|
New
Yorkers stare in disbelief as the Twin Towers burn Tuesday morning.
Collateral
Damage
A
real war has erupted in our own streets.
by
Alisa Solomon
The Village Voice
I emerged from the Chambers Street subway
stop at 9 this morning (Sept. 11) into a crowd gaping up at the World
Trade Center moments after its top floors had burst into flames. Some
people were crying, a few women crossed themselves, but mostly people
were exchanging stories in that almost affable New York-in-a-crisis
way, collecting the tales that they would later tell their friends
and maybe someday their grandchildren. Until the second blast. As
soon as we heard the muffled boom and saw flames kick along the walls
of the tower, we knew in our bellies that America was changed forever.
I wanted to throw up.
A panicky mob ran screaming up the street, some stopping
two blocks north to gape some more. Theories started flying: "Terrorists,"
though few could say which kind for what cause. Sirens howled and
quickly the streets became eerily empty of traffic. We could see some
small figures -- something orange, something flapping white --
hanging off the building. Could they be people? The crowd let out
a high-pitched primal squeal. I got the hell out of there.
I headed east in a nauseous daze -- due for jury
duty at State Supreme Court on Centre Street, propelled by one of
those defense-mechanism impulses that makes you focus on the thing
that is absolutely beside the point. I turned onto Duane Street, soon
finding myself passing the Javits Federal Building. I started to run.
It might blow any minute, I thought.
Perpetual Anxiety
I spent much of this August in Israel
and the occupied territories. I was there during the weeks the Sbarro
pizza restaurant in Jerusalem was blown up by a suicide bomber, and
left Haifa only a day before the bombing at a restaurant there. Though
I witnessed during my travels through the West Bank and Gaza how those
areas were the ones literally under siege, I began to understand the
depth of Israeli fear. I lived in perpetual anxiety: sitting in a
cafe, going to the grocery store, standing in any crowded area. Every
time I boarded a bus I felt my heartbeat speed up. I never felt so
relieved to return home from abroad as I did two weeks ago. At last
I could drop the guard, leave the panic behind.
Or so I thought. Jury duty was over: The court was
closing. So I began the citizens' march up Centre Street, merging
with the throngs sent home. Cops waved us away from subway entrances
and told us to keep walking.
I fell in with a group of young women, administrative
assistants at 2 World Trade Center. One was still crying. She was
about to enter the World Trade Center when the first plane hit. "Arms,
legs. Parts of people. They were falling on my head," she said. Her
friend put an arm around her, saying only "shhh," and the whole block
went silent for a moment. The third friend tried frantically to get
a cell-phone signal. A secretary to three vice presidents at a Wall
Street firm that opens at 9, she typically starts work at 8:30. "I
have to get their days prepared," she said, shaken yet proud, almost
as if she expected to be there again tomorrow. "My subway was late
today and for some reason, for once as the train slowed down and waited,
I didn't get mad," she marveled.
Her calls wouldn't go through. Neither would anyone
else's. Block-long lines formed at payphones as WTC workers tried
to contact loved ones to let them know they were okay.
As we trudged along -- strangers talking like
old friends, people who managed to find cabs and offering to share
them -- I flashed on the grammar-school drills I went through
in the '60s. The Cold War came to my Midwestern suburban school in
the form of duck-and-cover exercises and, once a year, a practice
evacuation. We were let out of school early and had to walk all the
way home, filing out in neat lines and heading into the streets, kids
peeling off as we came to their neighborhoods.
Bringing It Home
A real war has come to these shores
now, bringing massive violence into America for the first time. The
terrible human casualties of today's attacks haven't even begun to
be counted yet. Some of the intangible ones to come are obvious --
the First Amendment, for starters. The altered city skyline is only
the most visible manifestation of the size of the change.
I finally got my turn at the phone. There were three
anxious messages on my answering machine: One from my partner. And
two from friends in Israel.
Retaliation
Will
civil liberties and foreign civilians be the next victims?
by
Alan Pittman
Gored by the terrorism against the World
Trade Center and Pentagon, the U.S. may lash out like some enraged,
wounded animal, some people fear. Domestic civil liberties and innocent
civilians abroad may be the next casualties.
Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman wrote that
Americans may have to surrender civil liberties to fight the coming
war against terrorism. "We may have to give up some measure of freedom
to preserve what's best of the rest."
Dave Fidanque, director of the Oregon branch of the
American Civil Liberties Union, fears that the terrorism could spark
attacks on innocent Arab-Americans or political dissidents.
Fidanque says he saw former Secretary of State James
Baker on TV blaming reforms of FBI violations of civil liberties in
the 1970s for the failure to stop the attacks this week. "That's just
insane," Fidanque says.
The FBI's problem is that it wastes resources on investigating
legal political activities -- resources that should be devoted
to catching dangerous terrorists, he says. "If they were targeting
their resources on criminal activity, they would have had an even
better chance of catching the culprits," he says.
Local political fringe groups already fear that they
may be targeted. "Traumatic moments often cause a lot of people to
run toward reactionary racism, authoritarianism and nationalism even
when those are the same tendencies that created the problem in the
first place," says Eugene anarchist Marshall Kirkpatrick.
Historically, the ACLU reports that civil liberties
have suffered in the name of fighting wars and terrorism:
-- In the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the
media and government officials rushed to blame Arab terrorists for
the carnage.
-- The FBI wrongly accused Abraham Ahmad of involvement
in the Oklahoma bombing, strip-searched him and held him for days.
-- More than 200 incidents of threats, assaults and
harassment against American Muslims occurred as a result of the mistaken
blame on Arab terrorists for the Oklahoma City bombing, according
to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
-- Innocent Arab immigrants are routinely jailed by
the INS for years based only on secret evidence of alleged terrorism,
the ACLU, Arab and Muslim groups have complained.
-- A study last year by the National Commission on
Terrorism recommended reducing civil liberty protections by abolishing
restrictions on domestic CIA activity and tracking foreign students
in the U.S., according to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
(ADC).
-- In the last two years the ACLU and ADC have complained
that airlines use racist profiling to target Arab-Americans for searches
and harassment.
-- In 1999 a jury awarded a $3 million verdict against
United Airlines after an Arab-American airplane janitor complained
of discrimination and harassment.
-- After Oklahoma City, Congress passed an anti-terrorism
law that allowed the deportation of people accused of being members
of broadly defined "terrorist" groups and the prosecution of Americans
who may support such groups. The ACLU compares the restrictions to
the restrictive anti-Communist laws of the 1950s.
-- In the 1940s, the government placed thousands of
loyal Japanese Americans in internment camps.
-- From 1971 to 1997, the FBI maintained files on John
Lennon. The files on the suspected subversive included information
that his parrot could say, "right on."
-- In 1996, the FBI wrongly accused Richard Jewell,
who saved lives by moving people away from a bomb, of planting the
bomb at the Atlanta Olympics himself.
-- In the late 1960s and early 70s, the FBI engaged
in a COINTELPRO program to infiltrate and disrupt peace groups opposed
to Vietnam. Targets of the spying included Martin Luther King Jr.
"On the domestic front, the immediate response [to
the attacks this week] will probably be a wholesale attack on civil
liberties," the San Francisco Bay Guardian warned in an editorial.
"The United States can't allow terrorists to turn us into an armed
camp. Nor can we allow this to stir up hatred against Arab Americans
and Arab immigrants, who are already under attack on Internet chat
sites and message boards."
On the international front, retaliatory U.S. bombs
may kill even more innocents.
After the 1988 Pan Am bombing, the U.S. bombed Libya
as responsible. The attack missed Muammar Qadaffi but killed his baby
daughter.
To strike against terrorist Osama Bin Laden in 1998,
the U.S. fired a cruise missile into a factory in Sudan, killing more
than a dozen people. But it's still unclear whether the factory was
actually linked to Bin Laden.
With anger building, retaliation for the terrorism
this week could be on a much more devastating scale. President Bush
spoke of an "unyielding anger" in the nation and promised to "hunt
down" those responsible. "We will make no distinction between the
terrorists who committed those attacks and those who harbor them."
"I feel like going to war again. No mercy,'' WWII
veteran and New Yorker Felix Novelli told the Associated Press.
One woman called NPR and described her shock at seeing
children in Palestine celebrating the terrorism. "These children don't
realize that maybe their death sentence has been written."
Progressives have criticized such retaliatory strikes
against terrorists in the past as escalations that have only made
the problem worse.
A better approach would be to reform U.S. foreign
policy to reduce the level of hatred against the nation, critics say.
"Let us seek an end of the militarism that has characterized this
nation for decades," the War Resisters League pleads. "Let us seek
a world in which security is gained through disarmament, international
cooperation, and social justice not through escalation and retaliation."
Conservative columnist George Will calls such an attitude,
"appeasement tarted up as reasonableness."
With a conservative president in charge, civil liberties
and innocent foreigners may be dismissed as collateral damage in the
war on terrorism.
Notes
From New York
It's
the end of the world as we know it.
A
personal essay
by Orna Izakson
The servers at the Hi Life Bar and Grill on
Manhattan's upper West side didn't expect to be called in to work
on Tuesday night. "It's the end of the world," one of them said. "Nobody's
going to be out tonight." There were people out in restaurants, and
not all of them looked stricken or were talking about the day's events.
The most recognizable sign that something was wrong was the abundant
street parking.
A few miles south, people trapped in the wreckage
of the World Trade Center's collapsed Twin Towers called for help
on their cell phones. At the bar, the server said "People are freaking
out because they don't have enough mayonnaise. Thousands of people
have died. Can you please have some perspective?"
A reporter friend of mine was
on the subway coming into Manhattan from Queens on Tuesday morning,
taking a train she calls "the Orient Express" for its ethnic diversity.
She was shocked, she said, that the people waiting on the elevated
platform took the attack so personally. They didn't think of the people
in the steaming (but still standing) World Trade Center buildings
as just a bunch of rich white folks.
Tuesday in New York City was a day the living reserved
for shock and horror and tried to wrap their brains around the magnitude
of what had happened. New Yorkers, for the most part, went home to
their friends or families, listened to the unending sirens, and did
what they could to call out on phone lines that were constantly jammed.
There was little to report, other than the news.
But by Tuesday evening, the major media criticism
was starting to emerge and will likely grow as time passes. Even business
reporters whose buildings shook when the Twin Towers collapsed complained
that all the media reported was "God Bless America" and "hit our enemies
hard," completely disregarding any analysis of why the U.S. --
and the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon -- became a target
in the first place.
One man said matter of factly to me in the morning
that this is what happens when 5 percent of the world's population
wants to consume 40 percent of the world's resources. (His building
was evacuated a few hours later.) My sweetheart's mother, far south
of New York, told him that if tens of thousands march to protest institutions
like the WTO, everyone knew the day would come when someone in the
world would be upset enough to launch an attack like the one on Sept.
11.
In the wake of the disaster, some peace activists
were dispirited by the seemingly inevitable slide toward jingoism
and war. Others saw an opportunity to change our thinking, adjust
our society's gaping maw of desire for stuff: "The way to protect
ourselves is to stop fucking over others so much they feel they have
no other recourse," one said.
At 2 a.m. Wednesday at the New York City
Independent Media Center (IMC), activists were planning a meeting
in front of a Ghandi statue later in the day to discuss a community
response.
"The television showed the pictures of the New York
skyline, and when people look at the New York skyline they see buildings,"
Media activist Goldhagen said. "We play with buildings and toys as
kids and knock them down. We see them blow up in movies all the time;
we cheer and we think it's cool. But from this close, you see the
people, and there's a human element to what's going on. And we don't
have the luxury of being able to rejoice at the collapse of Western
civilization because we all lost friends yesterday."
Some people did react joyfully at the attacks, one
woman there said. But everyone knew people who were killed, she added,
and it's important to craft a gentle response to a complex situation.
"We don't want to go to war," she said. And "(we)
don't think the proper response is to bomb fucking Afghanistan."
One concern, she said, was the likely targeting of
Muslims, even before there is any clear sense of who was behind Tuesday's
attack. After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Muslim New
Yorkers were being beaten in the streets. On Tuesday evening, New
York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said he had ordered additional protection
for Islamic/Muslim groups.
The NYC IMC plans to create a pamphlet explaining
what they feel the rest of the media have ignored: the roots of Tuesday's
attacks. The IMC activists' analysis is that the problem is global
capitalism and a U.S. military that they say attacks civilian targets
around the world just like the U.S. was attacked on Tuesday.
But during the day on Tuesday,
as sirens wailed all through the city throughout the day and the night,
most people were still just living with the horror, trying to make
sense of it, and, shell-shocked, wanting to tell their stories.
Stories about the people who jumped from the 80th
floor of the burning buildings, or the body parts that drifted down
(and weren't shown on TV because the networks deemed the footage "inappropriate.")
Stories about firefighters in one of the towers who
used their axes to break open vending machines so that escaping workers
could have food and water, or of the store owners on the far side
of the Williamsburg Bridge who offered their wares for free to people
walking out of the city still covered in dust.
Or the story about one man's phone call from the 90th
floor of one of the towers: "I'm going to die here," he told his friend.
"Please stay on the phone with me until I die."
Table of Contents
| News | Views | Arts & Entertainment
Classifieds | Personals
| EW
Archive
|