MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Early reports on SEAL raid also incorrect”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday,May 8, 2011
The Fog of War, the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz famously called it. And that was a pretty good term.
The idea was that, in the heat of battle, the details of what just happened could get awfully confused. Who shot whom? Who ran for the hills? How did one soldier’s battlefield courage compare with another’s?
Years later, historians might settle some of these questions. But no one could ever be certain until war’s fog blew off.
Clausewitz wrote in the early 1800s, long before Facebook, Twitter and 24-hour cable news. Attention spans today are shorter than they’ve ever been. In the battle between speed and accuracy, accuracy doesn’t have a prayer. If anything, the fog is thicker than it’s ever been.
As the members of SEAL Team 6 raided Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani lair, it was almost inevitable that the early reports 
would arrive quite quickly and be substantially wrong. So they did, and so they were.
The terror leader was armed, until he wasn’t. The SEAL raid erupted into a half-hour firefight, until it didn’t. The pictures of the corpse were being released, until they weren’t. Oops.
There’s a tendency to find political motivation in everything these days, one side aggrandizing itself and attacking the other. But these errors, slowly being corrected, really may flow from the Fog of War.
REASON FOR CONCERN?
1. The iPhones are tracking us.
2. Al-Qaida wants to blow up the trains.
3. Justin Bieber’s now an official Nassau County role model.
4. An off-duty cop pulls gun on an unsuspecting bartender.
5. Kate and Wills still need a honeymoon.
ASKED AND UNANSWERED:
Was the service THAT slow at the South Main Street Pub in Farmingdale? Please put the gun down, Ritchie Heffron! . . . Your first two thoughts when you heard al-Qaida was eyeing 9/11/11 train attacks? The LIRR and the New York subway? 
Certainly not some trestle out in America! . . . Happy that daredevil Great Peconic Bay kite surfer is OK now. Now will the Coast Guard and Suffolk cops bill him for the search and rescue costs? . . . Theater legend Arthur Laurents never made clear — was he a Shark or a Jet? . . .
Why so many young people at Betty White’s book signing at the Smith Haven Mall? Didn’t anyone mention? The ever-youthful TV icon is 89 years old! . . . If you had a choice, which would you rather pay: the current MTA tax or tolls on the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro bridges? Depends how much the tolls are, right? . . . Who knew Tampa Bay’s Sean Bergenheim’s was THAT good? He never quite proved it to Islanders fans . . . No Uncle Mo? Aren’t headline rhymes fun? . . . Amid all these passionate debates over the Osama death photos, is this a relevant fact? I don’t even like looking into an open casket at a funeral home.
THIS WEEK’S NEWS IN SONG:
Randy Newman : Lousiana 1927
LONG ISLANDER OF THE WEEK:
Nancy Shevell
Nancy Shevell is not exactly your stereotypical rock-star babe. But now that she and Paul McCartney have announced 
wedding plans, get used to it. As an executive with New England Motor Freight, she has top-level business chops. As an MTA board member, Nancy’s been struggling mightily to fund mass transit around here. In her work with the Arlene Walters Shevell Endowment Scholarship, she’s a philanthropic leader in the field of addiction recovery. “All You Need Is Love,” her groom-in-waiting once famously wrote. But it turns out intelligence, ambition and public-spiritedness are kinda nice too. So how’d Sir Paul like to bail out Long Island Bus?
E-mail ellis@henican.com.
Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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