State Department Looking for Linguists - DOD Has Some Spares

During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the State Department budget, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spent a lot of time in her testimony talking about "the foreign language deficit" and how much the government needs Farsi and Arabic speakers.

New York Rep. Gary Ackerman said he believed the State Department might be able to save money by hiring some of the military linguists fired under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy instead of hiring and training new linguists.

"You don't have such a prohibition in your agency, do you?" Ackerman asked.

"No, we do not," Rice said.

"Good for you. Well, it seems that the military has gone around and fired a whole bunch of people who speak foreign languages - Farsi and Arabic, etc.," Ackerman said, adding that after much money and time were spent to train the linguists and after they passed their security tests, the linquists were kicked out for being gay. "Maybe you might find some people among those who are recently unemployed."

"We'll look at it," Rice said.

"For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are of terrorists; they're very brave with terrorists. If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they'd get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad," Ackerman said, receiving some chuckles from the audience.

Ackerman's comments were lauded by the gay and lesbian rights organization Human Rights Campaign, whose spokesman said Ackerman was clearly lampooning the military's unjust policy toward gays.

"It is clear that the congressman was underscoring the ridiculousness of the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy, and how it's hurting our efforts to fight the War on Terror," said spokesman Luis Vizcaino.

"Excluding qualified translators simply because they are gay or lesbian is a disservice to our nation and a threat to our security," he added.