At a hearing with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Queens Rep. Gary Ackerman yesterday slammed the Pentagon for firing Middle East translators who were gay - and cracked jokes about a "platoon of lesbians" in Baghdad. Ackerman, a senior Democratic member of the House International Relations Committee, was questioning Rice at a hearing about the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays. He accused the Pentagon of firing military linguists fluent in Arabic and in the Iranian language Farsi who turned out to be gay. "For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are...