From The New Republic, excerpt (subscritpion):

CANNING GAY LINGUISTS.

Stonewalled
by Nathaniel Frank
        

When Ian Finkenbinder served an eight-month combat tour with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq in 2003, he was tasked with human intelligence-gathering, one of the most critical ingredients in the Army's effort to battle the deadly Iraqi insurgency. It is also essential to the U.S. goal of winning support from the Iraqi street. Finkenbinder's job as a cryptologic linguist was to translate radio transmissions, to interview Iraqi citizens who had information to volunteer, and to screen native speakers for possible employment in translation units.

Finkenbinder was a rare and coveted commodity. Having attended the Army's elite Defense Language Institute (DLI) at the Presidio of Monterey, he graduated in the fall of 2002 with proficiency in Arabic at a time when the United States was scrambling to remedy a dire shortage of linguists specializing in Arabic, Farsi, and other tongues critical to the war on terrorism.

So it's not surprising that, according to Finkenbinder, his company commander was "distraught" last month at the prospect of having to start discharge proceedings against him just before the 3rd Infantry, which spearheaded the Iraqi invasion with its "thunder run" to Baghdad, was scheduled to redeploy for a second tour. But he had no choice. The Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gay troops makes no exceptions for linguists, and Finkenbinder had revealed he is gay.
        
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In November 2002, I reported in The New Republic that--despite the importance of trained Arabic speakers to waging the war against terrorism and the critical shortage of these skilled translators in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies--the military fired seven Arabic language specialists from DLI earlier that fall for being gay or lesbian ("Perverse," November 18, 2002). It also booted speakers of Farsi, Korean, and other languages critical to combating the emerging global threats facing the United States.

As Finkenbinder's story illustrates, the Pentagon continues to dismiss trained linguists--people whose skills are desperately needed in Iraq and elsewhere around the world--for being gay. In fact, newly obtained data from the Department of Defense reveals that these firings were far more widespread than previously known. Between 1998 and 2004, the military discharged 20 Arabic and six Farsi language speakers under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The new data are not broken down by year, but additional figures from other reports suggest that about half the Arabic discharges came after September 11. The data were obtained from the Pentagon following a Freedom of Information Act request by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, a think tank at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I work, and the office of Massachusetts Democratic Representative Marty Meehan, a vocal critic of the ban on gays in the military, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee. (...)

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I should think the very thought of canning linguists would make Bush blanche. AHJ