I don't care how much you hate gays; our nation's security is more important than pandering to the far right. Bush kicked out trained and patriotic Americans who have the valuable skill of speaking Middle Eastern dialects. Why? Because they're gay. And when those soldiers tried to get placed in other branches of the government where their skills are desperately needed -- such as the FBI -- Bush sent them packing.
Bush doesn't care if this endangers national security. For all we know, the Paris address of Osama Bin Laden or info on the next 9-11 or the next 7-7 could be buried in our files untranslated and we wouldn't know. Mind you, these translators go in to work, sit at a cubicle and go home at night, so we're not even talking about combat troops sharing living quarters. Anyone who cared about this country would order the military to let these people serve their country and place our nation's defense ahead of blind hate. And now onto the absurd situation at the FBI that inpsired this rant.
We've known for years that our intelligence units are piling up emails, transcripts from phone conversation taps, letters and literally millions of pieces of info all in Middle Eastern languages few speak and even fewer are learning. And the backlog is growing. Bush's lackeys were grilled by a Senate committee today.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's backlog of untranslated terrorism intelligence doubled last year, and the time it takes the bureau to hire translators has grown longer, officials said Wednesday....2009. 2009!! Bush was President when this country suffered the worst attack on our soil from a foreign power in history. And he's going to spend EIGHT YEARS in the White House without even being able to update the computer system of the FBI. How incompetent does Bush have to be before people wake up?
The F.B.I. "has no assurance" that some 8,300 hours of untranslated material does not include information that could be critical to terrorism investigations.
In addition, the bureau told the committee that its long-delayed effort to overhaul its computer system and allow agents to search terrorism files more easily would not be completed until 2009 at the earliest.
Two of the F.B.I.'s most pressing problems - its computer capabilities and its ability to translate terrorism material - have continued to languish, and in some respects have worsened....
The F.B.I. was not the only counterterrorism agency that came under fire at Wednesday's Judiciary Committee hearing.
At the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, a program manager who runs the information sharing environment office - responsible for linking federal, state and local offices to combat terrorism - told the committee that he had only one full-time employee and two contractors, some seven months after the directorate was created.
If Bush were President when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he'd still be trying to translate documents and be PLANNING to pump up the military and maybe focus on the war in 1946...after the Nazis had invaded London and the Japanese invaded Hawaii.
REVISED DIG (courtesty of threader cervantes): If Bush were President when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he would have invaded Mexico.
Every day that Bush refuses to put those gay translators back to work is another day Bush endangers our country unnecessarily. When Bush refuses to do EVERYTHING to make this country safer, he is putting our troops, our cities, our harbors and our way of life at greater risk.
