Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Terror alert

I resisted the urge to comment yesterday on the Fort Dix terror arrests, but having had some time to think about what happened and having heard Keith Olbermann’s comments, I thought I’d weigh in.

First, if the information released by the feds is correct, then the six men arrested should face some jail time — significant time.

Second, and this is where the Olbermann comments come in, there was a breathless quality to the reporting yesterday, taking what were a half dozen somewhat ineffectual terrorist wannabes and elevating them to mastermind status. As I said, these guys deserve jail time, but we shouldn’t turn this into more than it was.

Consider the basic facts as reported:

A suspect brings a videotape of some of the men “shooting assault weapons at a firing range, shouting in Arabic and calling for jihad, or holy war” to a South Jersey video store. The clerk reports the tape’s contents to police and the FBI becomes involved. The group spends time discussing its plot — which at various times included attacks on Fort Dix and the Army-Navy football game — and engages in a second weapons training in the Poconos.

Based on what has been reported, The FBI and police acted appropriately — they cannot afford to take chances — though the announcement was not made without the kind of hyperbole that has come to characterize the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism investigations. Consider this comment from yesterday’s press conference (above photo from New York Times):

“This is a new brand of terrorism where a small cell of people can bring enormous devastation,” Christopher J. Christie, the United States attorney for New Jersey, said at an afternoon news conference at the courthouse here.

And this:

“Today we dodged a bullet,” J. P. Weiss, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Philadelphia office, said at the news conference. “In fact, when you look at the type of weapons that this group was trying to purchase, we may have dodged a lot of bullets.”

Mr. Weiss added: “We had a group that was forming a platoon to take on an army. They identified their target, they did their reconnaissance. They had maps. And they were in the process of buying weapons. Luckily, we were able to stop that.”

Again, I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of a potential attack, but the rhetoric here seems to be way out of proportion with the facts. The New York Times, in its front page story today, offered a glimpse at the kind of self control that the media should have shown:

The arrests came after a 15-month investigation during which the F.B.I. and two informers who had infiltrated the group taped them training with automatic weapons in rural Pennsylvania, conducting surveillance of military bases in the Northeast, watching videos of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers and trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles.

The authorities described the suspects as Islamic extremists and said they represented the newest breed of threat: loosely organized domestic militants unconnected to — but inspired by — Al Qaeda or other international terror groups.

But the criminal complaint that details the plot describes an effort that was alternately ambitious and clumsy, with the men at turns declaring themselves eager to sacrifice their lives in the name of Allah and worrying about getting arrested or deported for buying weapons or possessing a map of a military base.

Simple, to the point, the paper encapsulates the entire affair in a few paragraphs, giving the details of the arrests and plot, without blowing the plot out of proportion.

In the end, however, I think Keith Olbermann’s comments on the media storm are probably on target:

The ultimate premise of the war in Iraq and the ultimate premise, certainly, of the Republican presidential campaign ahead, counterterrorism. The FBI claims it has broken up a plot to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey. The flaw, though, in the breathless reporting of the purported terror cell, the bureau infiltrated the six-person group after its members took video of themselves practicing with assault weapons, brought the tape to a photo store, and had it transferred to a DVD.

The details of the supposed plot don‘t seem to hold together that well either, though that did not stop extensive and entirely credulous coverage on TV, the Internet, in print today. The men supposedly had plans to gain access to the base disguised as pizza delivery guys, then cut the power somehow, they, quote, “hit four, five, or six Humvees and light the whole place, and retreat without any losses.” And take the tape of yourselves practicing and have it copied at PhotoMat. In other words, the FBI has arrested six morons.

Perhaps a bit too strong, but then these were not the 9-11 hijackers and this was not the major coup that it is being painted as. What we have is a solid piece of law enforcement.

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War hits home

I guess there are some Americans who are sacrificing because of the war in Iraq. The sad thing is that they should have to sacrifice in this way.

A shortage of Kansas National Guard equipment will slow recovery efforts in tornado-ravaged Greensburg, state officials say.

Because of the war on terror, Kansas has only 40 percent of its allocated equipment, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the adjutant general’s office.

As a result, she said, the state is rushing to hire contractors to help clear debris.

The situation was no surprise to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who has warned for months that the National Guard was ill-prepared for a catastrophe because so much equipment and personnel were in Iraq.

And national experts say the problem is not confined to Kansas.

A congressionally sponsored commission looking into military readiness reported last month that close to 90 percent of Guard units in this country were “not ready,” primarily because of equipment shortages.

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Mixed decisions

Buried in Monday’s state Supreme Court decision upholding the death sentence of 29-year-old Brian Wakefield, who was convicted of the 2001 home invasion and beating deaths of Richard and Shirley Hazard in Atlantic County contained a kernel of hope for opponents of the death penalty.

The court ruled that the Wakefield trial and sentencing met all of the criteria under New Jersey law, that it was fair, the death sentence was properly imposed, and his death sentence is not disproportionate.

Justice Virginia Long, in a dissent, offered a concise rebuke not only to the courts immediate decision, but to the ethical underpinnings of the courts willingness to continue endorsing the death penalty. She said the state court in the 1980s relied on evolving standards of decency to uphold that ultimate sanction and that a changing moral climate required the state to reconsider its commitment to the death penalty.

Justice Long’s view of the death penalty is consistent with the recommendations made in a report issued by a state panel that had been charged with reviewing the state’s capital punishment statute.

The key finding of the report, issued in January, was that the the death penalty was inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in New Jersey and elsewhere in the country. The report also found that there is no evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent or “rationally serves a legitimate penological intent”; that there remains too much risk that felons who commit similar crimes will face different sentences or that the innocent will be executed; that it is more expensive than life in prison without parole; and there are better alternatives, including life imprison without parole.

Unfortunately, the court may not have the authority to follow Justice Long’s lead — Justice Roberto A. Rivera-Soto, writing for the majority, cited a 1992 constitutional amendment explicitly stating that the death penalty is not cruel or unusual punishment to explain why he believed the court did not have the constitutional authority to strike down the capital punishment statute.

But that does not mean the death penalty cannot be overturned by the state Legislature. With Thursday’s Senate hearing coming up, I am hoping that members of the Senate Judiciary Committee read Justice Long’s dissent and take it to heart.

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A capital idea

The state Senate is scheduled to consider a bill on Thursday that would abolish the death penalty in New Jersey. According toa story in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The proposed legislation, scheduled to go before the committee on Thursday, would repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole. Current death-row inmates would be resentenced to life imprisonment without parole in a maximum security prison.

It seems a sensible approach and should address some of the legitimate concerns raised by Assemblyman Bill Baroni (a Republican who represents South Brunswick, Cranbury, Jamesburg and Monroe). Mr. Baroni told me last month that poorly constructed legislation could open the door for death-row inamtes to appeal and potentially overturn their sentences because there would be no mechanism to commute them.

In case anyone is interested, here are my five reasons to oppose the death penalty:

1. Murder is murder no matter who pulls the trigger or sticks in the needle. When the state murders in a democracy, it does so with our implied consent making us complicit in the act. The death penalty, therefore, makes all of us murderers.

2. Premeditiated murder, according to Camus, is especially heinous; capital punishment is really just state-sanctioned, premeditated murder and vigilantism.

3. Death is permanent. There is no system that can be put in place that can safeguard against human error or bias, meaning that there always will remain a chance that the innocent will be put to death.

4. There is no system that can be put in place that can safeguard against human error or bias, meaning that there always will remain a chance that issues of race, class and gender will influence who gets sent to death and who faces life in prison.

5. It not about deterence, but about retaliation and retribution. — something that should be out of character for a civilized, democratic society. Just listen to supporters who consistently stoke fear and speak of it as “the ultimate punishment”; no one talks about the death penalty as a way to prevent crime and, if they did, there have been far too many studies offering evidence to the contrary.

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Tales of the dog

An eventul morning that, unfortunately, is the culmination of a strange and difficult week for my dear doggie.

Honey, my often-too-active mutt, has suddenly lost her sight — within days, literally — and has gone from a dog that could out run a thrown tennis ball and catch it over her shoulder on a fly from 50 yards away to walking into walls and doors.

If that weren’t bad enough — and it’s bad, believe me — she managed to get out of our fenced-in yard this morning and wander up the block.

A little background: I get up at about 6:15 every morning with her to let her out. Our yard is fenced, so I just let open the back door and lie down on the couch for an extra 10 minutes of shut-eye before pouring my coffee and getting into my running clothes.

Often, she’ll either bark or body slam the back door when she’s ready to come in. This morning, however, she didn’t — and she wasn’t visible from the back window. I thought she may have gotten lost back behind the pool, confused in her sudden blindness, so I pulled on sneakers and jeans and went out.

That’s when I found the fence gate open.

The gate is always closed and Annie and I have no idea why it was open this morning. Honey must have nudged it somehow and then wandered off. This has happened before — though, she almost always wandered right to our front door, where should would take a seat and wait for us to find her.

This morning, however, she wandered up the street, and into the yard a couple of houses down. I was in full panic mode, unable to find her (she was obscured by a set of bushes), and not sure what to do. I jumped in the car and drove around the block, hoping I’d come across her and that she hadn’t been hit by a car.

Annie called me on the cell phone shortly after I left — our next door neighbor found Honey just across his fence (his dogs were barking, so he went to investigate) and he helped Annie corral her and get her back to our house.

Needless to say, it was not a good morning — made no better by the news that we’ d need to take her to a specialist in Red Bank and that we probably would not be able to take her to North Carolina later this month (we finally rent a house that allows dogs and she can’t go — figures).

So there it is. I’m still hopeful that the specialist will determine that it is treatable and that with medication she will regain her sight. I also know, however, that she will adjust either way.

I’m not sure, however, whether Annie and I ever will.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
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