The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (9 page)

Shortly after Choi’s public admission to being gay, the Department of the Army sent him a letter stating, in part, that “you admitted publicly that you are a homosexual which constitutes homosexual conduct. . . . Your actions negatively affected the good order and discipline of the New York Army National Guard.” Since Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993, 13,500 soldiers, sailors, and Marines have been discharged from the military for similar alleged behavior. Choi could receive an “other than honorable” discharge, losing the health, retirement, educational, and other benefits to which combat veterans are entitled. While Congress acts to remove the restrictions on health insurance for people with “pre-existing conditions,” Choi’s pre-existing conditions, being gay and being honest about it, may be enough to keep him out of the Veterans Affairs health care system for life.

The night before Sunday’s march, President Barack Obama spoke to the Human Rights Campaign, the largest and wealthiest gay-advocacy group: “We should not be punishing patriotic Americans who have stepped forward to serve this country. . . . I will end ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’” He laid out no timetable, however.

After receiving the letter from the Army, Choi wrote an open letter to his commander in chief, Obama. He said: “I have personally served for a decade under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: an immoral law and policy that forces American soldiers to deceive and lie about their sexual orientation. Worse, it forces others to tolerate deception and lying.” U.S. troops in Afghanistan are serving side by side with NATO forces that include openly gay and lesbian troops.

Longtime gay-rights activist Urvashi Vaid, author of
Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation
, is opposed to war and militarism, but told me, “The military is a large employer, and has to commit to not being discriminatory.” She, too, was at the march Sunday, whose turnout surprised many of the mainstream gay organizations, as they hadn’t actively organized it. She said: “First, it’s a generational shift in the LGBT movement. There is a new wave of activism coming up. And it’s gay and straight. That’s a second big change . . . the third shift that’s happening in the LGBT movement is that it’s much more of a multi-issue agenda that is being carried by the people who are marching.” In addition to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the LGBT movement is also intent on repealing the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act, and on achieving marriage equality. This will be a hard fight, Vaid predicts, based on grassroots activism in every congressional district. Challenging discriminatory laws couldn’t be more timely: On the day before Obama’s speech to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay man in New York City was taunted with anti-gay slurs and savagely beaten by two men. He is currently in a coma.

Lt. Dan Choi is still technically a serving officer. Obama could halt proceedings against Choi. Activists contend Obama could stop active enforcement of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell through an executive order. Presidential or congressional action may not come in time to save Choi’s military career. If he loses his health benefits, he has a plan. Choi got a message from an Iraqi doctor whose hospital Choi helped to rebuild while he was there. He said the doctor is “in South Baghdad right now. And he’s seen some of the Internet, YouTube and CNN interviews and other appearances, and he said: ‘Brother, I know that you’re gay, but you’re still my brother, and you’re my friend. And if your country, that sent you to my country, if America, that sent you to Iraq, will discharge you such that you can’t get medical benefits, you can come to my hospital any day. You can come in, and I will give you treatment.’”

Choi ended, “I hope that our country can learn from that Iraqi doctor.”

August 4, 2010

Why Did Obama Fire Dan Choi?

“As we mark the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq,” President Barack Obama said this week, “a grateful America must pay tribute to all who served there.” He should have added “unless you’re gay,” because, despite his rhetoric, weeks earlier the commander in chief fired one of those Iraq vets: Lt. Dan Choi.

Choi was an Iraq War veteran, a graduate of West Point and a trained Arabic linguist. I ran into Choi the day after he received his official discharge. We were at the Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas, a gathering of thousands of bloggers, activists, and journalists.

Though Choi had known the discharge was coming, he was still shaken to the core. He took out his phone and showed me the letter he was emailed.

Choi announced he was gay on national television in March of 2009. He knew the stakes. I asked why he did it. “I came back from Iraq,” he told me, “and I decided that it’s not worth it—I could have died at any moment in the area that I was, in the ‘Triangle of Death.’ Why should I be afraid of the truth of who I am?”

He went on: “I’ve wanted to go back to Iraq and to Afghanistan, but then I thought, ‘If I die in Afghanistan or Iraq, then would my boyfriend be notified? Or would he have to hear about it through
Democracy Now!
or CNN—who would be the one telling him?’ And the fact of the matter is ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ forces our families into the closet and into nonexistence, and that is no way to support our troops or the families that allow them to continue to serve.”

Obama promised during his presidential campaign to repeal the law that allows soldiers like Choi to be fired for being openly gay, the so-called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. The brainchild of the Clinton administration, it has led to the firing of close to 14,000 members of the military.

Obama has instructed Defense Secretary Robert Gates to conduct a survey among members of the military and their families about the potential impact of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Sounds reasonable? Not according to Choi.

“I think it’s absolutely insulting that we are having a survey right now, in this day and age. That the commander in chief [was] the first racial minority to achieve that rank and that position was a signifying moment for all of us, whether we’re racial minorities, whether we’re sexual minorities, whether we’re American citizens or not even yet American citizens, it was an absolute moment of vindication for a lot of people.” Choi, also a proud Korean-American, continued, “Nobody ever polls the soldiers on whether we should go to war or not. Nobody ever says, ‘What do you think about your commander in chief being African-American?’”

It’s difficult to think of Dan Choi as lucky, since the West Point graduate wanted to make the military his career, but being honorably discharged, he gets to keep his benefits. He says that’s not true of many of his peers. “A lot of people have given up quite a hefty sum of benefits, including your medical benefits, your right to go to a VA hospital without paying, if your disability rating is like mine—I’m something like 50 percent disabled from my time in service—I stood to lose all of that as well as scholarship moneys, GI bill and a home loan through the VA programs.”

At the Netroots Nation conference, Democratic leaders tried to convince their progressive base that the Democratic Party truly did represent change. When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took the stage, the moderator handed him Lt. Choi’s West Point ring and said Choi wanted him to keep it. Choi then joined Reid on the stage. Holding the ring, Reid asked Choi, speaking of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, “When we get it passed, you’ll take it back, right?” Choi responded, “I sure will, but I’m going to hold you accountable.”

Obama’s Wars: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Act III

The War on the Public Treasury

June 30, 2010

We Can’t Afford War

“General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts,” began the MoveOn.org attack ad against Gen. David Petraeus back in 2007, after he had delivered a report to Congress on the status of the war in Iraq. George W. Bush was president, and MoveOn was accusing Petraeus of “cooking the books for the White House.” The campaign asked “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” on a full-page ad in the
Washington Post
. MoveOn took tremendous heat for the campaign, but stood its ground.

Three years later, Barack Obama is president, Petraeus has become his man in Afghanistan, and MoveOn pulls the critical Web content. Why? Because Bush’s first war, Afghanistan, has become Obama’s war, a quagmire. The U.S. will eventually negotiate its withdrawal from Afghanistan. The only difference between now and then will be the number of dead, on all sides, and the amount of (borrowed) money that will be spent.

Petraeus’ confirmation to become the military commander in Afghanistan was never in question. He replaces Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who resigned shortly after his macho criticisms of his civilian leadership became public in a recent
Rolling Stone
magazine article.

The statistics for Afghanistan, Obama’s Vietnam, are surging. June, with at least 100 U.S. deaths, is the highest number reported since the invasion in 2001. 2010 is on pace to be the year with the highest U.S. fatalities. Similar fates have befallen soldiers from the other, so-called coalition countries. Petraeus is becoming commander not only of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, but of all forces, as the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is run by NATO.

U.S. troops, expected to rise to 98,000 this year, far outnumber those from other nations. Public and political support in many of those countries is waning.

Journalist Michael Hastings, who wrote the
Rolling Stone
piece, was in Paris with McChrystal to profile him. What didn’t get as much attention was Hastings’ description of why McChrystal was there:

“He’s in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies—to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany’s president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.”

The whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org, which received international attention after releasing leaked video from a U.S. attack helicopter showing the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and a Reuters cameraman and his driver in Baghdad, has just posted a confidential CIA memo detailing possible public relations strategies to counter waning public support for the Afghan War. The agency memo reads: “If domestic politics forces the Dutch to depart, politicians elsewhere might cite a precedent for ‘listening to the voters.’ French and German leaders have over the past two years taken steps to preempt an upsurge of opposition but their vulnerability may be higher now.”

I just returned from Toronto, covering the G-20 summit and the protests. The gathered leaders pledged, among other things, to reduce government deficits by 50 percent by 2013. In the U.S., that means cutting $800 billion, or about 20 percent of the budget. Two Nobel Prize–winning economists have weighed in with grave predictions. Joseph Stiglitz said, “There are many cases where these kinds of austerity measures have led to. . . recessions into depressions.” And Paul Krugman wrote: “Who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.”

In order to make the cuts promised, Obama would have to raise taxes and cut social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Or he could cut the war budget. I say “war budget” because it is not to be confused with a defense budget. Cities and states across the country are facing devastating budget crises. Pensions are being wiped out. Foreclosures are continuing at record levels. A true defense budget would shore up our schools, our roads, our towns, our social safety net. The U.S. House of Representatives is under pressure to pass a $33 billion Afghan War supplemental this week.

We can’t afford war.

July 21, 2010

Deficit Doves

Getting out of the red is the new black. Deficit hawks have swooped down on the U.S. budget. This week, they attacked unemployment benefits.

Ultimately, they are going after Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, the venerable programs once considered untouchable “third rails” of U.S. politics. These have been replaced by a new third rail, the defense budget. To really deal with annual deficits and a surging national debt, we are going to need to cut military spending.

We need some deficit doves.

First, let’s call it what it is: the war budget. The government formed the Department of War in 1789, and only in 1949 renamed it the Department of Defense. The war budget President Barack Obama recently sent to Congress, for fiscal year 2011, is $548.9 billion, with an additional $33 billion, which is the 2010 supplemental that is currently being debated in Congress, and $159.3 billion more “to support ongoing overseas contingency operations, including funds to execute the President’s new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Recall, “overseas contingency operations” is how the Obama administration rebranded the “global war on terror.”

This is just the publicly available war budget. There is also a “black budget,” kept secret, for clandestine operations that former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair revealed was about $75 billion. As the
Washington Post
exposed this week, the post-9/11 security state has grown into a massive, unmanageable and largely privatized “enterprise.”