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"Your Liberty is Our Interest"
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"Your Liberty is Our Interest" |
December 13, 2004 | |
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Reason Express - December 7, 2004
Reason's Weekly Dispatch December 7, 2004 1. Fuel Pumps That Kill Reason Express is made possible by a grant from The DBT Group, manufacturers of affordable, high-performance mainframe systems and productivity software. 1. Fuel Pumps That Kill If life is what happens while you are preparing for other things, war is what happens when dumb little things turn deadly. By detailing the last few hours of former NFL star Pat Tillman's life, The Washington Post's Steve Coll reminds us that sending men into combat is virtually certain to meet with unforeseeable tragedy. Tillman's last mission was crippled by a Humvee with a balky fuel pump, forcing his detachment of Rangers to tow the vehicle over the Moon-like surface of Khost, Afghanistan. Naturally, there was no allowance in the mission plan for such a delay, forcing Ranger commanders to make an awful choice. They could keep the unit intact and fall short of their objective, which was to clear as many villages as possible of Taliban fighters as quickly as possible, or the unit could be split into two groups. One would deal with the busted truck and the other would go on to the objective. They chose the latter and split the unit. There is nothing strikingly wrong about this decision; it is precisely the sort of decision that has been made by commanders in combat thousands of times. But in this case it turned out horribly wrong. The two units lost track of each other and--thanks to a perfectly timed ambush, itself another rule of war--were left confused and blind, certain only that somebody was shooting at them. The end result was that Tillman came under fire from other Rangers who thought they were shooting at Afghan attackers and was likely killed by that friendly fire. There is danger in trying to draw too big a lesson from these events no matter the urge to find meaning in Tillman's death. But one stark lesson has to be that U.S. forces just do not function well without solid lines of communications. The steep canyon walls wiped out radio communication between the two units, setting the stage for the deadly confusion that followed. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37679-2004Dec5.html?nav=hcmodule 2. House of Saud or House of Cards? Details surrounding the attack on the U.S consulate in Saudi Arabia are sketchy--aren't they always in the land of Saud?--but there is one bit of information that merits close watching. There seems to be some dispute about exactly how the attackers gained entrance to the building, whether by frontal assault or via a side "mail room" door. The difference goes to just how dangerous terrorists inside Saudi Arabia might be. Some reports say the attackers used explosives to breach the main gate, while the Saudi government supports the mail door theory. Heavily armed terrorists are bad enough, but if they have access to explosives that makes matters even worse, and it suggests that some sort of large-scale bombing might still be possible in Saudi Arabia. Further, the goal of the raid appears to have been hostage taking, which would add a new wrinkle to terrorists' activities in the country. In short, it would seem the Saudis are still several steps behind the bad guys. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=7007074&pageNumber=0 3. The Rocking Family You'll never guess what those crazy kids are up to now! Why, they have taken left-wing victimhood culture to heart and routed it back in their music to trip conservative social critics! Mary Eberstadt declares that pop music is dripping not with joyful abandon but with abandonment issues. Disaffected "emo" screamers are evidence that parents today just do not understand. The fact that the Fresh Prince made the very same observation almost 20 years ago might be a clue that there is nothing truly revolutionary about teens complaining about their parents involvement, or lack thereof, in their lives. As far back as James Dean and The Blackboard Jungle parents just did not get "it." Plus there is one extremely practical reason for all those "abandoned" rockers howling for their lost childhoods. Every band has to have at least one or two latch-key kids in it; otherwise there would've been no place to practice after school. What parent, what sane adult, is going to put up with a bunch of teens learning to play very loud music?
http://www.policyreview.org/dec04/eberstadt.html 4. Quick Hits Quote of the Week "They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, 'I'm with you.' We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe. " -- Lt. Col. Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team, on what his Marines must do to keep control of Fallujah http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/12/05/returning_fallujans_will_face_clampdown/
Calling the Tin Foil Hat Brigade, Over Is there a secret Pentagon program to jam certain radio bands in areas around military bases? Will the scourge of garage door openers finally be stopped? http://www.lancasteronline.com/pages/news/ap/4/pa_garage_wars Swap 'Til You Drop A Pew Internet Project survey finds that musicians are not all that eager to haul music file swappers into court. Two-thirds of those surveyed said file-swapping peer-to-peer networks pose little or no threat to their creative efforts. http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/142/report_display.asp Court of Last Resort The Supreme Court is going to decide if your cable modem is really a telephone. Sounds dumb, but the decision will determine if cable companies will become as heavily regulated as telephone companies. http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=6993186 5. New at Reason Online Citizen Snoops Forever 6. News and Events We're proud to present Choice, a new collection of Reason's best articles from the past decade, available now from BenBella Books.
Established in 1968, the award-winning Reason is the nation's magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets" that is "dictating the libertarian spin, emphasizing choice as the key difference between libertarians and control freaks" (The Village Voice). For more information about Choice, including the full table of
contents and excerpts, go here. Buy Reason T-shirts and coffee mugs! Click here for the latest on media appearances by Reason writers. Want even more Reason? Sign up for Reason Alert to get regular news from Reason Magazine and Reason Public Policy Instiute, as well as advance notice about media appearances and events. We encourage you to forward Reason Express. If you received this issue from a forward, please subscribe. It's Free! ---
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