...of civil liberties would automatically expire in a 90-day period and have to be renewed
by Congress every 90 days.
Jeff, you're not a mystery.
No, we're not living in a military time frame.
I think that's reasonable.
We think it's reasonable.
First of all, you're not a mystery.
I think that's reasonable.
Eddie and I, we both served in the military.
We served 50 years.
We...
And you know I did.
We...
Yeah.
And you did too.
We recognize that these are...
Oh, yeah.
Something that's...
If there were ever emergency times...
Yeah.
...you know, the trouble is giving...
You know, we already passed the terrorism bill, which gave them pretty much carte blanche
if they had anything related to terrorism to just throw up wiretaps.
That's inexistent.
Schumer.
Schumer's the guy that brought it.
You know, and people criticized it, but they couldn't...
They should be...
Still have to get warrants for wiretaps.
They've got a secret court down here that's a rubber stamp for warrants anyway.
Exactly.
They've had it anyway.
But the point is, what good, you know, if we become complacent with politicians telling
us we're giving them more money, this is the danger.
If we become complacent behind this crap, and when we know these guys don't know how
to do it, what we're trying to address is what specifically should change.
And...
Go ahead, Eddie.
I just want to say, we...
You were talking about Title III wiretaps.
No, this...
The terrorism bill...
Right.
Okay.
...we don't need.
It's not Title III anymore.
I just use Title III as...
The terrorism bill, you go in and you say, we've got a spy.
Right.
We need it right now, and they do it right now.
Right.
Okay.
You and I both know, a wiretap, historically, people don't come on the phone and say, I'm
going to do something at a certain time, at a certain place.
They talk in code...
You're right.
...which is good.
That keys you off.
But without the human factor, the guy who has infiltrated them to connect the dots,
you just have an ambiguous conversation that you can't figure out.
So it's a combination of both.
You need the technical surveillance, but you need the human factor too.
Yeah.
You're listening to WBAI in New York.
Stay tuned for Off the Hook.
The more I see, the less I believe.
The barbed wire fences have replaced all the trees.
The houses I've got are full of sin and every weed.
Praying for forgiveness for those they lead to bleed.
And they keep telling me it's not my concern.
But when petrol runs dry, when cars overturn, when you see children cry, because their citizens
are burning, who's gonna show concern?
The more that I see, the less I believe.
Like countries split in two through religion, tradition and greed,
the devil's curse is put upon those who have solutions
and those like me too ignorant to find my own conclusions.
Is that why they're telling me it's not my concern?
But when I see children cry, cos that's all they can do,
they are crying for help and they're looking at you.
What are you supposed to do?
They're supposed to, they're supposed to, they're supposed to, they're supposed to.
The governing powers are confused, the army's becoming bemused.
Another bomb becomes defused and the terrorists aren't amused.
Paisley is getting his shirt off, Sinn Féin are going insane.
They strive to divide the countryside but the borderline remains.
Another attack leaves a widow in black, grieving for her bereaved.
Another kid with a brick gets shot in the back and gets left on the pavement to bleed.
And they keep telling me it's not my concern, it's not my concern, it's not my concern.
They're all, they're all, they're all, they're all certainly half an hour away.
Does anybody know any jokes?
I'm a couple of blocks away from where I'm sitting right now, right in this studio here.
It's the weirdest sensation to know that, you know, just to know what occurred.
The fact that it's not just on your TV set, it's real, it really happened, you know, it really took place.
The first time heading into New York and just seeing what I was seeing on television in front of me.
And that was last week, that was last Tuesday.
Because, as you know, of course, this dreadful thing happened last Tuesday morning at around 8.45.
And even though it was obvious that the city was going to be completely unlike New York from that point on,
certainly on that day, I felt a strange kind of drive, this obligation that the radio station was the place to be.
The radio station was the place to gravitate towards.
And I'm quite certain that just about everybody here at this place who has been involved with this place
over the years, over the decades, and of course a lot of the listeners probably felt the same kind of spirit of
this is the time to come together, this is the time to reach out, communicate, see if everybody's okay,
which we're still in the process of doing.
And so I headed out to New York last week, many, many hours early,
because I knew it was going to be hell to get in, and it was hell to get in.
Weird, because driving from Long Island, it was amazingly quiet.
There was very few cars on the parkway or expressway.
But almost immediately upon hitting Queens, all of a sudden, wow, you couldn't move.
It was impossible to move forward.
So I knew that the best thing to do at that point, since the subways were running on partial schedules,
was to just leave my car someplace and hop on a train and just try to get into Manhattan.
And it was such a weird phenomenon to see this, to see the streets of Queens.
I hadn't even gotten to Manhattan yet, but the streets of Queens, there were barricades, there were buses blocking Northern Boulevard.
I abandoned the parkway and the expressway and got onto some of the side streets and eventually made my way to Northern Boulevard.
And for some reason, buses were blocking certain intersections.
And I had to wonder why, what was going on all the way out in Queens,
that certain streets had to be closed off, main streets, main arteries, and people rerouted onto side streets.
But eventually, I just parked my car in front of somebody's house someplace and just got out and started walking.
It was my intention to walk to the 179th Street station and get on the F train.
Of course, being an idiot, I didn't realize that I parked on Northern Boulevard and not Hillside Avenue.
So of course, I didn't realize that mistake until I tried to get back many hours later and realized I was nowhere near where I thought I was.
But eventually, I found a bus and I just got on the bus and took that to Flushing.
Buses weren't charging at all. I just got on the bus and they just let you on.
It was the strangest feeling.
And there was just a mood around the whole town that was just different.
It was hard to put your finger on it.
People weren't openly sobbing or going hysterical in the streets, but you could feel kind of a quiet that isn't normally there in New York.
And just kind of an intensity.
Just kind of this look that, you know, I'm going from point A to point B and there'll be no deviations today.
I've seen that look before.
And documentaries about cities that are being bombed or that have been going through long civil wars and things like that.
And here it is.
Seeing it on a bus in Queens.
Eventually, I made it to the number 7 train, which actually was going to Manhattan, to Grand Central Station.
Actually was doing what the media says was impossible, getting into Manhattan.
And the people on the train just didn't seem that phased.
They were just reading the paper.
The Trade Center is in back, burning.
You could see the smoke rising into the sky from the train outside.
And people are reading the paper.
I was the only person standing up in the front of the train looking in amazement.
And so eventually, the train got into Manhattan.
I found out that's the furthest south I could get.
So I had to meet up with some people, walk the rest of the way.
And it was a long walk from Grand Central to Wall Street.
And while there were police everywhere, there were all kinds of vehicles,
all kinds of fire department and medical personnel and police everywhere going in every direction.
North, south, east, west.
They were going every place, blocking streets.
Just by foot, running around.
But still, it was not hard to get downtown.
There was nobody saying you couldn't walk down the street.
I think they were too busy worrying about the cars going down the streets.
And so it took a long, long time.
But eventually, we made it all the way down here.
The air was really, really thick with all kinds of debris.
You had to have something covering your face or it would have been impossible to breathe.
And unfortunately, by the time we got here, which was right about 8 o'clock, it was close to 8,
we found out that, in fact, power had been lost to this building
and a couple of others in the immediate area.
And the radio station had been evacuated about an hour, hour or two hours earlier.
And so, while our transmitter remained unaffected,
our transmitter was broadcasting just fine, there was no audio signal to the transmitter.
So basically, what that amounted to was silence going over the radio,
which, unfortunately, was the one thing that I think we needed to have more than silence,
obviously, in a time like this.
And we spent the rest of the night just kind of wandering around,
just looking at things, looking at the reaction, I guess,
just seeing all these emergency vehicles in every part of the city
and seeing people, you know, strangers, friends,
people that just all of a sudden meant a whole lot more.
You know, and spent hours just talking,
you know, small talk or talking about the devastation or talking about anything,
just being glad to be around where you could talk to these individual people.
And it took a long time to get home, too,
because of the aforementioned parking in the wrong part of Queens
and taking two hours to find where I actually did park.
But after that, I just kind of didn't feel like going out again for a while.
I just felt like, I guess, what a lot of us have been feeling
over the past several days, just kind of wanting to hibernate,
wanting to get away from all of this,
wanting to see people and just, you know, hang out
and prize the quiet times,
the times with the people that you didn't realize mattered so much.
And it was an eye-opener in many, many ways
because here's something that all of us, all of us were familiar with.
We had all seen the Twin Towers of Manhattan.
There was something we grew up with, something we became accustomed to.
It was New York.
And within the space of a couple of hours,
they were destroyed completely, wiped off the face of the earth
and everybody inside along with them.
And it made you realize how, no matter how big something is,
there's nothing permanent about it.
It can be wiped off the face of the earth just like that.
And at the same time, I realized that all the small things
that we take for granted, they matter more than anything.
And that's kind of what I've been doing over the last week.
Not a whole lot of work, not a whole lot of anything, I guess,
defined in our society as productive,
but a lot of seeking of comfort.
And I think that's what many of us in New York have been doing.
And I'd certainly like to talk to people here,
both in the studio and people over the phone,
see how we made out, how we're going to make out in the future.
I'm glad this place is still here.
I'm sorry for all the time that we were off the air.
I wish we could have done more.
We have a lot of people here in the studio.
Let's start with Regular's Isaac.
Hey, Joseph.
Actually, you're on the wrong microphone.
There you are.
Okay, there's a mic next to you.
Glad you...
This is actually the first day I've seen you since it happened.
Since the event, yeah.
You look the same.
Yeah, yeah, I look basically the same.
It doesn't change you physically much,
but it makes you think, to say the very least.
Yeah, and it sure does.
Where were you when it hit the fan?
I was on a 7 train on the way to Manhattan.
You were on a 7 train too?
Mm-hmm.
And it was...
I honestly don't remember.
It was a little bit east of either 33rd and Rawson or 40th and Bliss.
And I saw some of it happen.
Were you looking out the window at the time?
No, I was reading a book.
Okay.
And...
Was there a sound that could be heard all the way in Queens?
It was...
I mean, it wouldn't be anything you would pick up
over the rumble of the subway.
The second impact, I did hear, because I'd gotten off the train.
But someone actually had spoken while we were on the train
and looked out the window.
And, you know, it was some kind of very strange feeling
before someone said something.
And you kind of look up and you just saw the smoke coming off the tower.
And we'd gotten to the next station and we stopped.
You had no idea it was a plane at that point?
Well, it was...
My first instinct was, you know, something flew into the Trade Center,
either a helicopter by accident or something.
It would be...
It was way too high and too large to have been a bomb.
I mean, you know, that would involve, like, UPS and a hand truck,
you know, moving a large, heavy object up to that floor
and putting it next...
It seemed unlikely to me, but I basically saw the smoke.
I was on the platform when the second one went into the tower.
Did you see the actual plane?
I saw a dot, which I looked back...
Or I think I saw a dot.
I mean, I'm looking back and it's still kind of hazy.
It was obviously smoky as well, but...
It hit the tower and there was a delay before you heard this low kind of rumble,
like a single sort of roll of thunder that came over.
And at that point I was on foot back home.
I, you know, you just saw a flash and you heard this sound that came later.
It was like watching lightning at a distance.
Right.
It would roll towards you.
And that was my immediate experience.
I kind of knew based on...
I mean, I didn't think about it,
but I kind of knew that those towers were coming down
when I saw the event simply because of the way they're designed.
I'd been familiar with the way the structure works.
That's the thing that plagues me,
is knowing that now and realizing that had I been in the building at the time,
especially the second building,
I wouldn't have jumped to that conclusion.
I wouldn't have said, well, you know, the whole tower is going to collapse.
The whole World Trade Center is going to collapse because the plane hit it.
Well, the first building I fought for the longest time was just some helicopter
that, you know, managed to get a wind gust and blow into the building or something.
And that possibly could have been survivable for the structure.
But when I saw the second flash,
which was basically this entire section of two or three floors engulfed in...
On the second building or on the first one?
On the second impact.
I saw that too.
I saw that on television.
I saw the airplane on television and I said,
that airplane, you know, should not be there.
That was obviously a lot closer than I was.
I mean, I was watching from very far distance.
But I thought that was just, you know, some idiot getting too close, you know,
for one of the news...
I didn't realize how big the plane was either
because it was kind of hard to tell the scale.
It was a 767.
Yeah, and then I saw the explosion.
I said, why did the second tower just explode?
What, you know...
It didn't make any sense at the time.
And then once I realized what had happened,
I heard the commentators...
It's very interesting to watch news when something like this is happening.
Some of them were speculating as to whether
something horribly wrong had gone on
with the air traffic control system
that was somehow steering planes into buildings.
Yeah, they were theorizing about all kinds of things,
but it seemed pretty obvious at that point.
And then, after all that,
just to hear all the different reports coming from around the country
of things all of a sudden...
I heard a car bomb outside the State Department.
I heard, you know, the White House.
I heard the Capitol and I heard the Pentagon,
plus a whole lot more.
I heard there were plane crashes in Colorado.
Just this sense that it's all falling apart
right in front of your eyes.
And, you know, things are very fragile.
You know, our society is fragile.
We think that it's high and mighty,
but, yeah, you can destroy things.
You can totally take out cities.
It's a horrible reality.
Well, that's not a society.
That's buildings.
Unfortunately, the lives in those buildings.
But you cannot knock out a society like that.
Well, I hope so. I hope that's true.
Because I think that's the next thing that we have to face
whether or not this is going to affect our society
in a very negative way.
Ken is here from Nuff Said.
How are you doing?
Why don't I still have the right mic?
This is the white mic.
Oh, you're white. Okay, they're switched in order.
There we go. Go ahead.
How are you doing?
Okay.
Actually, I saw you last week in front of the station, too.
Yeah, I came down here early to, you know,
just to talk to people.
I felt the same sort of, you know,
people I knew who gave a damn
and were intelligent
and, you know, wouldn't
have knee-jerk reactions.
And I left home
right before
the explosion at the
Seven World Trade Center that knocked the power out of this building.
So I was very
blissfully figuring out,
I know so many people who are here. I've heard them on the air.
So I'll go down there.
Yeah.
But we met up. We didn't actually get in the building or anything like that.
Yeah, we met up.
There was really no notice as to what was going on,
where people were.
And in fact, to this day, we still don't know where people wound up going.
The few people that did broadcast over the airways here.
Oh, yes. That's a secret.
That apparently is a secret.
And unfortunately, we were off the air 12 hours a day
because of that secret.
And I don't know.
I just think that was really, really unfortunate.
A lot of our best reporters, you know, have been banned
and fired. So, you know, we lost their skills, too.
That's a whole other issue, too.
But we have to look at the
really big picture here, which
affects the entire world.
How do you think this is going to
impact us as a society?
Do you see negative things coming out of this?
I see a lot of negative things.
And I also see people fighting those negative things,
which sort of gives me a little bit of hope.
But you kind of wonder,
because politicians, they want to be noticed, too.
And of course, extreme behavior is what's noticed.
You know, the moderates
who are dealing with this issue
of all the politics involved
in Palestine, Israel, whatever,
the moderates are being ignored.
So the extremists are like,
your way doesn't work. Let's try my way.
And they're getting people going,
yeah, you're right. The other way didn't work.
And I hope that we let the other way work.
Right now,
the sympathy of the entire world
is lying with the victims of the
Trade Center and, to a small extent,
the Pentagon.
As it should. As it should.
I've been glued to the radio
for a week.
Probably to an unhealthy degree.
But I can't tear myself away.
I want to know more. I want to know more.
I want to listen to all these damn experts
that every station seems to have.
And one person
who talked about terrorism
in England
had an interesting observation
that when the IRA first started bombing
in London,
most of the Irish people were like,
I'm not Irish. I'm Irish. They're not Irish.
The Irish don't do that.
And then the British started rounding up
anybody who was Irish.
They decided that everybody who was Irish
was a terrorist.
And the sympathies of the Irish people
switched from being with the victims
of the bombings
to being with the terrorists
because the British establishment
were lumping them in with the terrorists.
So they found themselves part of that
whether they wanted to or not.
Even though those first sympathetic individuals
may have never ever wanted to become
a terrorist, their kids might have.
And so the reactions
of the British, the extreme
reactions of the British
to the extremists in the IRA
created more terrorists.
And I am scared to death
that there's going to be extreme behavior
on the part of the United States
of people representing the United States
that the people who
the Arabs throughout the world
that people representing themselves as Arabs
are doing this that they would never do.
They're going to be lumped in
and their sympathies are going to switch.
And I don't want
to see us be more, because if we be more terrorists
we're going to be more World Trade Center bombings.
Absolutely. And the Islamic world is as
outraged by this as the Western
world. And I think
it's a very, you know, the horror
What's personal with them?
The horror of this event is also a great opportunity
for us to bridge any gaps that we have
between the cultures. And I think the Islamic
world wants to deal
with this at least as much as
us. And
you have to look at this. I see
everywhere on television, I see war in America
and all the
little catchphrases and things like that.
Which I understand why that's
happening, but I think we're missing
an opportunity by just focusing on that so much.
This is a war on Islam as well.
Look at what they have done
to an entire people. Look how they've
made them appear to the world.
And that's something that has to be
fought, you know, to the strongest
degree. And I'm thinking
of the civil liberties that
we lost in the U.S. during the Cold War
and during World War II.
That we really didn't get back until Watergate.
When people were outraged that
you could abuse power that way.
And I don't want to have to wait for some
Watergate 20 years down the road to
regain the civil liberties. These things don't go back.
I mean, basically all the barricades going up
in front of all the federal buildings, they're not coming down.
And the thing is, they're not
the answer.
That simply kind of ups the ante
and says, well, you can't get us. You have to think of
something better. And they do.
They think of something better. They crash airplanes into the buildings
then. Our own airplanes.
They didn't even use their own. They used ours.
Yeah.
It said American on it.
In a way,
I have to say that
if all the barricades
were not there, yeah, we would be open
to more risk of terrorism.
But we would also
I don't think we would feel as
victimized by it.
And it's kind of hard to explain this, but
I think
I think terrorism is always going to be
a reality of life. And we have to
deal with that. We have to kind of
protect ourselves
in a different way. And that's not by
erecting barricades and closing things and
searching everybody.
It's figuring out how this happened
in the first place. And I think that's what really
gets me kind of angry is that we don't
pay attention. We don't pay attention.
And I've been railing about this for weeks
ever since I got back from Europe.
How people
in America, people in the United States
do not seem to care what's going on in the rest of the world.
We don't watch the news
from other countries.
In fact, right before this happened, literally
moments before this happened, I was up
early. I never get up at this time.
I had jury duty.
I hadn't been called that day, but since
my hours were exactly the opposite
as the hours they would have to be if I did get called,
I had to kind of wean myself to waking
up in the morning. So I woke up at 7 in the morning
because I might have to wake up
at 7 in the morning the next day.
And when I did that, I turned on the TV
to see if there was any news on. And yeah, there was news.
Michael Jordan might be coming back to the
NBA. The person
who drowned her kids, she's facing trial.
All this stuff, over and over
again on all the channels.
There were like 7 different channels and they all had
the same stories, not a single one
having to do with anything in another
part of the world. Just all this
regional stuff. And it just got
me angry. And I turned the TV set off and
walked out to make some tea and my phone rang.
And then the TV came back
on for the rest of the week.
But I'm just saying, you know, by not paying
attention to what's happening
in the rest of the world, we don't see the warning
signs of what's coming.
Now, today I'm hearing that
there's a report of a link between
Iraq, you know, Iraqi
intelligence and one of the pilots.
They call them pilots. I don't know why
they do that. The pilots are the people
legitimately flying the planes. The hijackers. Let's call them
what they are. They're hijackers who managed
to take control for a few minutes.
And, you know,
there's a link now between Iraq
and this.
Are you surprised by that? I mean,
if you bomb a country every day for
over ten years, what do
you think some people are going to do?
You know, they're going to get very upset
and make it their life's mission to
destroy this country as well.
And, of course-
Robert E. Lee knew that he had to bring the war
to the north. The entire Civil War
is fought in the south and he goes, we're not going to
win if it stays here. We have to bring it to them.
Make them know the horrors of war
and they'll stop. And so
it's the same strategy.
We now know the horrors of war.
Does that become a justification?
No, not at all. It's not a justification.
But is the political and
military strategy behind it?
Let's draw a cancer analogy.
You want to know how it forms. It doesn't mean
you're saying, yes, cancer, come and destroy
people's lives. But by understanding
what causes it, maybe you can stop
it before it actually
victimizes you.
We're joined by Bernie S.
down in Philadelphia. Bernie, are you there?
I'm here, Emanuel.
And also
Terrence from
Philadelphia. You might know him as Shapeshifter, the person
that the federal government held on half a million dollars
bail at the Republican convention last
August. He joins us here in the studio.
And I'm listening to your microphones
working. Yeah, I'm here. Good.
And Alex is here from
the island. Not on a pay phone today.
Not on a pay phone. Here in person.
We'll have someone come in and ask for a nickel
every once in a while. That'd be excellent.
Thoughts, guys?
Anything on your minds?
How about some of the
new legislation that's being suggested
for wiretaps and things like that?
I think that's particularly
troubling. I think
well, just before we came into the city
I just got an email from the ACLU
who claimed that... Jerry Falwell
blamed for this whole thing. Did you notice that?
The ACLU is responsible
for what happened. What an
idiot, you know, to pin it
on anybody like that.
It's pretty terrible. But they made a good point
in the email. I just sort of skimmed it.
They said, you know, call your
congressman, make sure that the next
victim of this terrorism is not our civil
liberties. And I think they make a good point.
But at the same time
you sort of understand where
they're going with
these criticisms of the wiretapping laws.
Right now, if
the government wants to
monitor somebody, they need to get a wiretap
for every single telephone that you're using.
Now, they want to change this so that if you go
and use another telephone, if you go
and use a payphone, or if you go and use your friend's
telephone, they won't have to obtain another wiretap
in order to monitor you.
They want to have
the ability to just monitor you wherever you
go without fail and
by obviating all the due procedure that
they're supposed to go through to obtain
a wiretap. And it makes a lot of sense
if you really want to be able to track people efficiently.
It makes sense
for the person that you're tracking
but what is the side effect of this?
Do you wind up tracking all the
other people that are
related in any kind of way to
anybody who might have talked to this?
I think it's terrible because we all know that the problem with this
is that once you amend these
laws, after the war on
terrorism is over, the so-called war
on terrorism, it's never going to go back to the way it was
before.
One of the things that I think
is really important to remember now is that
domestic politics are
usually going to
dictate
regular national politics.
So if we really make
a ruckus about this and you make sure your congressman
is called and your senator is called and you really
voice your concerns about
this kind of legislation, hopefully it won't
go through. But it seems like
so much of the American people just really wants
retribution.
I thought that before today.
Before today I thought that that's
pretty much what most people
want. It's just retribution.
Then I went over to Union Square Park
with you guys before the show.
I was blown away by what's taking place
over there and I say to all our listeners
if you have not gone over there yet, please go over there
as soon as possible. This
makeshift memorial has just completely
enveloped the entire park.
Pictures of the people, the victims
and just
people
basically getting what they needed
at a time like this. A place to go,
people to talk to and listen to.
It's a very
peaceful, harmonic,
harmonious type of
place to be.
Of course there's anger at what's happened to
us, but we have to heal.
We have to heal and I think that's
very important. You can't just lash out
irrationally without knowing what it is that
you're going to do. I see that as
the world reaction. The world is really kind of
worried as to what the United States is going to do next.
I think the world is on
our side here. We can work with people
and get
the situation taken care of
in a way that makes sure
it doesn't happen again,
hopefully.
What's happening in Union Square Park I believe
is around the clock, so just go over
there and
be part of it. It's fitting that the very
place is named Union Square.
Yeah. It's bringing people together
that's for sure. There really is a reverence about
that place. Once we
walked into it, it just seemed like you
had to be silent.
You had to be reverent. There was nothing you could say.
There was absolutely nothing you could say.
All the pictures, all the
candles. It's just the human aspect of this
and that's something we forget. I was driving around
on the island over the last week and
occasionally you'd pass a mob of people
standing on a corner waving flags, cheering
and getting people to honk the horn
and they'd cheer. Okay, fine.
I understand the feelings
that come out in all that,
but what are we cheering?
What is the cheering about? Why are people
acting happy? This is not a time to act
happy. The time to act happy
is when terrorism is gone
and when we know we've won. I don't know if that day will ever
come, but right now I
sure don't feel happy. I don't think it's
happy. I think it's pride.
No, it's happy. People are jumping up and down, drinking
beers and getting drunk. I think
they're not even paying attention to what happened.
They see this as an excuse to just go out
and kick some ass and
have fun. That's wrong. That's not what it's about.
I can't believe that.
I'll take you to some key intersections
on the island. You can see it yourself.
The people who
are there just
remembering.
Remembering the victims.
Getting drunk and yelling
is another form of denial.
It's another way of escaping.
You can't stop them. You can't change the past.
You just get drunk. You escape
life for a couple minutes.
Andrew Phillips is also here from
days past.
In fact, Andrew is probably the person
that we should give credit for this program
ever starting. He was the program director of
WBAI back in the
late 80s.
He saw a need for a program
like this, and he said
Emmanuel, you go and do that show.
Well, you were doing this show late at night, if you
remember, and we just put it in a more accessible
slot.
I came by the station
today, Emmanuel. It's great to see you, by the way.
And to hear the voices behind
Off the Hook, which is a great show.
Needed at a time like
this, more than ever, by the way,
in my opinion.
I came by the station
today because I couldn't stand not
being here any longer.
We all know the station
has been going through tremendous turmoil
and what a tragedy it is here
that we're not able to
step up to the mark in the way we
perhaps should or could because
of other issues that have
unfortunately occurred
over here. But here we are.
And I really encourage
other producers and people who
are really serious and perhaps can
set aside some of our
differences to get out and do
the work just as those firemen are doing
the work as we speak amongst the stench
down there and the horror
and those spirits moving on to
another place. I mean,
this is indeed the beginning of
World War III. Let's wake up
and let's do some work and live a day at a time
and do our best to put
out our best and to share our best
with each other and the world.
I mean, is that sentimental?
If it is, good. So be it.
But we need to do some real work
here. I mean, we've got a big problem here.
I don't think we quite
are able to comprehend
what's happened, which is
very understandable, of course, after such
an enormous trauma.
And the reasons why it
happened, yes, we absolutely do need
to understand those. Will America ever
understand those?
I don't know. It'll take a long time. Will it be
too late? I mean, we don't know. These are
apocalyptic times. Language has changed.
At last the word awesome means
something.
You know what I mean? I mean,
it's an important moment in our history
to say the least.
And I'm glad
you guys are here to be able to share
some of your... By the way, Emmanuel,
tomorrow at 5 o'clock,
Eutrice Lee came in. I said,
put me on the radio. Let's do something.
She said, why don't you go
on the radio tomorrow at 5 o'clock, 5 till 6
behind the news. So I'm going to come in and do
something. I'm not sure what yet, but
I'm going to do my best. 5 till 6
tomorrow
in the evening. And I hope
some of you will be listening. I hope I can share something
that's helpful then.
I hope a lot more VAI producers
follow your lead
and just take part in this
because a time like
this is when radio is so
important, so intimate to people
out there. You know, when I
was working about to go to work, I build
gardens out in Brooklyn, work with stone. I'm a
stone man, really. And
I turned on the TV and there was no TV.
It was all snow because the towers
had been knocked down. I don't have cable.
Finally found Channel
CBS. And I
actually had turned on VAI prior
to the event just to see if Democracy
Now! was back or what was happening. It wasn't.
But Paul D'Arienzo was
describing this event, which at that point I thought
like you guys did. It was some kind of accident.
And then of course we learned it was
not. But
it was a very, very
I guess I'll talk more about that tomorrow, but
a lot happened in this city.
And your description of Union
Square, what a beautiful place.
You know the other thing that struck me when I was over there?
Twice I've been there.
All the candles are still
alight because it hasn't rained and there's hardly
any wind. It's as if even
nature knows to be silent
in this time of morning.
The world is almost still.
It's almost still.
That's right.
I guess we should take
some phone calls. So we have a special phone
number. Oh, Terrence, I'm sorry.
I totally missed you there.
Well, one of the things that I'm really concerned
about is the dehumanization
aspect of this. I mean, there's a lot of
Arab Americans and Arabs
throughout the world who are being dehumanized.
One of the things, I was at this
Quaker, I'm from Philadelphia, and you know there's a lot
of Quakers down there, and I was at
this Quaker service that
this Palestinian woman, she got up and
spoke and she's like, you know,
she's like, you know, I'm a
Palestinian and I'm also American, but today
I feel like, you know,
I'm proudest to say that I'm a human.
And she said that, you know, she's really
disturbed to see that on CNN
they kept on showing this one clip over
and over again of these Palestinians
celebrating in the streets. And
you know, maybe that did happen.
Who's to say? It probably did.
I saw that too, and I have
to say I saw that on BBC, which I've
always sung the praises of, but in this
particular time they showed the buildings burning
and on a split screen next to that
they showed these kids celebrating
and you know, to do such
a thing, obviously
you know, these kids aren't the ones that did it
first of all, but second of all
you do not know
if they even knew the magnitude of what was
going on. Who knows what they were
told? They probably were told that something bad
happened to the U.S. Okay, U.S. enemy, that's good,
we'll wave our flags. Who knows, maybe they were just told to wave their
flags. The point is, it had
nothing to do with the event.
To show that was just to foster hatred, and it
did, it really fostered hatred. I saw
I was on IRC at the time, people were saying how they
wanted to kill all Palestinians, now
you can really use media to control people.
And what people did not hear about
was that Palestinians
were going to Gaza Strip Hospital
and giving blood to the Red Cross
to be sent here to New York.
And that's the one thing you saw
I saw, I was watching BBC too
in Philadelphia
there's a channel there that rebroadcasts
BBC, they actually, it's a public
access. You told me about that, it's an actual
over-the-air TV channel in Philadelphia?
It's channel
WYBE
they broadcast
British and German
and French and South Korean news.
That's great, Bernie, do you know about this?
Yes, and because of
the law, the federal law
requiring that local stations be carried on
cable, it's
actually got a much wider audience to the
cable system in Philadelphia than
this weak transmitter
that WYBE would
normally reach. So it's a good thing.
I think I remember hearing about it in the
late 80s, they started
as a trade school
or small school station
and it's grown
it's a great local resource.
We need something like that up here, certainly.
Terrence, anything else?
The other thing I saw on BBC is they
didn't show the Palestinians giving blood
in the Gaza Strip Hospital, but they did go
and showed a clip of Israelis
from Israel giving blood
in a hospital and sort of like they're very
polarizing and
I think it's an important thing to remember
like there's a spectrum of how people
deal with these things. I mean, the U.S.
has done wrong in these other countries and there's
a spectrum of response.
Some people can understand that
we have been, Americans have been
dehumanized to people in those
countries and that's why we see things like the World Trade
Center bombings and then there's
people in those countries who are also giving blood
and like definitely understand
what's going on here and understand
that there's people, civilians who are also hurt
in this too and that
you know, it sort of goes
a lot of, it goes both ways.
Yeah, I agree with you. I saw
that clip of the Palestinians
dancing in the streets
probably 20 or 30 times in one day
and just once the
next day did I see a group of
mournful Palestinians where the corporate media
actually came out and said, well, maybe they're
not all bad. And how many people were in that
clip? Three or four.
Yeah, I kept seeing it over and over again the same
ten seconds. Only about five or six children in the other
clip if you've seen it so many times.
Now
we want to take some phone calls. Let me
first demonstrate. Bernie, hopefully I won't
lose you when I do this. I'm going to play a dial tone here
so don't panic.
Got a dial tone? Okay.
That is a
normal dial tone. Look what happens when you dial
us.
Okay, well if you don't dial 9 first
on this new system. Okay, hang on.
Hopefully I won't. Okay, let's
try that again.
Now if you dial us
if you even get to this point
this is the recording you'll get.
Okay, sometimes you don't even get a recording.
Ah.
No, it's not working. Let me try it one more time.
As you can see, the whole phone
system here is falling apart.
I don't mean here at the radio
station, I mean
here in New York City.
Due to a high
calling volume, all of our
circuits are busy. Please
try again later. Thank you.
This is a recording.
I love the guys
who can switch to record these messages.
Yeah, yeah.
Got that crusty sound.
So we use this
as an example.
We use this as an example.
We use this as an example.
We use this as an example.
It's a crusty sound.
It's a New York accent. It is a New York accent, yeah.
So I had all kinds of
problems last Tuesday with phones.
Of course, I understand.
I was actually surprised that Sprint PCS and
VoiceDream even stayed up at all.
But of course, there are all kinds
of problems getting through. To this day, I'm still having
problems. We have a special phone number
for people to reach us here
at the station. I don't know where this number came from, but it
works. It's area code
212-968-0500
212-968-0500
Please call us
and let us know how this
has affected you, any observations you might have
had, any stories
that you might have lived through.
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
Did you notice on Sprint, I know you're a Sprint
PCS customer, for better or worse,
did you notice that long distance calls
were almost always,
no matter where you were calling, were almost always
met with an unusual recording?
What was the recording? Well, it just said
your call cannot be
processed at this time, followed
by a tone, which I
decoded as a touchtone
5 digit. Really?
And I kept getting the same message, but
I was able, by using
a prepaid calling card from my Sprint
PCS phone, to
make calls almost anywhere without any problem.
I noticed that when I checked my
voicemail, I got a recording urging me to delete
any unneeded messages.
It's like, what, are we stockpiling
metal here or something for the war effort?
I don't understand why my deleting my own messages
is going to help out. Don't they have enough
disk space for their own customers?
Well, the answer is no. You have 10 or 20
people all calling this one person, asking
if she's alright.
That's not the impression I got.
I got the impression that the whole system needed
me, you know, everybody, to delete their messages
so other people could leave messages in other
places. Is that what it was?
World Trade Center.
The World Trade Center is where a lot of this voicemail
technology was.
When they lost the World Trade
Center, they lost a lot of this voicemail stuff.
People lost voicemail throughout the city.
Queens, everywhere.
Alright, let's, Andrew?
Could I just ask you, the expertise
of your program, your co-hosts
here, what about cell phones
in this situation? Cell phone calls
made from airplanes, cell phone calls
made from under the ground?
Cell phone calls obviously can be made from airplanes, as
we've now seen proven.
It's a basic issue where they don't want you to use your cell phones.
They can tell you up and down that it's
because it conflicts with the navigational
systems, which I find more frightening
than anything, if that's true.
But it basically comes down to the fact that...
It was so interesting, though, the way the cell phone
was used as this tool. It was such a
terrific example.
This thing puts out maybe 200 milliwatts,
or maybe a watt if you've got a major
digital phone, and
the idea is that you'll wind up hitting so many
cell sites from an aircraft
that they don't want you to use it.
It doesn't mean it doesn't work. In fact,
it works too well, and you wind up
just blanketing a whole area
with your call.
People picked up their phones.
I was actually waiting for some commentator
to say, well, you know what crashed that plane
in Pennsylvania? All the people
turning on their cell phones. I would have
marched down to the station and just strangled
that man.
Let's take some phone calls of our own.
Again, the number is 212-9680-500.
Let's see
who's out there.
Good evening. You're on Off The Hook.
Hello. How are you guys doing?
We're doing okay. We're getting through this. How are you?
I'm okay. I'm good. I'm driving
right now downtown
to Manhattan to do some work. I'm a little worried
about it, but...
Don't drive past 14th Street or it'll be mayhem.
Yeah, right.
Well, I have to do that, but I'm going to
try to take it easy.
But anyway, I'm actually...
It's nice to hear another Australian voice
there. I'm going to head back there myself
with my wife and little baby
very soon and hang out there
for a few months. I'm a little worried.
The reason being is that
all the
little ingredients
all add up to
something that has
never happened before. My question
is, I guess, I would like to know what you guys
are thinking about Nostradamus'
predictions
and how the number
11 I heard a little of
has become a
focal point.
He mentioned something about number 11 and
the twin towers and glide 11.
Nostradamus is like a
three-foot cube cardboard
box, and you can throw anything
you possibly have into it and say,
oh, look, it fits so perfectly.
Yeah, but also a lot of people say
that this is from Nostradamus when they made it
up themselves. And the other thing is that this
is a human act. If it was an
earthquake, maybe you might have some credence there,
but humans said, hey, wouldn't it be
cool if we did this on the 11th, because then it
would spell 9-1-1, and it would be
all kinds of stupid
reasons. Do they have 9-1-1 in Afghanistan?
Well, I imagine they
studied here. And that's the other thing. This whole
Afghanistan business, you know,
I just
find it very hard to believe
that Afghanistan
is our enemy, you know, the people
of Afghanistan. They're living in poverty.
I mean, this is like probably the worst thing we could
possibly do would be to start bombing in Afghanistan.
We need to find out who is really
behind this and neutralize
that particular source. But, you know, I'm not
seeing, I'm not saying it's not there, but I'm not seeing
evidence pointing to bin Laden. I really am
not seeing it. Where is that evidence? But that's honestly
not the point. The point of all these
operations that people are suggesting
is to eliminate terrorism.
We're not, you know, specifically revenging
the people who committed this act.
It's the idea that there
will be no more terrorist
acts in the world.
That is the much broader perspective.
See, the impression I'm getting is that we're going after the people
responsible for this particular act, not
sweeping the entire world. That prospect
scares me even more. Because then,
you know, you have to define terrorism. You have to
like put priorities on certain types.
That gets a lot more interesting because they're talking about
these multinational coalitions. And you can imagine
say even just the French,
the UK, and the USA coming
together and making this anti-terrorism coalition.
You know that at some point
they're going to say, well, you know who's next on the list?
The real IRA. And the
US is going to go, um,
well, isn't that
your internal problem?
Well, wait a second. They're bombing our
buildings in London. That came up in a press
conference today. Ashcroft
was sort of backpedaling
about whether he wanted to define
the IRA. He wouldn't say one way or the other,
but they kept trying to push him to
say something. I'm curious about one thing.
If this whole thing had happened and it turned out
to be another Timothy McVeigh type person
from within the United States,
who would we be bombing? Who would we be
threatening war against? Dallas.
You know, something to think about
because this kind of thing can come from anywhere.
If I may,
I think one has to be a little bit
careful with the hypothetical at this
point because we've got so much stuff grounded
in literal fact. I mean,
we've got an enormous number of people
just
evaporated off the bottom of the island
a week ago. Oh, they weren't evaporated.
They're still there. Yeah. Well,
parts of them are. A terrible,
terrible, terrible
tragedy for this country and the world.
We've got a situation where the president,
who was in real trouble with
the economics coming recession
in this country and a lot of other things,
who's getting saved by the skin of his teeth,
which is a whole other story we don't have to get into now,
but who's marching off literally
what he describes as a crusade,
a holy war. And you'll also
notice the enormous way that
religion and the state have got involved.
I went to St. John the Divine on the weekend
and they played
the Star Spangled Banner within
the church and of course there's religious
references just riddled through politics
here. So there's this really sense of a
holy war that America's about
to wage against the Islamic world.
I mean, when Bush made that
statement, I think soon after that he was wheeled
into the mosque to sort of try to soften
that image. I think he was speaking off the cuff
when he used the phrase crusade,
the word crusade. But this is the
kind of situation. He does want to
wipe terrorism off the face of the earth, which
I don't know whether that's possible actually,
particularly without even getting into the
nature of why the terrorism
exists.
I think
one thing to keep in mind here is
like, if you go and bomb
Afghanistan, you're just, you're sort
of honoring the people who
died last Tuesday
at the World Trade Center because you're going to continue
this cycle of violence and more people will
die. One will be enough to say,
hey, like, we're going to end
this cycle of violence here.
If we keep on bombing, then more people are going
to get more angry and
attack the United States and then
there's no
chance for peace ever and
that will just continue terrorism.
And it's like
people call it terrorists, people who
work without states, but then
the actions that the United States has taken
and even the British in Northern Ireland
could be considered terrorism.
Denying people
food and water is violence
and I think
bombing a city that has
no running water anyway, like in
Afghanistan and Kabul,
that's a violent act.
We should just say enough is
enough. Especially when you consider
that probably the vast majority
of people in Afghanistan have no idea
what's going on right now. They're not connected
to media.
They know enough to flee the country.
Let's try and take one more phone call
because we're really running out of time here.
Good evening, you're on Off the Hook.
Hello, good evening.
What's up? I just found
an interesting
juxtaposition.
One is
I work with
the traumatically
brain injured
and the
power
of the media
to reach
all members of our
society is incredible.
Several of my
patients are
Muslims
and within
or I'd say minutes
of the occurrence
there were other members
already abusing
or mistreating
Muslim members of my
group.
I run a support group there.
And
it was sort of frightening
that actually the media
reached them a lot faster than I did.
And I had to
all of my other classes were
spent on
discussing what had taken
who was
who was truly responsible
which is a fact unknown
and that we don't respond to
facts unknown. We wait
and we listen for information.
And I
just
attempted to deal with
especially people who are
emotionally involved
because of their injury
to
offer some guidance.
That's the experience that I had.
That's really all I wanted to say.
Thanks. Thanks for saying it.
We're out of time.
I wish we had many many
more hours to talk to people and share
experiences but I do want to thank people for
listening. I want to thank people for
coming here. I'm glad everyone
that so far seems to be
part of the BAI family seems to have gotten
through this.
But of course I know that a lot of our listeners
were in those buildings.
And
I want to thank everybody who has emailed us
over at 2600 with their kind thoughts
and best
wishes for our survival and
future and that kind of thing.
I also want to urge people to stay tuned
to this station because there will be all kinds of
good programming coming up. I know
you can will be on Nuff Said at 10 o'clock.
No I won't. Oh you won't be. I'm being preempted
but I'm doing a segment
that's going to be on at 2 o'clock tomorrow they tell me.
And I'm talking about how our community
raised a whole bunch of money for the
Red Cross and Firefighters. Yeah speaking of which
1-800-HELP-NOW, the Red Cross
donation number. Okay.
And at 12
o'clock the Morrish Orthodox Radio Crusade.
Terrific program. I'm sure they'll be covering this
in really profound and
emotional ways.
And at 1-30 a show I think
a lot of us will be listening to is Weaponry
with Tom Whisker. That's going to be
especially interesting this week.
So we'll be back next week
hopefully. And
again, take care
everyone. Look to the small things.
We'll
see you later. Good night.
Look mummy.
There's snow playing up in the sky.
Why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath the clear blue sky
Did, did, did, did you see the frightened ones?
Did, did, did, did you hear the falling bombs?
The flames are all long gone but the pain lingers on
Goodbye, blue sky, goodbye, blue sky, goodbye, goodbye
We're not going to report
We're not going to report
You're tuned to HIGH FIVE, WBAI 99.5 on your FM dial, New York
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