had a female friend in the navy who saw him looking at an attractive guy and said, “I saw you looking.” He blushed and said, “Please don’t tell him.” From that point on, the two interacted honestly as friends, sharing their attractions to men. Did she ask? Did he tell? Another sailor explained the difficulty of concealing sexual orientation even if one conforms to the silence provision: “Some people can just figure things out, especially if they’re from the more liberal states like California, places where they may have been around gay people before.” A senior noncommissioned officer recounted one individual who “didn’t really have any choice but to be openly gay, because he was very effeminate.” The officer said, however, that he was “treated with dignity and respect,” a result he attributed to the service member’s effort to “always go above and beyond and do the best job possible.”43
Of course, you don’t have to be a liberal from California to be able to figure out which of your coworkers might be gay. Senator John McCain, who aggressively grilled gay soldiers and sailors from his seat on the Senate Committee on Armed Services at Nunn’s hearings, said controversially during his 2000 presidential run that he served in the navy with gay men, but he was never told they were gay. How did he know? “Well, I think we know by behavior and by attitudes. I think that it’s clear to some of us when some people have that lifestyle.”44
“DON’T ASK, DON’T tell” is a farce. It is a policy based on ignorance, denial, and deception. Even if it had been properly understood and enforced throughout the ranks, this policy and the spirit behind it would have caused heightened confusion, harassment, deception, mistrust, unit unrest, impaired bonding, and wasted talent. But the reality is that it was not properly enforced. Leaders at all levels (although certainly not all leaders) simply refused to cooperate with the spirit of the Clinton policy: to allow gays and lesbians who kept their identities private to enter and continue to serve in the military. For years, this policy has gone shamelessly unenforced. But it is also unenforceable at its core, relying as it does, on artificial and superficial lines between knowledge and ignorance, conduct and status, utterance and silence. And to the extent that the policy has been run as planned, the damage to service members and the military has been immense. The policy increases stress, lowers morale, impairs the capacity of both gay and straight troops to form trusting bonds with one another, restricts access to support services, and creates a culture of indiscipline by mandating behavior that is virtually impossible to enforce.
9
Brain Drain: Arabic Linguists
ON SEPTEMBER 10, 2001, the U.S. government intercepted two phone calls placed from Afghanistan between Al Qaeda operatives. “Tomorrow is zero hour,” said one of the voices. “The match is about to begin,” came another ominous line. The National Security Agency intercepts millions of messages every hour, but these calls came from sources deemed to be high priority. They were, of course, spoken in Arabic, so they made their way to a translator’s queue, waiting to be interpreted. Unfortunately, in the fall of 2001 our government did not have enough Arabic linguists to translate the messages quickly. The phone calls were not translated until two days later, on September 12, 2001. It was two days too late.1
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed everything. Almost immediately, a national consensus emerged, if only briefly, that nothing should stand in the way of true reform of the nation’s broken intelligence apparatus. Nothing should stop a thorough and efficient reorientation of our nat
ional security perspective, which must immediately be geared toward fending off future terrorist attacks. Nothing, that is, except letting gays in uniform take part in the fight. The story of the ongoing purges of gay soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines with language skills critical to waging the war on terrorism pits political expediency and moral dogma against national security, social scientific research, and common sense. It is a story that shines a spotlight on certain truisms that Americans seem to grasp only when it’s too late, and then to promptly forget until the next time it’s too late: that prejudice is generally self-defeating rather than productive, and that it nearly always has unexpected consequences. But it’s a story that should also be told with the hope—perhaps against our better judgment—that maybe this time we will learn from our mistakes, reorder our priorities, and face significant truths before we further compromise the security of our citizens and the safety of our troops.
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THE SHORTAGE OF language specialists in the intelligence and military forces has been hobbling national defense since the days of the cold war. But between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center, the focus of the armed forces and the intelligence agencies was mainly on Russian language fluency as the essential skill for keeping the country safe from its enemies. Some students had begun to grasp the significance of the Arab world. The number of enrollees in Arabic language courses in colleges and universities nearly doubled between 1998 and 2002, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The month before the 9/11 attacks, the University of Maryland’s National Foreign Language Center warned that the country “faces a critical shortage of linguistically competent professionals across federal agencies and departments responsible for national security.”2
Less than a month after the attacks, a House Intelligence Committee report criticized the nation’s three intelligence agencies—the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency (NSA)—for relying on “intelligence generalists” rather than linguists with expertise in a specific foreign language, culture, and geographical area. The report concluded that “at the NSA and CIA, 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. Written materials can sit for months, and sometimes years, before a linguist with proper security clearances and skills can begin a translation.” Meanwhile, the intelligence agencies poured funds into advertisements, including Internet marketing overseas, to try to lure linguists into the fight against terrorism.3
By the fall of 2002, one year after the attacks, CIA director George Tenet warned that the United States faced a terrorist threat every bit as grave as it did before 9/11. A week later, the Council on Foreign Relations issued an even more sobering report. Despite bipartisan support for intelligence reform, backed by overwhelming public demand for addressing unpreparedness, the study found that “America remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic terrorist attack. In all likelihood, the next attack will result in even greater casualties and widespread disruption to American lives and the economy” than those wrought by 9/11. During the first year of the war in Afghanistan, the United States had sixty-nine intelligence teams on the ground but had a 75 percent shortfall of daily intelligence reports. This meant that no matter the number of troops sent into foreign territory, and despite the billions of dollars being thrown into our military campaigns, a full three-quarters of the data collected about the looming threats from our enemies was not getting processed. A major obstacle to producing the reports, according to an assessment by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, was the shortage of Arabic speakers.4
The problem was not confined to intelligence agencies, but was felt in the armed forces, too. In 2002, the army reported, it could only find forty-two of the eighty-four Arabic linguists it was seeking to hire. In addition to this 50 percent shortage of Arabic experts, it faced a 68 percent shortage of Farsi translators and a 37 percent shortage of Korean experts. According to a GAO study released the same year, the army, along with the FBI, the State Department, and the Commerce Department, failed in 2001 to fill all their jobs that required expertise in Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Farsi, or Russian. The army reported that the “linguist shortfalls affect its readiness to conduct current and anticipated military and other missions.” It said, for instance, that it lacked the linguistic capacity to support the prosecution of two major wars at one time, the baseline requirement of American military planners since the end of the cold war. The GAO study concluded that staff shortages at these agencies “have adversely affected agency operations and compromised U.S. military, law enforcement, intelligence, counterterrorism and diplomatic efforts.” And it stated that shortages in language expertise resulted in “less timely interpretation and translation of intercepted materials possibly related to terrorism or national security threats.”5
Two years after 9/11, the situation had not improved. The shortage of Arabic speakers had become so desperate by 2003 that one of the top Arabic speakers in the Iraqi theater was being used to translate a common housekeeping exchange, taking him away from the critical duties needed to keep U.S. troops safe, mine the Iraqi desert for intelligence, and win over Iraqi civilians. On several occasions, the impact of the shortage was downright treacherous. In the summer of 2003, the Wedding Island Bridge in Baghdad was the site of an explosion targeting U.S. troops. The soldiers, part of the 40th Engineer Battalion of the 2nd Brigade of the army’s 1st Armored Division, had crossed the bridge repeatedly in search of their translator. If the army had been able to hire and retain enough of its own translators, it would have made unnecessary these perilous trips, which ended this time with a land mine explosion that sent shrapnel and bits of road into the windshield and body of the engineers’ Humvee. It also might have prevented tragedies before they occurred. An Arabic document was reportedly found in Kabul before the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, describing a kidnapping plot strikingly similar to the one that ended in his disappearance and murder. It was never translated because of the shortage of Arabic speakers.6
An army report released that year by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, found that “the lack of competent interpreters throughout the theater impeded operations” in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The US Army does not have a fraction of the linguists required.” The report of the 9/11 Commission concluded that the government “lacked sufficient translators proficient in Arabic and other key languages, resulting in significant backlog of untranslated intercepts.” The secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, pleaded that “we need more Arabic-speaking analysts.” A Pentagon advisory panel reported in 2004 that the United States “is without a working channel of communications to the world of Muslims and Islam.” A Justice Department inspector general report that same year found that the government “cannot translate all the foreign language counterterrorism and counterintelligence material it collects,” largely because of inadequate translation capabilities in “languages primarily related to counterterrorism activities” such as Arabic and Farsi.7
In response, President Bush ordered a 50 percent increase in intelligence officers trained in “mission-critical” languages such as Arabic. But the shortage was a problem that could not be cleared up overnight—precisely the reason that preparedness was so important. Despite tens of thousands of responses to post-9/11 calls for more Arabic speakers to join the government’s intelligence efforts, actual hires take time, especially for those positions that require security clearances. Background checks can take six months to a year. By the spring of 2005, Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the United States still had a “broken system.”8
THE U.S. MILITARY is the most powerful fighting force in the history of the world. Its troops are trained to crush the enemy with the sheer strength of superior technological might. Yet the success of these missions relies on one prime ingredient:
intelligence. On the tense streets of Baghdad; in the Sunni strongholds of Ramadi and Falluja, still seething with anti-Western resentment from the errant bomb dropped by a British plane during the first Gulf War; and in the restive outposts of Mosul, where insurgents have mastered the use of car bombs, roadside bombs, and rocket-propelled grenades against American forces, nothing is more vital to staving off casualties and ultimately winning the war than information culled from Arabic-speaking natives. Without it, commanders and their troops are crippled in their efforts to protect American forces, plan attacks against the enemy, and earn the trust and aid of Iraqi citizens. Poor, faulty, or inadequate intelligence plays straight into the hands of guerrilla tactics, as the ignorant behemoth staggers about in the shadows, sets up camp in oblivion, or accidentally strikes civilian targets, further alienating the people whose assistance is critical to winning the war. The astounding amount of money the United States invests in its campaigns and the volume of soldiers risking their lives mean little without knowing when and where and how to deploy.
IN THE MIDST of this confusion, what the nation needed more than anything was Ian Finkenbinder. In 2003, Finkenbinder served an eight-month combat tour with the army’s 3rd Infantry Division, which spearheaded the invasion of Iraq with its “thunder run” to Baghdad. He was tasked with human intelligence gathering, one of the most critical ingredients in the effort to battle the deadly Iraqi insurgency. His job was to translate radio transmissions, interview Iraqi citizens who had information to volunteer, and screen native speakers for possible employment in translation units. His efforts were essential to keeping U.S. soldiers safe and winning support from civilians on the streets of Iraq.9