Obama Lies, American Soldiers Die
June 30, 2011

The facts about two important military policy decisions, both of which compromise our armed forces' ability to do their jobs and which put American soldiers' lives at further risk, have finally begun to emerge. Both the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the military drawdown in Afghanistan were sold to lawmakers and the American public through the Obama administration's lying in order to achieve its apparent ends: weakening America's military strength and compromising our chances for military success.

Regarding the first: What had not been known until very recently is that the repeal of Clinton's Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell policy was engineered by the Obama administration through its leaking of lies which it fabricated about the results of a survey of military personnel concerning the probable effects of such a repeal.

It was necessary to lie about survey results because even the White House understood, based on preliminary information it had gathered, that our military universally felt that overturning the policy would be highly damaging to the American military.

The Obama administration, as it has done so often, simply lied to members of Congress.

This egregious political malfeasance was revealed in a report by the Defense Department Inspector General (IG). The IG's analysis found that the General Counsel of the Defense Department wrote and circulated to federal legislators and others a false "executive summary" of the Comprehensive Review Working Group (CWRG) report that, at the time, had not even been completed.

It was based on this phony overview that Republican Senators were convinced that the overturn of Don't Ask Don't Tell was not considered harmful to the military. The problem was that, first, the survey of some 400,000 military personnel had not even been conducted when the executive summary was released, and second, when it was finally conducted and tabulated, the survey revealed that the military was overwhelmingly opposed to the repeal.

The false information perpetuated by the administration was that 70 percent of those military personnel surveyed thought there would be no problems connected with repeal of the nearly-20-year-old policy. This, again, before the survey had been conducted and in direct opposition to the eventual results, in which, as Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness (CMR), found, "[n]early 60% of respondents in the Marine Corps and in Army combat arms said they believed there would be a negative impact on their unit's effectiveness in this context; among Marine combat arms the number was 67%."

The fact that "gay identity" has come to the forefront as an important issue in our culture has implications for our military even beyond the fact that the administration committed what amounts to perjury in obtaining the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell by having its representatives lie to legislators.

But members of the U.S. Senate are certainly not the only people Obama has lied to regarding his military policy. It's coming out that his decision to draw down troops in Afghanistan was not, as the administration has repeatedly stated, one of the options presented to the Commander-in-Chief by his military advisors.

General John Allen testified before a Senate Armed Services Committee that the president lied about the choices he was presented with regarding the options for a troop drawdown in Afghanistan.

In fact, contrary to the administration's insistence, the option the president "chose" was not presented to him as one of the possibilities. In other words, Obama ignored the advice of his military advisors, then lied about doing so.

When asked if the drawdown Obama decided to pursue was one of the options given to the president, General Allen was very clear: "It was not," he said.

The president's decision to withdraw 30,000 American troops during the summer and fall months of next year means that during the peak fighting season in Afghanistan, American soldiers will find themselves with significantly reduced personnel resources and at much greater risk.

Both General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have testified that the choice represented a "more aggressive" strategy than they would have recommended, despite the administration's insistence to the contrary.

The CMR's Donnelly has called for a full senatorial investigation into the false pretenses on which the administration obtained passage of the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The same should be done regarding the Afghanistan drawdown.

Unnecessarily increasing the dangers our soldiers face should never be an option for a president, let alone a choice arrived at through perpetrating lies.