Don't Ask Don't Tell - For How Much Longer?

International News, By Christian Taylor, 3rd February, 2010

The highest-ranking uniformed officer in the US military has told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today that he thinks the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell ban should be lifted.

Admiral Mike Mullen, [pictured] chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that repealing the 1993 ban on gays serving openly was “the right thing to do”. This makes him the most senior officer yet to publicly speak in favour of such a move.

While Mullen said that he was “speaking for [himself] and [himself] only”, he did say that it was troubling to have a policy in place that asked people to “lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell allows gays and lesbians to serve in the military so long as they remain in the closet and remain celibate. If they are outed by someone else, they can be dismissed.

Defence Secretary Robert Gates said that he was ready to follow orders from Barack Obama on the matter.

“The question before us is not whether the military prepares to make this change but how we best prepare it for it. We’ve received our orders from the commander in chief and we are moving out accordingly,” said Gates.

Some committee members who were present expressed their frustrations, saying that the policy has been “successful for two decades” and that the change comes at a time of “already tremendous stress and strain”.

However, the policy’s so called “success” really depends on where you’re standing. Last year, the ban came under fire when August Provost, a black and openly gay seaman, was found dead at Camp Pendleton, Virginia, on June 30. According to his family he had long been the victim of homophobic bullying, but could not tell superiors for fear of losing his job.

Last year reports emerged that an American naval officer had been subjected to more than two years of abuse at his base in Bahrain after his colleagues suspected that he was gay. When Petty Officer Third Class Joseph Rocha’s colleagues first suspected he was gay they hog-tied him to a chair and pushed him, still tied to the chair, into a dog kennel full of faeces. Rocha alleged that they also fed him dog food, forced him to simulate oral sex with a man more than 30 times on video tape and they bent him over a desk and hit him as hard as they could.

An official military investigation found that others were also similarly abused, citing 93 incidents in total, with the types of abuse including throwing hard rubber balls at the groin, allowing a dog to attack a sex worker, and handcuffing two female sailors to a bed and forcing them to simulate lesbian sex on video.

According to an NBC report, the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy has resulted in the dismissal of at least 12,500 military personnel over the last 15 years.