White workforce 'hampering GCHQ anti-terror efforts'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/11/gchq-anti-terror-ethnic-minority

The British anti-terrorism organisation GCHQ, that is responsible for eavesdropping, could achieve better results than they currently do, if they hired more ethnic minorities. Black and Asian intelligence officers complained of a 'racist environment', and the company's 5000-people staff only contains very few Asian and black people. The management itself is even completely 'white'. The company's white culture harms their productivity because a big part of their work is tracking communication between terrorist suspects, which is often in other languages such as Urdu and Arabic. The lack of employees speaking the respective languages has proven to harm efforts in detecting codes and cultural nuances in conversations intercepted by the GCHQ.

My opinion:
It is rather stupid to not employ ethnic minorities in an organisation like the GCHQ, especially since these minorities may have the requested languages as their mother tongue. Also, I believe such an organisation should represent the society well, and having nearly no ethnic minorities in the company, and none whatsoever in the higher ranks, does not represent society well. I believe it would not even be positive discrimination to specifically hire people of a certain ethnic background, considering this background is relevant for the job requirements. Therefore I feel the company should start hiring people based on both background ánd skills, to re-establish a balanced ethnic staff.