WARPED PRIORITIES: MARILYN PENN
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Marilyn Penn
Who’d have thunk that California’s show-biz governator would turn out to have so much more common sense than the billionaire third term mayor of New York City. Action-man Scharzenegger has proposed reducing the amount of money spent on prisons and re-directing it to the higher education system; towards that end, he will campaign for a constitutional amendment that would prevent the prison budget from ever exceeding the amount allocated for universities. By contrast, businessman Bloomberg, along with photophiliac Chuck Schumer, welcomed the notion of moving the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohamed to New York and only suggested that the federal government pick up the tab as an afterthought. Estimates for security costs for the self-confessed terrorist initially hovered around 75 million dollars; that sum has risen stratospherically in a month so that new estimates are well over 200 million a year for a trial that could easily take two years or more. Just think of the recent trial of Brooke Astor’s son for the more benign crime of retargeting some of his dead stepfather’s money from the Metropolitan Museum and other temples of culture into the pocket of his own estate. That proceeding invoved close to 100 witnesses and lasted six months for a matter that injured no one as much as those victimized jurors.
Regardless of who pays for KSM’s trial, it won’t be chicken feed if it’s in New York. Though there are more important reasons for not having it here, the astronomical budget is not an insignificant one at a time when more than two million New Yorkers show up in our courts without being able to afford lawyers. Our city is now begging for volunteer lawyers willing to do public interest work for people facing eviction and foreclosure while a man responsible for the murder of 3,000 people will enjoy the defense of the highest priced lawyers in an egregiously wasteful grandstanding event. Those who laughed when Bush urged Americans to go shopping as a way of proving that the terrorists hadn’t won have adopted the same thinking when it comes to the necessity for a trial in our criminal justice system. Somehow shifting the venue from a military court where it properly belongs to the over-burdened courts that were never designed for wartime combatants is meant to serve as an indicator of the same idea. This twisted logic would result in American taxpayer money, drastically cut from schools, hospitals and other social service agencies, going to assure that Al Qaeda gets maximum publicity in the most densely congested neighborhood of the very city most vulnerable to a repeat terrorist attack.
Considering the events of the past month – the sashaying Salahis, the Nigerian pantybomber and the failure of Newark’s security guard and cameras – we have just witnessed the fallacy of depending on security systems in order to be safe. That’s disorienting in itself but this administration’s opting to spend half a billion dollars to protect a terrorist in a show trial in New York is a slap in the face of every American and a perfect example of why so many people are increasingly thirsty for tea.
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