The Washington Post reports:
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.
Gee, maybe they should hire some of the more than 50 Arab linguists who have been thrown out of the US military for being gay in order to satisfy the anti-gay right.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
You gotta hand it to the military for having their priorities straight. With a long track record of white supremacist groups stealing military equipment and giving it to their KKK buddies, they still won't do anything to break up a network of such people operating at military bases around the…
Bleu Copas is the latest in a long line of arabic-speaking military personnel - something we have an enormous shortage of - to be discharged for being gay. ABC News covered his story, and the video can be viewed here. He makes a very important point. At a time when the military has been scrambling…
In my post yesterday about gay marriage, I said that no one had yet made a coherent and compelling argument for why gay marriage will harm traditional marriages at all. A commenter named jazzhouse thinks he's come up with such an argument and I thought I'd move it up here to answer it so it doesn't…
Both Nature and the LA Times this week have articles cautioning against labeling animal-rights extremists "terrorists" in the US. The justification that they're using is that the groups in question, ELF and ALF, are not terrorists because so far they've only destroyed property, and haven't managed…
Gee, maybe they should hire some of the more than 50 Arab linguists who have been thrown out of the US military for being gay in order to satisfy the anti-gay right.
But you're assuming that security is more important than pandering to the RR base...check your premises.
Hopefully, the gay Arabic translators the military cut loose will answer the call.
I wonder how many qualified applicants failed the polygraph screening (the "Are you lucky enough that the machine doesn't arbitrarily kick you out?" test).
I really have to wonder what purpose is being served by purging the military of important talent for some utterly trivial and inconsequential reason like this? Certainly there is some behind-the-scenes benefit to someone somewhere, but what could it possibly be that trumps national security? It boggles my humble little mind. And yet I can hope that these drummed out soldiers still have enuf patriotic spirit to offer their talents to other security aparatus (like the FBI) even though, at times, the country doesn't seem to want them.
Geez, who is being served by this backward priority system?