The last time we heard from Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell he was busy lying to us last May, claiming that the Pentagon was already working on the details of the implementation of a Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal. And I quote, from May 22, 2009:
"Although this will require changes to the law, the Secretary and Chairman are working to address the challenges associated with implementation of the President's commitment."
Right. It took the Secretary and the Chairman eight and a half months to figure out that they needed a study, which they announced a few weeks ago. The past eight months DOD has been holding meeting after meeting to decide that they want a study. I'd love to see the notes of all those meetings, they must be fascinating.
Gates: How about a study?
Mullen: Sure.
Basically, Morrell lied to us. It doesn't take eight months to come up with the idea of having a study to defer repeal for yet another year. Had Morrell been telling the truth, had Gates and Mullen been working on the details of implementation eight months ago, they'd have almost been done by now, and we'd be able to fully repeal the legislation.
With that in mind,
today we hear from Mr. Morrell yet again, this time to throw cold water on the notion of a DADT moratorium:
Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who chairs the Armed Services Committee and agrees with Obama that gays should be able to serve openly, has suggested a possible compromise — a moratorium suspending discharges of gays from the military under the current policy.
Such a moratorium could be added to legislation authorizing defense programs as it moves through Congress in the coming months, Levin told Reuters earlier this week.
[Pentagon spokesman Geoff] Morrell said Gates agreed with top brass that it would be a “mistake” to pass a moratorium before the review is completed. He said the proposal amounted to a “repeal by another name.”
Of course, SLDN and Servicemembers United don't want a moratorium either - they want a full repeal. But the fact that the Pentagon is coming out against a moratorium means that the White House isn't helping Levin to even get the moratorium. We already knew that the White House wasn't helping Levin get DADT repealed this year. But now they're not even helping Levin throw us a less-than-adequate bone.
Make no mistake, I'm dead set against a moratium. It's a sneaky way to get the President off the hook by putting a hold on full repeal, just in time for the Democrats to lose the House next November, or at the very least, lose enough seats in the House and Senate to make them even more gun-shy on our issues than they already are. But it's rather horrifying that things are so screwed up in the White House that they're not even helping us with the cop-out position, let alone with their promise to get DADT repealed this year.
So where is HRC, which told us that everything was on track just two weeks ago, even though SLDN, Nathaniel Frank from the Palm Center, Senator Levin, Barney Frank and staffers in the House and Senate all have now publicly said that the administration isn't showing the leadership it needs to show on DADT repeal? Everything is not on track, and groups like HRC and the Center for American Progress, which we only recently learned has been at the center of HRC's "work" on this issue in the guise of their staffer Winnie Stachelberg (a former HRC staffer), are going to be held accountable if they continue to claim that everything is going well while the White House so obviously undercuts the effort to repeal DADT. It's almost as if HRC and CAP are intentionally lying to America's gay community and our straight allies, trying to convince us that everything is moving ahead swimmingly, when they know it's not. That would be an unfortunate turn of events for both organizations, and their donors.
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