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In April Laura and Edmund Gerstein of Boca Raton, Florida, attempted to save their beloved backyard grapefruit tree from the state’s citrus canker eradication program by filing a motion invoking an article of the 1949 Geneva Conventions that prohibits governments from destroying civilians’ food sources during wartime. “As I understand it, we’re in a state of war,” Edmund told reporters; a state agriculture department spokesman responded, “That tree will be coming down.” (Sure enough, the tree was cut down three weeks later.)
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As described in an April column on Slate.com, the Defense Department report “Defense Language Transformation Roadmap,” dated January 2005, contains a chronology of the department’s efforts so far to improve the foreign-language skills of military personnel in the wake of 9/11 and a timetable for future steps. According to the report, it wasn’t until September 2003 that the Pentagon commissioned a study “assessing language needs”; in May 2004 the formal decision was made to form a “steering committee” to assess these needs. By July 2005, the department is to issue instructions providing “guidance” for managing a stepped-up language program, and by December 2005–more than four years after the attacks–it must finally get around to identifying which of its personnel already speak a foreign language.
