"At the time there was such a witch hunt going on," Clinton said at the event co-sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign and the Logo cable channel, on which it aired live. Pointing to Eric Alva, a Marine sergeant in the audience who was the first American service member wounded in Iraq in 2003, she said, "Fifteen years ago he could have been both refused the opportunity to serve... and threatened with criminal action if he didn't reveal names."

But academics who study gays in the military and the leading organization that represents gay and lesbian service members do not think that Don't Ask, Don't Tell, implemented in the first year of President Bill Clinton's administration, was an improvement.

"We do, of course, disagree that Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a step forward in the first place, but the important thing is that as commander-in-chief she would support repeal and that is a position that we are happy she is taking," said Steve Ralls, director of communications at the Washington-based Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN).

Senator Clinton, who wants to end the ban entirely, was correct in one aspect. The "witch hunt" atmosphere has eased significantly though that shift started prior to 1993.

According to a 1992 report from the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO), there were 472 criminal investigations into allegations of homosexual conduct in the military in 1990. That was down by nearly 50 percent over 1986 when there were 907 such investigations.

"Certainly before 1993 there was a long history of witch hunts and fishing expeditions in the military," Ralls said. "That has decreased in recent years, but has not disappeared entirely... It is not unusual for SLDN to hear of cases that involve witch hunts or fishing expeditions a couple of times a year."

Discharges today are typically handled administratively and it is "very, very rare" that gay or lesbian service members are charged with crimes or investigated, according to Ralls.

"The criminal investigations have gone down, the witch hunts have gone down, and those are all good things, but I would not describe the policy as a good step forward," he said. "The real step forward will be when gays and lesbians can serve openly."

Discharges have continued. Nearly 12,000 gay men and lesbians have been booted from the military since 1993. There were 17,000 such discharges between 1980 and 1990, according to the GAO report.

Aaron Belkin, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego and director of the Palm Center, a think tank that studies gays in the military, said that Don't Ask, Don't Tell may have done more harm than good.

"On the one hand, Senator Clinton is correct in that witch hunts for the most part disappeared," he said. "On the other hand, there's a lot of evidence that Don't Ask, Don't Tell made things worse... If you look at the window kind of right before the policy and right after the policy, things got worse."

Between 1980 and 1990, the highest number of discharges came in 1982 at 1,998. By 1992, discharges fell to 708. The lowest number - 617 - came in 1994, but they climbed to 1,241 in 2000, Bill Clinton's last full year in the White House, and hit a peak at 1,273 in 2001. Discharges fell to 742 in 2005.

When Bill Clinton agreed to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy after promising to end the ban altogether, that sent a "symbolic message," Belkin said.

"The fact that the White House caved and didn't really sink the necessary capital into the fight signaled that it was open season on gays and lesbians not just in the military, but in America," he said. "Clinton didn't really do what he needed to do to show that he was the new sheriff in town."

Prior to 1993, the ban was in place only through an executive order. Following a brutal debate over the policy, in which Bill Clinton lost key Democrats, most prominently Sam Nunn, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, it was enshrined in federal law and can now only be removed by Congress with approval by the president.

Asked during the debate why she had not introduced legislation to repeal the ban since arriving in the Senate in 2001, Clinton said, "I think the very simple answer is we didn't have a chance in a Republican Congress with George Bush as president."

That will change with Democrats in control of Congress and, in 2009, the presidency, she said.

"We're talking now about what steps we can take to sort of lay the ground work," Clinton said. "I think we will lay the ground work and then when I'm president we'll get it done."

By By: DUNCAN OSBORNE From Gay City News