Al Qaeda Goes to College: First Book Review

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/adjunctprofs/2009/02/book-review-h-1.html

February 21, 2009

Book Review Highlight Al-Qaeda Goes to College

On Jan. 23, 2009, Adjunct Prof Blog announced  that James Ottavio Castagnera, a well known lawyer and professor at Rider University, just wrote an exciting new book entitled “Al-Qaeda Goes To College.” Professor Castagnera was kind enough to provide me with an advance copy and I could not put it down. 
The book starts off by detailing how Professor Castagnera world began to change on 9-11. It then goes on to discuss the Anthrax scare that occurred at the Hamlton New Jersey Post Office, just a few miles a way from Rider University.    
The book’s research is excellent and it is full of detailed footnotes that others will undoubtedly find helpful.  Professor Castagnera central thesis, however, is on the impact  9-11 had on higher education. He views 9-11 as a double edge sword. On the one hand universities lost their innocence at great cost (increased governmental regulations, security costs etc.), but on the other hand universities also got a windfall because now they offer more programs and research on national security. Professor Castagnera believes that American universities have met the challenge of 9-11 and we are better off because of it. He compares 9-11 to WWII and states that America became a super power because of WWII.

The book goes on and covers such topics as universities’ roles in training counter-terrorism experts, particularly anthropologists working in Iraq and Afghanistan; bio-terrorism research on campuses; inflammatory critiques by the likes of Ward Churchill; the conspiracy theories advocated by some academics regarding 9/11; lawsuits against universities by terror victims trying to get settlements from countries like Iran by seizing archaeological artifacts in American universities; accused Islamists teaching at American colleges, like Sami al-Arian at USF.

This book not only presents well researched factual information, but it also contains legal analysis. For example with respect to the discharge of Professor Ward Churchill, Professor Castagnera outlines the First Amendment rights of public employees and in particular academic freedom. 

To my knowledge, this is the first book on how 9-11 has changed the world of higher education.  This book will be available around April 30th and you can pre-order it now from the above link. You will be glad that you did.

Mitchell H. Rubinstein

Read a sample chapter from my newest book, “Al Qaeda Goes to College”

http://www.historyplace.com/specials/writers/domestic-terrorists.htm

Why Reforming Education Is a Critical National Priority

Why Reforming American Education Is Crucial
By James Castagnera
Attorney at Large
Last week in this space, talking about how to win the war on terror, I asserted, “The American workforce must be better prepared to compete in the global marketplace. When we are through congratulating ourselves on electing our first black president, let’s recall that inner-city high school graduation rates still hover at or below 50 percent in most major metropolises. Colleges are over-priced and inefficiently labor-intensive. We are cranking out too many lawyers and too few engineers and scientists.”
Just as I am convinced that our national security against terrorists rests primarily on good police work, secure borders, and a sensible immigration policy, the proliferation of drug wars, inner-city gangs, and campus crazies persuades me that education — like energy — is a national security issue.  I offer two reasons why.
First, no democracy can feel itself either fair or safe, when it allows an inner-city proletariat to persist and fester from generation to generation.  According to the cover story in the December 8th TIME Magazine, “Young Americans are less likely than their parents were to finish high school.”  Adds the article’s authors, “This is an issue that is warping the nation’s economy and security.”  They are right.
A report issued in April by America’s Promise Alliance and reported on Fox News found high school graduation rates below 50% in America’s 50 largest cities.  According to Fox, “The report found troubling data on the prospects of urban public high school students getting to college. In Detroit’s public schools, 24.9 percent of the students graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis Public Schools and 34.1 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District.”
Consider this:  the odds that you or I will be the victim of one of these thousands of high school dropouts is astronomically higher than the chance that one of us will be killed by an international terrorist.  Philadelphia annually averages about 400 homicides, for example.  While many of these killings are drug dealers or gang members taking out their rivals in jungle-land turf battles, the collateral damage in innocent citizens, including kids, is heartbreaking.
We need only glance across our southern border to Juarez, Mexico, to see how much worse it could become.  As early this year as February 28th, the Dallas News reported 72 drug-related murders in Juarez and worried that the violence could begin spilling over the porous border.  In Mexico, the killings include public officials who try to oppose the warring factions.  “Among the dead there: journalists, a city council member and a police chief on the job just seven hours before he was gunned down. Additionally, the cartels tried to assassinate a federal legislator. And efforts to clean up the force have stalled, as nobody wants the job of police chief. Local media self-censors to survive.”  A popular way for cartel killers to communicate their message is to hang a beheaded corpse from a highway overpass.
How great is the distance between Philadelphia and Juarez?  Thousands of miles as the crow flies, but perhaps only a few years away in terms of escalating violence, as our uneducated proletariats turn in increasing numbers to the only livelihood likely to pay them well.
For those who do graduate from high school and hope to come to college, the current financial crisis may pose an insurmountable barrier.  College students already are regularly graduating with five-figure “mortgages” on their diplomas.  Often, if mom and pop are footing the tuition bills, an actual second-mortgage on the family homestead is how the money is raised.  Now, even that undesirable method may be slipping away, as home equity shrinks and major lenders like City Bank flounder.  We’ll have to wait and see whether the college class of 2013, which will come to campus in September ’09, will be substantially smaller than this year’s crop of collegians.  I predict it will be.
Those who can’t afford college probably won’t be working either.  This morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer’s front page reports the highest unemployment rate in 34 years: 6.7% nationally.  More than 500,000 jobs, adds the Inky, evaporated just last month.
More than 100 years ago, the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow claimed, “There are more people go to jail in hard times than in good times — few people comparatively go to jail except when they are hard up. They go to jail because they have no other place to go. They may not know why, but it is true all the same. People are not more wicked in hard times. That is not the reason. The fact is true all over the world that in hard times more people go to jail than in good times, and in winter more people go to jail than in summer….  The people who go to jail are almost always poor people — people who have no other place to live first and last.”
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, more than 700 people per 100,000.  Only Russia, some of the other states of the former USSR, and a couple of Caribbean countries come close.  Are we stronger on law and order than our sister democracies?  Or are we failing to provide alternatives to crime?
And where lies the greater threat to our security, Afghanistan or the city nearest your home?
[Jim Castagnera, formerly of Jim Thorpe, is a Philadelphia lawyer and writer.  His 17th book, Al Qaeda Goes to College, will be published in the spring by Praeger.]

Two new books

Published on Times News Online (http://www.tnonline.com)

TIMES NEWS “Attorney at Large” publishes his 16th Book

Enlarge Image

Al Qaeda Goes to College has just gone into production at Greenwood Press.

Jim Castagnera, the Times-News “Attorney at Large,” has published his 16th book, The Employment Law Answer Book: Forms and Worksheets. The 800-page tome, complete with a CD-Rom of adaptable human-resource templates, is a new companion to Castagnera’s popular Employment Law Answer Book, which was first released in 1988 and is now in its sixth edition. Both are published by Aspen Publishers, an American subsidiary of the Wolters Kluwer, a large European publishing/communications firm.

Meanwhile, his 17th book, Al Qaeda Goes to College, has just gone into production at Greenwood Press.

Holder of a J.D., Ph.D., Castagnera has spent more than 25 years practicing, writing about, and teaching law. He has been a labor lawyer and litigator with a major Philadelphia firm and the general counsel/corporate secretary for the then-largest convenience store chain in New Jersey and for the nation’s number one econometric forecasting organization. He has published 15 other books, as well as more than 50 professional/scholarly articles and book chapters. He is a frequent commentator in newsletters, newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media and has been writing his regular weekly column “Attorney at Large” for the Times-News since December 2003.

His teaching has taken him to the University of Texas-Austin, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Widener University School of Law. He has completed 12 years as Associate Provost and Associate Counsel for Academic Affairs at Rider University in Princeton/Lawrenceville (NJ), where he also holds the rank of Associate Professor of Business Policy.

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Deja Vu All Over Again

Last April MSNBC reported from Shanghai, “The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef’s nightmare: pesticide-laden peapods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with Salmonella.” The report went on to say, “China’s chronic food safety woes are now a national concern.” Yogi Berra might respond, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
If so, Yogi would be right on. We are now fighting the same struggle for a safe food supply on a global scale that we once fought at the national level something like a century ago. Muckraker Upton Sinclair led the charge with his 1906 classic, The Jungle. Considered Sinclair’s masterpiece, the novel chronicles the misadventures of an immigrant employed in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. A typical example of Sinclair’s lurid prose reads like this:
“The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers, and they were paid by the United States government to certify that all the diseased meat stayed in the state…. [A] physician made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been found to be tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were… carted away to be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of kerosene — and was ordered to resign the same week! So indignant were the packers that they went farther and compelled the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection…. There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush-money from the tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded in box-cars and hauled away to a place called Globe, Indiana, where they made a fancy grade of lard.”
Professor Maura Spiegel of Columbia University commented in a recent edition of The Jungle, which has never been out of print, “Sinclair wanted to arouse not sympathy, and certainly not pity, but indignation and outrage.” Indeed, The Jungle fueled a firestorm of debate about food-sanitation laws. During the decades that followed, Americans slowly but surely came to enjoy the safest and most plentiful food supply on earth.
The bad news out of China has caused many Americans to wonder whether we are slipping backwards into the bad-old-days of The Jungle. They may be right. On Tuesday, July 17th, according to the New York Times, Congress was treated to testimony that food importers “have been able to bring tainted products into this country because the F.D.A. has neither enough resources nor inspectors to stop them. And each year it has become easier: since 2003, the number of inspectors has decreased while imports of food alone have almost doubled.”
According to the Times, “Over all, the Agriculture Department inspects 16 percent of imported meat, while the F.D.A. inspects about one percent of the food over which it has jurisdiction. Just a fraction of that is actually sampled.” The hearings were prompted by the FDA’s announced intent to close seven of its 13 testing labs, including one close to home here in Philadelphia.
If the effluvial emanations from abroad bring with them a silver lining, perhaps it is that we consumers — our consciousness raised — are circling back to homegrown produce and meat products. At farmers’ markets, such as Philly’s Reading Terminal and Suburban Square in Ardmore, Amish and Mennonite family businesses are booming. Nationwide, organic-food sales are growing at the rate of 17-20 percent per year, while conventional food sales are only increasing by a puny two to three percent, according to Internet sources. Most supermarkets now point out local produce and organic products with pride.
For decades, family farms have been under pressure from population growth, suburban sprawl, and anemic food prices — driven down in no small part by import competition. Could it be that the supermarket will be the battlefront where we Americans for the first time ever turn back an unwelcome onslaught of globalization? Now, that’s food for thought.
Jim Castagnera of Havertown is the Associate Provost at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Last April MSNBC reported from Shanghai, “The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef’s nightmare: pesticide-laden peapods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with Salmonella.” The report went on to say, “China’s chronic food safety woes are now a national concern.” Yogi Berra might respond, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
If so, Yogi would be right on. We are now fighting the same struggle for a safe food supply on a global scale that we once fought at the national level something like a century ago. Muckraker Upton Sinclair led the charge with his 1906 classic, The Jungle. Considered Sinclair’s masterpiece, the novel chronicles the misadventures of an immigrant employed in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. A typical example of Sinclair’s lurid prose reads like this:
“The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers, and they were paid by the United States government to certify that all the diseased meat stayed in the state…. [A] physician made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been found to be tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were… carted away to be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of kerosene — and was ordered to resign the same week! So indignant were the packers that they went farther and compelled the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection…. There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush-money from the tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded in box-cars and hauled away to a place called Globe, Indiana, where they made a fancy grade of lard.”
Professor Maura Spiegel of Columbia University commented in a recent edition of The Jungle, which has never been out of print, “Sinclair wanted to arouse not sympathy, and certainly not pity, but indignation and outrage.” Indeed, The Jungle fueled a firestorm of debate about food-sanitation laws. During the decades that followed, Americans slowly but surely came to enjoy the safest and most plentiful food supply on earth.
The bad news out of China has caused many Americans to wonder whether we are slipping backwards into the bad-old-days of The Jungle. They may be right. On Tuesday, July 17th, according to the New York Times, Congress was treated to testimony that food importers “have been able to bring tainted products into this country because the F.D.A. has neither enough resources nor inspectors to stop them. And each year it has become easier: since 2003, the number of inspectors has decreased while imports of food alone have almost doubled.”
According to the Times, “Over all, the Agriculture Department inspects 16 percent of imported meat, while the F.D.A. inspects about one percent of the food over which it has jurisdiction. Just a fraction of that is actually sampled.” The hearings were prompted by the FDA’s announced intent to close seven of its 13 testing labs, including one close to home here in Philadelphia.
If the effluvial emanations from abroad bring with them a silver lining, perhaps it is that we consumers — our consciousness raised — are circling back to homegrown produce and meat products. At farmers’ markets, such as Philly’s Reading Terminal and Suburban Square in Ardmore, Amish and Mennonite family businesses are booming. Nationwide, organic-food sales are growing at the rate of 17-20 percent per year, while conventional food sales are only increasing by a puny two to three percent, according to Internet sources. Most supermarkets now point out local produce and organic products with pride.
For decades, family farms have been under pressure from population growth, suburban sprawl, and anemic food prices — driven down in no small part by import competition. Could it be that the supermarket will be the battlefront where we Americans for the first time ever turn back an unwelcome onslaught of globalization? Now, that’s food for thought.
Jim Castagnera of Havertown is the Associate Provost at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Last April MSNBC reported from Shanghai, “The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef’s nightmare: pesticide-laden peapods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with Salmonella.” The report went on to say, “China’s chronic food safety woes are now a national concern.” Yogi Berra might respond, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
If so, Yogi would be right on. We are now fighting the same struggle for a safe food supply on a global scale that we once fought at the national level something like a century ago. Muckraker Upton Sinclair led the charge with his 1906 classic, The Jungle. Considered Sinclair’s masterpiece, the novel chronicles the misadventures of an immigrant employed in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. A typical example of Sinclair’s lurid prose reads like this:
“The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers, and they were paid by the United States government to certify that all the diseased meat stayed in the state…. [A] physician made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been found to be tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were… carted away to be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of kerosene — and was ordered to resign the same week! So indignant were the packers that they went farther and compelled the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection…. There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush-money from the tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded in box-cars and hauled away to a place called Globe, Indiana, where they made a fancy grade of lard.”
Professor Maura Spiegel of Columbia University commented in a recent edition of The Jungle, which has never been out of print, “Sinclair wanted to arouse not sympathy, and certainly not pity, but indignation and outrage.” Indeed, The Jungle fueled a firestorm of debate about food-sanitation laws. During the decades that followed, Americans slowly but surely came to enjoy the safest and most plentiful food supply on earth.
The bad news out of China has caused many Americans to wonder whether we are slipping backwards into the bad-old-days of The Jungle. They may be right. On Tuesday, July 17th, according to the New York Times, Congress was treated to testimony that food importers “have been able to bring tainted products into this country because the F.D.A. has neither enough resources nor inspectors to stop them. And each year it has become easier: since 2003, the number of inspectors has decreased while imports of food alone have almost doubled.”
According to the Times, “Over all, the Agriculture Department inspects 16 percent of imported meat, while the F.D.A. inspects about one percent of the food over which it has jurisdiction. Just a fraction of that is actually sampled.” The hearings were prompted by the FDA’s announced intent to close seven of its 13 testing labs, including one close to home here in Philadelphia.
If the effluvial emanations from abroad bring with them a silver lining, perhaps it is that we consumers — our consciousness raised — are circling back to homegrown produce and meat products. At farmers’ markets, such as Philly’s Reading Terminal and Suburban Square in Ardmore, Amish and Mennonite family businesses are booming. Nationwide, organic-food sales are growing at the rate of 17-20 percent per year, while conventional food sales are only increasing by a puny two to three percent, according to Internet sources. Most supermarkets now point out local produce and organic products with pride.
For decades, family farms have been under pressure from population growth, suburban sprawl, and anemic food prices — driven down in no small part by import competition. Could it be that the supermarket will be the battlefront where we Americans for the first time ever turn back an unwelcome onslaught of globalization? Now, that’s food for thought.
Jim Castagnera of Havertown is the Associate Provost at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The Size of the Dog

All dogs are a single species. More precisely, I’m told, dogs are the domestic subspecies of wolves. You can almost get that out of the Latin name, even if you aren’t a former alter boy or an ex-nun. Canis lupus familiaris: Canis sounds like canine. Every fan of vampire movies knows that lupus means wolf. And familiaris seems pretty obvious to me.
A single subspecies they may be, but all dogs are not created equal. Our bichon, despite his name (Spike), is a 15-pound fluff ball who’s usually afraid of almost every other canine he encounters. The Westminster Dog Show places bichons in the “non-sporting” category, just one notch above the “toys,” e.g., the toy poodle. He’s cuddly, clingy, and far from fierce.
By contrast, while traveling in Israel on a Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellowship two weeks ago, I attended a demonstration of the guard dogs employed by the army units tasked with moving terrorists and criminals from police station to courtroom to jail. The demo took place on a large lawn. One guy, probably the last man to punch in that day, donned the brown prison coveralls issued to all inmates. He pretended to be running for freedom. The dog, which looked like a German police dog on steroids, ran him down and knocked him to he ground. Then the beast went for the guy’s throat. (Of course, the brute was muzzled for the exercise.)
I raised my hand. “Does the dog only hold onto the throat or does he…”
The officer smiled. “He’s not there to negotiate,” he replied. The rest was left to my imagination.
Subsequent demonstrations proved the dogs to be as brave as they are fierce. Faced with firearms and hand grenades, they charged into melees without a second’s hesitation. No time was wasted on negotiations… that’s for sure.
Arriving home, I decided to discover whether Spike had any semblance of the Israeli dogs’ wolfish qualities buried beneath his white, wooly exterior. One thing I’d noted on walks with our four-footed fuzz-ball: He’s braver on his own block than anywhere else in the neighborhood. With this in mind, my experiment went like this.
I waited until the guy on the corner let his dog into the back yard. This dog is a big boy. My best guess is that we’re talking about a retriever-setter mix of some sort. This fellow is 90 pounds if he’s an ounce. He always bellows his basso bark when Spike and I walk up the opposite side of the street. Spike usually ignores him. However, once in awhile my tiny pooch has uncharacteristically barked back.
This time we strutted our stuff right on up the big guy’s side of the street. As we approached the fence, the monster roared his low-pitched bark. Spike dragged me toward the fence. I couldn’t resist. I let go the leash. Spike charged right up to the fence, yapping like Peewee Herman on a caffeine high.
In the ’62 Cuban missal crisis, when word reached the Oval Office that the Russian ships had turned back at the American blockade line, Secretary of State Dean Rusk remarked, “We were eyeball to eyeball and I think the other fellow just blinked.” I held my breath, hoping Spike wouldn’t be the dog that blinked.
Far from it, he pushed his muzzle between two slats in the fence. Then, just as quickly, he backed away, turned around and started for home, me double-timing behind him. He didn’t stop until we reached the front door. Checking him over, I found three long lacerations on his little black nose.
They say it’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog. Having seen the Israeli guard dogs in action, and having completed my Spike-experiment, I can report that this saying is baloney. Where dogs are concerned, size matters.
All the same, Spike sports his dueling scars… but we keep to our side of the street.

Of Cats and Kidneys

A news photo caught my eye last week. Four Pakistani men are holding up their shirts, displaying long surgical scars. The caption explained they had each sold a kidney to a “transplant tourist.” Transplant tourists are patients who journey abroad in search of affordable bodily organs. Kidneys are among the most popular human commodities. Payments to impoverished donors reportedly range from a high of around $10,000 in Brazil to a low of $1300 paid by the Iranian government.