A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Nineteen

See the full calendar here.

A thought on DADT

There's been a lot of talk about 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' lately, thanks to the recent Congressional vote. This being Memorial Day, I'd like to share a few thoughts on the subject.

Specifically, I keep hearing misunderstandings about to what repealing DADT means. The core of the issue is this:

Repealing DADT will not allow gay people to serve in a hitherto straight military. Instead, it will merely allow formally closeted gay people to serve openly in the military.

This is a vital distinction, especially in light of some of the bizarre garbage (read at your own risk) that has been written about DADT.

Gay people are serving in the military, and have done so for years. In fact, allowing gays to serve was the entire point of Don't Ask, Don't Tell's creation. It was a compromise, put in place to slightly shield gay people from discovery while still technically not allowing them to serve. (A ridiculous contradiction, of course). In other words, the military in no way thinks that being gay prevents someone from being a good soldier.

Repealing DADT, then, is not really about gay people. After all, a gay person is still the same person, whether they're out or not. It's about straight people's reaction to gay people. It's the Department of Defense saying, "We believe that gay people are fine, but we're not sure about everyone else's response." (I'm simplifying here, of course, but that's the basic issue.)

I've heard any number of people, many of them active or former members of the military, who seem to think that DADT is keeping all gay people out of the military, that letting gay people in will somehow make the military weak, or (like in the article linked above) that there are huge numbers of gay people waiting to assault people, and that DADT is the only thing stopping it.

DADT is not any of this. Its repeal would simply allow gay military personnel to be honest and truthful about themselves.

So, if you know someone (especially a member of the military, as the recent bill relies on a DOD study) who might not understand what DADT is really about, please let them know. Surely the sacrifice - lives, identities, and more - of LGBT servicemembers is worth that much.

(Crossposted on Constant Thoughts)

Part 674 in an infinite-part series about how the GOP is attempting to become a cadre of evil super-villains

H/T Feministe

Women in Combat

Really interesting article in the NY Times today about women in the military, and their increasing roles in combat.

The article is accompanied by an equally compelling video essay.

What do you think about women in combat roles?

I don't get it...

Lt. Dan Choi served his country proudly in the Iraq war after graduating from West Point. He's a leader---groomed as such at the country's top military university. So after all this, why did the military administrative board of the New York National Guard recommend he be discharged? Because he stood up and proudly represented who he is---a gay man. However, as an OPENLY gay man who is active in the military, Choi violated the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and stands to lose some, if not all, of his veterans benefits.

So President Clinton thought it would be a good idea to not allow recruiters to ask if a person's sexual orientation as part of the military's admission process. Unfortunately, he also thought it was a good idea for any gay person in the military to keep it quiet, forcing them into a closet with a padlock on it. And now, it's sketchy as to whether or not Obama will repeal the act as promised when running for election.

Let's get right down to it. As a person drowning in the military culture (entire family is in and/or retired), I must stand up and applaud Lt. Choi. He stayed true to who he is AND served his country. He is to be honored, not ridiculed, for his service, leadership, and courage to fight a seemingly endless war. Thank him for having the balls to fight instead of sitting on your high horses, glad that your sons and daughters aren't over there fighting (I'm talking to you, members of Congress). And, for Pete's sake, quit trying to govern someone else's bedroom and find out what's going on in your own! (I'm talking to you, endless line of political figures that sleep with anything in a skirt EXCEPT for your wife.)

Get rid of "don't ask, don't tell" and focus on the bigger picture. Trust me, I've asked the Korean war veterans, the Vietnam war veterans, the Operation Desert Storm veterans, the Bosnia conflict veterans, AND the Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans in my family and they could care less if the girl or guy next to them is gay...as long as they have their backs and make sure everybody makes it home alive, nobody cares.

Torture: Just for the Fun of it

Part of me is unclear on what we're actually talking about in the "torture debate." But I'm becoming convinced that we actually DO know—and the position taken by many Americans is chilling.

As if we didn't know this, the latest declassified information reveals that torture orders came directly from the office of former Vice President Dick Cheney. These orders came despite the fact that Cheney and the rest of the sadistic Bush administration had been warned such tactics were ineffective. These orders came despite the fact that not one Neocon believed there was truly a link between Sadaam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. (Well, maybe W. thought so, bless his heart.) These orders came precisely because Cheney knew that he needed an excuse for an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation. So that waterboarding thing, eh? That's known for getting people to say anything. Let's try that, say, 183 times this month and see what happens.

But nothing happened—no information that was helpful came out of those simulated drownings. Not one shred of useable intelligence was produced after six of these sessions a day for what must have been a very long month—in United States custody. We knew this would happen. We knew this because Cheney's torture script was based on the military training program Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which was designed to help downed American pilots resist torture. SERE came out interrogation methods used by the Chinese during the Korean War to elicit false confessions from American prisoners for propaganda purposes. For essentially the same sinister purposes, the Bush administration ordered the SERE program reverse-engineered by psychologists working within a joint Army and CIA command and renamed "enhanced interrogation methods."

Military and law enforcement professionals repeatedly warned against the application of SERE tactics, but Senate reports confirm that their use was urged by top Bush administration figures desperate to link Al Qaeda and Iraq. The Senate report notes that SERE-based interrogation techniques were presented to Guantanamo personnel in September of 2002, despite the objections of instructors from Fort Bragg. In an interview with the Army’s Inspector General, Army psychiatrist Major Charles Burney said "interrogation tactics that rely on physical pressures or torture…do not tend to get you accurate information or reliable information." According to Burney, instructors repeatedly stressed that harsh interrogations don’t work and that the information gleaned "is strongly likely to be false."

So what in the hell could have led Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, to praise the henchmen who used these techniques? Manically relieved that Democrat Nancy Pelosi has been charged with knowing that torture was being used on detainees as early as 2003, Bond nearly tripped over a flag in his rush to condemn the Hose Speaker. In response to Pelosi's bold-faced claim that the CIA lied to Congress, Bond said: "It’s outrageous that a member of Congress would call our terror-fighters liars. Instead of prosecuting or persecuting, our country should be supporting our intelligence professionals who work to keep us safe.”

I don't doubt that Pelosi is lying. I don't doubt that important documents remain classified today because they reveal the extent of many Democrats' knowledge and endorsement of torture. This is the sort of deplorable response that a child would know better than to try and pull. You don't cover up injustice. And when the rest of the world is watching, you really can't.

Just what is at stake here? Well, not valuable intelligence that will keep Americans safe. We know that sort of thing isn't a byproduct of torture. What we are seeing is a segment of the US population articulate a preference for violence and state-sponsored persecution. Forty two percent of Americans think that there are cases in which the U.S. should consider using torture against terrorism suspects. Almost half of my neighbors have the will to use pain, fear, and overpowering brutality to get what they want. Oh, wait—given what we know about the SERE program's ineffectiveness, those who still support decisions to use torture prefer to inflict pain and suffering EVEN IF it fails to get them a damned thing. They'd do it just for fun.

We will regret it if we don't deal with the perpetrators of US-backed torture techniques. No domestic issue is worth turning our backs on gross injustices committed by Americans. Hoarding "political capital" cannot dissuade the Obama administration from seeking the swiftest, harshest punishment for those who want to bully the rest of the world. If we don't police our own, it will be done in ways even less to our liking.

Military women

Echnide has a great post up about Specialist Monica Brown, who is only the second(!) woman since World War II to receive a Silver Star for valor. Brown was recently interviewed on CBS's 60 Minutes:



Echnide draws her readers' attention primarily to a part of the interview where one of the saved men makes clear how he feels about women in combat, despite the fact that he probably owes his life to Brown:

But both of those men, Smith and Spray, declined to give 60 Minutes an interview. When we asked why, Smith said flat out women have no business being on the front line. The men who did talk to us did not feel that way, and said Brown performed as well as any man on the battlefield.

Seriously? This is kind of thing where there's really not much more to say than "Fuck you." She saved your life. Do you really wish she hadn't been there?

Thankfully, most of Brown's fellow soldiers are more open-minded (at least those interviewed by 60 Minutes), although a few obviously had no qualms implying that Brown may have only gotten her medal because she's a woman:

But these men all questioned whether Brown acted any more heroically than the men that day, and they suggested she may have been awarded her Silver Star because she is a woman.

"People ask, you know, like, 'Was she a superhero? Did she do anything, you know, super woman, super heroic?' No, she did her job," Best says. "And she did a very, very good job doing it. Now, that fact that she was 18 and, you know, a female and all, you know, that adds something to it."

This excuse (the reverse sexism or reverse racism excuse) is used for everything nowadays and it is so tiresome. They get us coming and going. Women aren't [insert adjective here] enough to [insert traditionally male activity here], but if a woman does something extraordinary and gets recognition for it, she clearly only got that recognition because she's a woman. I mean, no one accuses men of falsely gleaned privilege(s) only bestowed because of their gender.

But isn't that a lot closer to the truth?