It's big political dividends for the Bush administration, and these so-called pro-America
rallies are really pro-war rallies cheering on the slaughtering of Iraqi people.
As George W. Bush gives 48-hour notice to the world, it seems that this patriotic franchise
may be coming to a city near you.
For Free Speech Radio News, this is William Ross in Houston.
This is Free Speech Radio News.
I'm Deepa Fernandez.
And this is radio station WBAI in New York.
It's 7.03, time for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would.
Bondedly bond for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bondedly bond.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would.
Bondedly bond for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bondedly bond.
And a good evening to everybody on this auspicious occasion of, it's kind of bizarre how things
always seem to happen during our program, but this is actually it.
The much-hyped countdown to war, well, this is the final hour when our show is over.
It might very well be when war officially begins, it might even begin before then.
We're monitoring the situation, and at this point we really have to give you some important
information as to just what's going to be happening here at the radio station.
Obviously things are about to hit the fan in one way or another, we don't know exactly
how things are going to go, nobody does, but one thing that is vital to this community,
to the New York area, to all the people who are listening to us on the internet, it's
important for us to have a voice to be able to broadcast whatever information we're able
to obtain, whatever news is not being broadcast by the mainstream media.
And that's why, for the foreseeable future at least, the main focus of this program,
as well as many others on this radio station, is going to be the military action that is
taking place, how that affects us back here at home, how that affects people over there,
and we're just going to try and shed our particular unique light on events as they unfold, and
we invite our listeners obviously to do the same as well.
Quite a lot of changes going on right before our very eyes, and I'd say not one of them
is a good change, it's really, it's kind of unbelievable.
First, what's going on in New York right now, the sense of occupation that's taking
place.
Generally in wars, traditionally, wars have been fought over borders where people throw
things back and forth at each other, but that's not the case here.
We have some bizarre distorted view of war that allows us to go someplace else and bomb
another country to smithereens and nothing happens to us except our own paranoid delusions
of what they might do.
And those paranoid delusions of what they might do have led to a virtual military siege
of the city here.
Last night I was walking around in the Penn Station area, I was actually in the subway
system, not in Penn Station, and I bumped into a guy.
I always bump into people, it happens on the subway, except this guy had a goddamn machine
gun on him.
Yeah.
It was one of these military people, I guess they're National Guard, but you know what,
I don't care what you call them, they're soldiers and they're occupying the city.
And they have machine guns.
And I don't know what in God's name somebody with a machine gun is going to be able to
do to prevent somebody from blowing themselves up or crashing planes into buildings.
I remember when this first started a couple of years ago, we were talking about the National
Guard in Penn Station and various other places and how, you know, it was just a show of strength
or force or something like that and that there's nothing to worry about, these people don't
even have guns.
Well, that's certainly changed.
That's changed a lot.
There's people walking around now with machine guns and, you know, I don't know what to do
with these people.
What to make of them?
You know, do you look into their eyes?
Do you look away?
Do you, you know, say excuse me when you bump into them?
Do you like try like the plague not to bump into them?
I mean, what, has anyone out there had any kind of encounter with these people, you know?
It's really frightening.
And then walking down Wall Street on the way to the station here, yes, we're right on Wall
Street and that's sure a mixed blessing, I guess.
We get to see exactly what's going on, but we also have to live through it.
It's like going through a military camp right now.
There's those suicide bomber blocking pieces of concrete everywhere.
There's cops and soldiers with, you know, machine guns and all kinds of hostile expressions.
And you know, it really affects you.
Even if they don't talk to you, even if they don't approach you, just seeing them around
there, it's really frightening, scary, and makes you realize how much things have changed
in the past couple of weeks, past couple of years, certainly.
So that's where things stand.
Now, Bernie S. is in Philadelphia.
Bernie, you've noticed some things down there as well, haven't you?
I have, although it's quite not the state of speech that New York did, but from my office
window I have a good view of the federal building at 6th and Market Street.
And I casually look up at the roof of that building occasionally because there's an interesting
array of antennas, and occasionally they put a new one up there, so I take note of that
and speculate as to its purpose, but today I noticed several machine gun armed, apparently
Homeland Security officials walking around on the rooftop.
So that was an unusual sight, I've never seen that before, but it's clearly because of the
near state of siege that we're, our government is afraid that we're under.
Did they have any kind of uniform, fatigues, anything like that?
They were too far away.
All I could see from the contrast with the sun was the black profile against the skyline.
Veronica, I've got to ask you if you can move to a more quiet location because there's
a bunch of loud people around you and it's causing the phone to...
I am very sorry, I'll try to put a scaffold behind me here, here we go.
Thank you.
They were saying, all I could make out was their profile against the skyline, but they
were clearly carrying automatic weapons and pretty padded, so they're wearing bulletproof
vests, I guess.
Well of course we welcome any reports from our listeners of other strange things that
might be going on throughout the country.
As many of you know, there was a 48 hour time limit given by George W. Bush to, for Saddam
to get out of his own country.
I don't know where he's supposed to go, and I also don't understand if this guy is like
such a horrible war criminal why you'd say, okay, everything will be fine if you just
go somewhere else.
But that means that, I'm looking at live pictures now, well actually I guess they're
not live in Kuwait, but nothing seems to be happening as of yet.
But it's insane that people actually are timing this to the moment that he said this in his
speech.
He talked on Monday night at about 8 o'clock and it was 8.10 p.m. when he said the words,
he had 48 hours for Saddam Hussein.
So of course that means that at around 8.10, or many people are now saying 8 o'clock, that's
when the deadline runs out and if Saddam Hussein is still in Iraq, that's when, hey, he should
go to Kuwait, what if he did that, huh?
Yeah, that would really surprise everybody, no, you have to maintain a sense of humor
in these things.
Sorry Mike, there you are.
I think that North Korea has said he's welcome there.
Wow, that would be some coalition, wouldn't it?
You have to think of that situation too.
North Korea has already expressed its, how shall I say, edginess about what we're doing.
Now we start bombing over in Iraq and we talk about North Korea as the axis of evil, part
of the axis of evil.
What do you think is going to be going through their heads?
What do you think, they just might be a little bit really trigger happy.
We're putting the world in a very, and by we I mean this government that allegedly represents
us, in a very dangerous position when diplomacy certainly should have been given more of a
chance.
I've got to say something right now, I want to go on the record as saying this.
It's basically admitting that I was wrong about a very fundamental thing.
I don't think that Al Gore would have messed it up this badly.
I think there was a difference.
There was a difference between Gore and Bush.
I think Bush is proving that marvelously right now.
That doesn't mean I still wouldn't have voted for Nader or somebody that I think would have
done a better job.
But to say that they were identical, nah, I think this is something that, you only see
a person like this come along once every couple hundred years.
That's going to plunge the world into chaos like this.
I don't know.
There are going to be all kinds of actions in New York.
As soon as bombs start falling, there will be all kinds of marches and rallies.
I recommend looking at the site www.unitedforpeace.org.
They have a terrific calendar on there with all kinds of locations throughout the country
that tell you exactly what's going on.
What's happening here in New York, if the bombing, let's say the bombing begins tonight,
which is quite possible.
There will be a convergence on Times Square at 5 p.m. tomorrow.
And that will be, I guess that will be tomorrow if the bombs start falling tonight.
If the bombs fall tomorrow night, then it will be the next day.
It's 5 p.m. the day after the bombing, assuming it begins at night.
However, if the bombing begins in the daytime, then it's 5 p.m. the same day.
It's all thought out.
Either way, whether the bombs are falling or not, there's going to be a march on New
York City.
The difference here, and Mike, correct me if I'm wrong, there's actually a permit for
this march.
That's my understanding.
The police actually gave in and gave a permit.
I'm amazed by this.
I went to a tiny rally in the town of Huntington on Long Island last week.
And the way the police treated the people there was like night and day compared to what
they did here in New York.
They were friendly.
They let people march up and down the street, even though they might not have had a permit
to do that.
They, you know, they let people use a bullhorn, which you're supposed to have a permit for
technically.
And it was great.
You know, I'm sure a lot of people were, you know, inconvenienced because there was, you
know, some traffic blockage.
But they were courteous.
The point was gotten across.
Everybody left happy.
Nobody was injured.
Nobody was arrested.
So I hope the cops in New York City could learn something from that and learn something
from their mistakes.
The last time there was a demonstration in New York, which was February 15th, a massive
demonstration.
So no terrorists came out of hiding or whatever we're supposed to be afraid of?
No.
But anyway, the march and rally takes place this Saturday at noon.
And that's, I believe, starting in Times Square, marching down to Washington Square.
That's what I'm told.
Check.
You should check the website for the details, because the march route was still being negotiated
the last I heard.
Yeah, that's what it said last time I looked, too.
Unitedforpeace.org.
Their phone number, 212-603-3700.
So that's all the information as far as that goes.
Here's something that I thought was just simply unbelievable.
And it's, you know, this is from the Gannett news, you know, empire or whatever.
This was reported in a New Jersey newspaper.
And this has to do with what a red alert.
We're at orange plus now, whatever the hell that means.
We're at orange plus?
Orange plus.
Not just orange.
Orange plus.
They added something to within orange.
Because they wanted to go above orange, but they don't want to use up red.
Not yet, anyway.
They want to save that for something really special.
This is getting more and more confusing.
It's getting really stupid.
It's like, you know, it's like we're in kindergarten, except there's nuclear bombs involved.
This is not red.
What's that?
And if we go to red, some interesting things happen.
Yeah, well, that's what I'm going to be looking at right now in New Jersey.
This comes from South Jersey News, I believe.
If the nation escalates to red alert, which is the highest in the color-coded readiness
against terror, and New Jersey listeners pay strict attention to this, you will be assumed
by authorities to be the enemy if you so much as venture outside your home.
That's according to Sid Casperson, New Jersey's director of the Office of Counterterrorism.
Now, we're not reading some bizarre, radical, fundamentalist newspaper here.
We're reading something in the mainstream, okay?
This comes from Gannett.
This comes from South Jersey News.
This is in newspapers that you might pick up today.
Casperson is a former FBI agent.
He was briefing reporters alongside Governor James McGreevy on Thursday, when for the first
time he disclosed the realities of how a red alert would shut the state down.
A red alert would also tear away virtually all personal freedoms to move about and associate.
Red means all non-critical functions cease, he said.
Non-critical would be almost all businesses except health-related.
A red alert means there is a severe risk of terrorist attack, according to federal
guidelines from the Department of Homeland Security.
The state will redistrict transportation and access to critical locations, according to
the state's new brochure on dealing with terrorism.
You must adhere to the restrictions announced by authorities and prepare to evacuate if
instructed.
Stay alert for emergency messages.
Casperson went further than the brochure.
The government agencies would run at a very low threshold, he said.
The state police and the emergency management people would take control over the highways.
You literally are staying home is what happens unless you are required to be out.
No different than if you had a state of emergency with a snowstorm.
Well, it's a little different because this is something that, um, we're actually imposing
the equivalent of martial law, saying that you have to stay inside your house by mandate
of this red alert, and that anyone venturing outside is in violation of whatever edict
they've handed down.
It's incredibly scary, crazy, stupid.
I can't think of enough words to describe this.
Jim, Jeff, you live in New Jersey, so obviously you're concerned by this.
Sure, and I deal with school and students, and I'm just concerned if they call a red
alert during a school day.
Are we going to try and get the kids home?
Get the buses in?
This hasn't been discussed in your school.
We are discussing the lockdown procedures and so on to keep the kids in the school because
evidently that's probably what would happen is we wouldn't be able to go out.
But I think that's only at the highest level.
If it's red minus, you can still go out.
Red minus?
Well, it's like orange plus.
Oh, boy.
I mean, this raises the larger question of what if you're not at home when they declare
the red alert?
Can you go home or are you the enemy?
No, no.
What if you're at the house of someone you don't like?
It's really unbelievable that it's come to this.
Bernie, you said that, was there anything else that you noticed for red alerts?
There's been other stories about this in other parts of the country besides the Courier Post
article you just read.
The Long Beach Press Telegram, which is the Long Beach near Los Angeles, is saying similar
things pertaining to Long Beach police being in a state of readiness as in a state of readiness
in case of war, plainclothes officers and detectives will be required to have their
uniforms with them at all times.
Let's see.
At the highest stage of alert, officers will work 12-hour shifts, patrol critical facility
locations.
Let's see, what else that looks even more ominous?
Reading this better.
Okay, well-
Basically, it's the same thing as New Jersey.
They're saying they'll be traveling restrictions in the Long Beach, Los Angeles area.
Well, I'm going to go over some of the things that are happening in New York.
They've implemented Operation Atlas here in New York.
It's a plan to bolster security throughout the city.
And what that means, basically, it's going to cost the city more than $5 million a week
for one thing.
It's going to go into full effect once the war begins.
And these are some of the measures that are going to be launched as a result.
Increased police presence outside key businesses, especially around the financial district.
We certainly have seen that, a lot more than police presence as well.
Expanded patrols by police focusing on houses of worship, government buildings, hotels,
bridges and tunnels.
Increased police presence at southbound streets into Manhattan.
That's I guess coming from the Bronx.
Cancellation of New York Police Department classroom training, except firearms training
of course.
Grid checks for radioactive materials by police patrols equipped with pager-sized radioactive
sensors.
A robust towing program, particularly in front of missions, embassies and UN buildings.
An increased presence by canine teams on subways and ferries.
And the addition of 250 National Guard troops on subways.
I saw a crowd of them last night on one of the platforms from the number one train.
And again, you know, I'm confused.
What exactly can these people do?
Do they have complete authority?
Do they have authority over police?
Who do they answer to?
Who do you complain to if you're abused?
If there's a crime taking place, not a terrorist attack, but a crime of some sort, a mugging,
are these people going to step in and use machine guns?
So many questions I have and I'd like to know if anyone out there has answers.
Also continuing with Operation Atlas, putting up to 25% of NYPD detectives into uniform,
warning headquarters personnel that they must be able to respond to the street if necessary.
And of course there's also all kinds of restrictions on airspace above the city.
And there's military jet patrols supposedly up there.
I'd like to know if anybody has seen those as well.
I would like to suggest a competition for off-the-hook listeners.
They can enter by emailing oth2600.com with their suggestion for a better use of $5 million a week.
The best competition wins.
Yeah.
So what else do we have?
I also want to say one thing that I think I understand the orange alert thing.
Orange plus, it's to put people in place for the red alert, as in if you go from orange
to red, if it's orange normal, normal orange alert, and it goes to red alert, then they'd
have to get all the National Guardsmen out into the city.
And to prepare for a red alert, they put up the orange alert to orange plus.
Okay.
Thanks for explaining that to us.
How many pluses can you stack up?
I don't know.
I don't know.
The whole thing is massive idiocy if you ask me.
Our number is 212-209-2900.
We especially want to hear from listeners tonight, your concerns, your thoughts, your
experiences, that kind of thing.
And I'm going to go to the phones in just a moment.
Also please stay tuned to this radio station because this is where you'll be hearing all
kinds of breaking news you won't hear anyplace else.
Probably never anyplace else because that's not what they want you to hear.
How about this?
Telephone bugs have been discovered at offices used by France, Germany, and Britain in the
building where European Union leaders are due to hold a summit this week.
I wonder who's responsible for that.
Sweden's EU ambassador said only a few intelligence services were capable of installing such sophisticated
devices which may have been an action undetected ever since the EU Council building was inaugurated
in 1995.
The countries targeted were France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Austria.
And the French newspaper Le Figaro, which broke the story in a brief item in its diplomatic
gossip column, accused the United States of being behind the wiretapping revealed amid
acute transatlantic tension over looming war in Iraq.
But nothing is certain as of yet.
Wasn't a memo, I heard that a memo was leaked a week or two ago, an NSA memo was leaked
with regard to the bugging of UN Security Council members' homes.
Homes, offices, whatever, anything that would get what they're talking about.
This was in relation to the UN resolution that we were desperately eager for them to
vote in favor of.
And I didn't see any denials that that's exactly what they were planning on doing, monitoring
these people, seeing what they're saying, keeping track of their movements, that kind
of thing.
So yeah, that's what we are doing.
I believe in fact that someone responsible for leaking the memo was fired from the British
intelligence service.
She's at least been arrested.
I feel like you get fired before you get arrested.
And all kinds of, I don't know, all kinds of people are resigning in the British government.
Robin Cook resigned.
He's the guy that spearheaded the NATO campaign into Yugoslavia.
You know, for somebody that already was in charge of a military campaign to say that
this is illegal what's going on right now and, you know, to go against the United Nations
and world opinion, that kind of thing, you have to take that seriously.
You can't just keep putting your head in the sand and saying, you know, well, the United
States will do what it feels is right.
Even no matter how this turns out, you know, if it takes an hour and, you know, they bring
Saddam Hussein and, you know, hook him up with Manuel Noriega in a cell someplace and
the whole thing is over inside of a day, even then there's irreparable damage that has been
done.
Okay, this is interesting too, sort of on the same lines.
Intelligence documents that U.S. and British governments said was strong evidence that
Iraq was developing nuclear weapons have been dismissed as forgeries by United Nations weapons
inspectors.
That's right.
The weapons inspectors say that they were forgeries.
It's great how whenever they say something that we don't like, all of a sudden their
qualifications are called into question.
But we don't hesitate to use them to say that they haven't been given all the information
so therefore we have to bomb on their behalf.
It's all very crazy nonsense.
The documents were given to International Atomic Energy Agency Director General, good
God, Mohammed ElBaradei, who indicated that Iraq might have tried to buy 500 tons of uranium
from Niger.
Actually, it's pronounced knee-jur in England.
People don't say it here so I don't know how it's pronounced.
But the agency said they were obvious fakes.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to the documents directly in his presentation
to the U.N. Security Council outlining the Bush administration's case against Iraq.
I'm sure the FBI and CIA must be mortified by this because it is extremely embarrassing
to them.
That's according to former CIA official Ray Close.
Responding to questions about the documents from lawmakers, Powell said, it was provided
in good faith to the inspectors and our agency received it in good faith, not participating
in any way in any falsification activities.
It was the information that we had.
We provided it.
If that information is inaccurate, fine.
It's like, you know, he was caught.
He was caught red-handed.
And the amazing thing, and this is according to this news story which comes from CNN, the
discovery raises questions such as why the apparent forgeries were given to inspectors
and why U.S. and British intelligence agents did not recognize that they were not authentic.
You know, it's not hard for them to have to figure this out on their own.
Either they're grossly incompetent or they're being disingenuous, or both.
Yeah.
With a war plan of its own for the home front, the FBI is set to step up round-the-clock
surveillance, monitoring, interviewing of people who might try to retaliate should hostilities
with Iraq begin.
In fact, I just heard today on the news that Iraqi nationals living in this country are
actually being detained.
Including I heard some people who are actually naturalized citizens of the U.S., which is,
I mean, goes, the whole thing is insane, but that's especially insane.
They've been under surveillance for a number of weeks, and it's felt that they might pose
a problem and might retaliate in some way if we start bombing their country.
So they're being, it's, you know, it's the Japanese internment camp, so it's the beginning
of that again.
But it's not racial profiling, right?
I don't know.
I don't know what they're calling it.
It's kind of insane plus, isn't it, Mike?
Yeah.
Insane plus.
Yeah, that's good.
The FBI has not detected intelligence foreshadowing a specific threat, officials said, but several
thousand of its 11,000 agent force, bolstered by local police and terrorism task forces,
are set to attempt to prevent violent attacks in the United States.
And virtually all of the dozens of known Islamic extremists not in custody are already
under surveillance, FBI officials said.
But they acknowledge concern about other sympathizers with Iraq who might try to strike out spontaneously.
I heard this referred to in the news before as freelance terrorists.
I guess they get, you know, they work on commission or something, I don't know.
A listener wrote in with this helpful bit of information, which it actually pertains
to something else, but I think it would be very useful in a situation like this.
We've talked about CBC News World, which is a channel up in Canada, and this person discovered
that there is a software company that has a demonstration of a live video feed and they
just happened to use CBC News World for that demonstration.
So if you go to www.destiny-software.com, you can see CBC News World live.
And since you can't get that channel here in the United States, it's another source
of what might be a different perspective, and of course that's why you don't see it
here.
Shall we take some phone calls, 212-209-2900, let's see what listener feedback we have.
Do you have the news story about the fellow who was traveling from Seattle to New Jersey
and had his luggage searched?
Yes, let me track that down.
Passenger finds chilling note from bag handler, according to the CNN story.
We've talked a lot about some of the large-scale incursions on our civil liberties, but this
is, in one sense, really small, but really disturbing.
Well, basically, actually it's an Associated Press story.
An airline passenger who had two no-war-with-Iraq signs in his suitcase says the federal security
agent who opened his luggage inserted a note criticizing his anti-American attitude.
Can you believe that?
A note was inserted into his luggage criticizing his anti-American attitude.
I found it chilling and a little Orwellian to have received this message, said Seth Goldberg
of Cranberry, New Jersey, and hopefully he's listening to us now.
Federal Transportation Security Administration officials are investigating.
Goldberg says that after a March 2nd flight from Seattle to San Diego, he opened his bag
and found the card notifying him that TSA had opened and searched it.
What's this?
That's what I was talking about last week.
Uh-huh.
Now, you have that card right there.
You went to San Diego, too, wasn't it?
That's right.
In this time period, was it?
Uh...
This guy wasn't going to your convention, was he?
No, no.
He was going somewhere else.
But it is interesting.
What I've noticed, we traveled just over Christmas, the three of us, and what I've noticed just
coming back this time, the stickers, the things that they're doing to your luggage, the fact
that, well, the weight dropped, actually, before we left.
But it's amazing.
Yeah.
And you actually had a bag searched.
They search twice.
They search the bags.
They reseal them with their own little blue little piece.
They put in...
And every airport does something different.
But you didn't get any notes inserted in your luggage, did you?
Not handwritten, not like he did, no.
And I understand there's a GIF that's going around on the Internet of the actual note.
Oh, really?
Yes, yeah.
Oh, that's great.
I thought you'd have it.
Otherwise, I'd have brought it.
Yeah, the handwritten note in full, according to this story, says, don't appreciate your
anti-American attitude, exclamation point.
Unbelievable.
Only they're allowed to have an opinion, not him.
Now, according to this passenger, he said it would have been hard for anyone else to
have placed a note, because when he claimed the bag in San Diego, the zipper pulls were
sealed with nylon straps that indicated a TSA inspection, like what you have right there.
Yeah, yeah.
If a TSA employee placed a note, according to TSA spokesman Brian Turmell, we will take
appropriate and swift action.
You're right.
Well, maybe they'll take them out for drinks or something.
I don't know.
I don't know what their appropriate and swift action is.
You know, he could have been going to the same convention.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
Goldberg said he picked up the anti-war signs in Seattle.
In New Jersey, there's very little in the way of protest, and when I got to Seattle,
I was amazed how many anti-war signs were up in front of houses.
You hear that in New Jersey?
That's something to be ashamed of, that there's people aren't expressing themselves.
I've noticed, you know, there are places where people shy away from that.
You don't talk about things like this.
Once the bombing actually begins, you're probably going to see a lot of people who were expressing
doubt and opposition and asking a lot of questions.
They'll just say, well, time for that's over.
We just have to follow blindly now and support our troops.
There's many ways of showing support, and killing isn't always the way.
There's a great story that's disappeared on the CNN webpage, and I thought it was amazing
because of the title.
It's a Reuters story, but the title simply says, Traveler Screening Won't Invade Privacy.
That's a fact.
It's not in quotes.
It's not, you know, an opinion piece.
It's a fact.
Traveler Screening Won't Invade Privacy.
Isn't that nice?
We can all go home and forget about this, because it's been settled.
Well, if you look at the story, it's a little bit more complex than that.
The head of a controversial airline passenger screening program sought to ease concerns
that the government would scrutinize travelers' financial and criminal records before letting
them on board airplanes.
While the TSA will hire private data aggregators to confirm travelers' identities and screen
out possible hijackers, the agency will not view credit records, traffic violations, or
other personal data, Admiral James Loy said.
In fact, the agency will not keep records of travelers at all once they have completed
their trip.
Of course, we only have his word for that.
Not long after the traveler has returned home, not long after, loosened up his laces and
unpacked the bag, all government records of his trip will be erased.
How many people believe that, really?
By then, it's too late.
The agency has faced a firestorm of protests since it first announced details of its second
generation screening program at the end of February, known as CAPS II.
It combines government intelligence with information from credit bureaus, other commercial
data services, and it determines if a passenger has links to Al-Qaeda or other violent groups.
I don't know how my bank statement and my credit report is going to determine what links
I have to Al-Qaeda.
I mean, I feel like the privacy threat is not after you've returned home that they're
going to maintain the data.
It's what they do with the data while you're flying, and they don't seem to address or
care about that.
No.
It's just a question of how long they keep it.
They might give it to somebody else, but they might erase it.
You know, there's all kinds of ways of getting out of that statement.
This from BBC, the threat posed by cyber terrorism has been overhyped, and the net is unlikely
to become a launchpad for terror attacks.
Yeah, that was the conclusion of a panel of security and technology experts brought together
at the CBIT Technology Fair to consider the threat posed by net attacks on businesses
and consumers.
Panel members said companies faced far more serious threats from ordinary criminals, fraudsters,
and pranksters than they did from technology literate terrorists.
Combating these real threats would take work by almost everyone involved in the running
and use of the net.
Security expert Bruce Schneier said the threat posed by so-called cyber terrorism had been
overestimated.
He says, the hype is coming from the U.S. government, and I don't know why.
I've got a pretty good sense why.
But he really said something interesting here, which I think is great.
Basically, breaking pager networks and stopping email is not an act of terror.
If I cannot get my email for a day, I am not terrorized.
And I think that pretty much wraps it up.
And sir, we've been saying this pretty much for years, haven't we, that cyber terrorism
is this big myth?
Yeah, there's been so much buzz about how this is going to be the first declared cyber
war or something like that, how right along with us starting a war with Iraq, we're going
to be starting some kind of cyber battle with them as well.
How do we do that when they're not even on the net?
They are on the net, but it's one little cyber cafe in Baghdad, and that's about it.
So we're going to obliterate them.
I mean, if we don't bomb them out of existence, we're just going to disconnect their net connectivity.
Well, it's American journalists hanging out in that net cafe, and we have to silence them.
But I've been searching far and wide for some hard information about really what kind of
measures we're undertaking.
And I just keep finding things that just must come from the bizarro world, because it doesn't
seem like reality to me.
Here's an article from the International Herald Tribune called Cyber Warfare in Iraq Has Already
Broken Out, which sounds rather authoritative for total speculation.
And here's what they have to say.
They're saying that air commanders are going to rely on these two planes, the Compass Call
and the Rivet Joint.
We've all heard about those a few times.
And they say there are just over a dozen of each in the U.S. arsenal.
In a war against Iraq, military commanders said new technology will likely allow these
electronic planes to plant false targets on Iraqi radar screens and spoof air defense
systems.
In an interview, General John Jumper, an Air Force chief of staff, declined to discuss
the highly classified technical advances, except to say, quote, we're approaching the
point where we can tell the SA-10 radar, which is an Iraqi radar, that it is a Maytag washer
and not a radar, and put it in the rinse cycle instead of the firing cycle.
Uh-huh.
I love it when they explain things in terms we can understand.
Where do these people, uh...
Yeah, exactly.
And here's another one that says, um, the internet makes deception easier.
Getting away with it, though, can be harder.
Saddam can check a Google for references to an army division.
Well, gee.
Yeah.
Google dot, what, IQ?
Wait, is that their, is that their TLD?
IQ?
Oh, well, that's why we want the country, then.
That top-level domain is great, you know?
Dot IQ, wow.
Wow, that's pretty good.
Yeah, that is pretty good.
I wonder if American citizens will be allowed access to that now.
Speaking of top-level domains, I did a little investigation of the Afghanistan top-level
domain, which we spoke about last week a little bit.
Dot AF.
Right.
Air Force.
And they've established a bunch of second-level domains underneath that one, much like we
and dot edu, except they have things like dot music dot AF and dot b2b dot AF.
Doesn't that make more sense?
Music?
I mean, well, I mean, just, you know, something that describes it a little better than, you
know, dot net dot org.
Oh, well, no, it makes plenty of sense from that angle, but I, uh, I mean, how soon is
music really going to be an Afghanistan internet phenomenon?
That's true.
And also, I don't think that's the word for it in their language, either.
No.
Yeah.
Okay, let's take some phone calls.
202-209-2900.
Let's see what people's reactions to all the stuff going on is.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hey, hello.
How you doing?
Um, right.
Well, you know, you know, the, um, you remember the Reichstag fire in Germany, right?
Mm-hmm.
When they used that as an excuse for Hitler to take dictatorial power.
Right.
Well, the guy who was accused of doing that was George Dimitrov.
And one of the statements he made about it was that, you know, the ideas of fascism
and its stupidity often approach lunacy.
And that's, like, kind of what I see now.
But his point in saying that, you know, wasn't just to, like, you know,
lampoon, you know, fascist ideology.
But his point was that, you know, because of that, people don't take it seriously.
They say, like, how can people believe this nonsense?
But what's really scary about the present situation is that how easily people can be
duped into giving up their liberties.
And no one questions the fact that.
Why are there machine-gun-toting guards in Penn Station?
Mm-hmm.
What possible relevance could this have to, like, you know, preventing something like,
you know, the terrorist attacks at 9-11?
You know, how does that protect us?
And why were we able to make war in Iraq, you know, 12 years ago,
and make war on Yugoslavia and make war on Panama
without requiring us to have machine-gun-toting guards in Penn Station
and have red alerts that prevent us from leaving our houses?
I mean, you know, and no one questions this.
And this is the real problem, that this could happen to us so easily.
Mm-hmm.
And people just take it for granted.
Oh, there's a guy with a machine-gun in Penn Station.
Gee, that's nice.
And the worst part about it is, like everything else, once something is established,
that's the way it becomes, that's the way it stays.
Right.
And people will know nothing else.
Right, right.
Then it's real life, right?
Yeah.
That's it? Okay.
Thanks for calling.
Bye.
Hopefully that strange noise was coming from his call.
Yeah.
It's weird, you know, I was thinking about this yesterday,
seeing all these people with their military fatigues and machine-guns wandering around,
how that would have made any difference at all on September 11th,
to have all these people around.
It's, I don't know, there's no words to really describe
the bewilderment that I'm feeling right now.
We're down to 18 minutes before the deadline expires, supposedly,
if you want to go by the hour.
28 minutes, I guess, if you want to go by the exact second that George W. said the words.
But obviously something bad is going to happen at some point, probably very soon.
May I go?
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
If people want to hear a play-by-play of what's about to transpire
on possibly more objective news outlets,
I have some shortwave radio frequencies for some countries
that might be broadcasting some less biased information than U.S. media.
Yes, and I understand shortwave radios are selling again.
This always seems to happen.
They are selling very, very briskly.
I just talked to the editor of Times Magazine recently,
and she said they can't keep in stock,
that portable shortwave radios are even more popular now
than they were during the first Gulf War.
Do you know of good places where people can pick up shortwave radios?
A couple of companies.
One is Grove Enterprises.
Another company is called C. Crane.
And these are both on the net.
And then C.R.A.N.E.
Both are very reputable companies and have good deals in shortwave radios.
Or if you're in a pinch, you can try to get one at Radio Jack.
However, they may be sold out.
That's true, that's true.
Or just any electronic store.
You know, if you get a cheap model,
you probably won't get the really distant stations,
but you'll certainly get the things that are powerful
that broadcast other perspectives as well.
It's helpful to get one that has a digital display
as opposed to one that has a needle dial
because shortwave frequencies have got to be pretty precise.
If you're not spot on, you're not going to hear the station.
So for $50 or more, you can get one.
You can just punch in the frequency dial on the phone
and listen to stations from around the world in English in their viewpoint.
Yeah, that's a misnomer too.
If they all speak English at one point or another,
they all aim signals in our direction.
And what's the name of that great book that gives you a guide?
It's Passport to World Band Radio, is that it?
It's Passport to World Band Radio.
And you can find that book by going to passband.com.
P-A-S-S-B-A-N-D dot com.
It used to be passbook.com, but then Microsoft took that.
So you have some frequencies for us.
Yes. Radio France International can be heard.
Well, they all broadcast 24-7, so you've got to find what time they're on.
There's a great URL I'm going to give out first.
PrimetimeShortwave.com.
Again, it's www.primetimeshortwave.com.
And here's some frequencies.
Radio France International can be heard at 11910
and at 15155 kilohertz.
Radio Deutsche Welle, which is Germany,
can be heard at 6145 and 6040 kilohertz.
Radio, even if you want to listen to Radio Havana,
they're easily heard here in the U.S. at 6000.
That's a great frequency, 6000.
It's an amazing frequency, 6000.
And they come in really loud and clear.
6000, 9820, and 11705 kilohertz.
Radio Netherlands, one of my favorite stations.
Of course, I like the Netherlands.
They can be heard at 6165 and 9845 kilohertz.
In fact, they start broadcasting at 0000 Greenwich Mean Time,
which was when this show started.
So usually the English broadcasts are timed for the evening North American hours.
So this evening, if you have a shortwave radio,
try some of these frequencies.
If you couldn't hear what I said or didn't get a chance to jot them down,
go to primetimeshortwave.com, and you can look them up.
There's a very easy chart to find them.
Yeah, it's not a hard world to really become fluent in very quickly,
and it's fascinating.
You'll find all kinds of things that you weren't looking for
that will just mesmerize you.
And I should also say some of those frequencies,
if they're particularly high, like 11,000 and higher,
usually those come in in daytime hours,
and the ones that are lower down, particularly 9,000, 7,000, 5,000, and 6,000,
they come in late at night, overnight periods,
and some of them are really pretty powerful and strong.
It's good to try to listen to more than one station to get different viewpoints.
I found it's very important.
The country that the news is coming from is going to have a spin.
I remember back when I was in college,
listening to the Falkland Islands war between Britain and Argentina,
and the viewpoint from the news editorials from both of those stations
were radically different of the fact that we're going on.
If you listen to the Voice of America,
you're not going to get the same story that you're going to get from Radio Deutsche Welle
or Germany or Radio Netherlands or Radio France International, obviously.
Domestic media should be balanced with international media,
and shortwave is really one of the best ways to access that.
And you can also access our propaganda, which is the Voice of America,
which you don't hear anyplace else because it's aimed at other countries.
So you can hear what we're saying to other countries,
and you can hear all kinds of stories you probably wouldn't hear anywhere else.
Go ahead, Mike.
The other point is if you don't have a shortwave radio
or if you live in Manhattan and can't get reception,
many of these stations now broadcast on the Internet, so you can just do that.
That's true, but let me just clear up something.
Living in Manhattan does not mean that you won't get reception,
and I know lots of people are able to listen to all kinds of stations.
Yeah, you can't get crystal clear reception of everything.
There is some interference, but you'd be surprised what you can receive
with just a portable radio and a small antenna,
even in the middle of a busy city like New York.
I mean, it also depends on what your particular building is made out of
and a million other factors.
You can move things around and figure it out,
but you're bound to be able to get something.
Now, Jeff, you've got something weird there.
Yeah, and I just wanted to mention, too, that my car shortwave radio,
I have no problem in the city.
Don't get me started on my car shortwave radio.
Yes, I know, I know.
But yeah, no, it's a good thing. I wish everybody had one.
And I thank Bernie S. again with the radio.
I wouldn't have it if it weren't for him.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Bernie.
One of the other things that was interesting, as Bernie S. remembers,
we took some pictures the last time we were being searched,
and I tried again in San Diego,
and the difference between that time and this time is remarkable.
They had many more people.
Hold on one second.
Did you tell the story about what happened when you took the picture
when you went over to Amsterdam?
I don't think we did, no.
Tell that story. It's a great story.
Bernie had gone through first,
and he was pulled aside to be wanded,
which is traditional for me.
Anyone I travel with, you're getting it, not me.
So when I had the opportunity, I just moved away with my camera,
and while they were wanding him, I managed to get a few pictures.
And once I pulled the camera away and kind of held it,
because it's digital, just to get a good shot,
one of the gentlemen came over and told me,
no, you can't take pictures.
I said, it's okay. He's my friend. We're on vacation.
And the guy said, no, you cannot take pictures here.
This was what airport?
This was in Newark.
Okay.
And he asked me to please erase.
So I erased, and I must have hit the camera
and gone to the first picture instead of the next last one that I took.
And once he saw that there was a picture of Seraph here,
they just said, well, okay, that's good.
So you fooled them.
Well, we have a few pictures. We do, yeah.
So, yeah, they know about digital cameras now,
so they can't just rip the film out of your camera.
They'll sit there and make you erase it,
but there are certain ways of making it seem like you erased something.
And, of course, with phones these days, you can transmit them.
So the picture's taken, it's gone, there's nothing you can do about it.
That's right.
Okay, so what happened on this time?
In San Diego, they had this giant machine,
this big, it looked like one of the MRI machines,
and I found out that's exactly what they're using now is that technology.
They're actually slicing the luggage with an X-ray to get the information.
I tried to take a picture, but because they had so many people,
the second my camera was in my hand,
I was immediately told, you put it away or it's theirs.
So I put it away,
but I noticed that the machine had its logo for InVision right on the side.
It had the model number, and all I had to do was go to the Internet,
and there are pictures, there's descriptions,
how they do this, the way it works.
I mean, and by the way, in San Diego, they had the small model.
There are much bigger, better versions of the same company's machine.
It goes from the $2,500 to the $9,000.
So what's the website where we can see all this?
This is InVisionTechnologies.com,
and I believe there's a hyphen in between.
Okay, and you have a URL?
Yeah, it's www.InVision-Tech.com.
Okay.
You can probably find a lot more information about those machines on the Web
than you ever could by taking pictures of them at the airport.
Absolutely.
It's like their top secret at the airport.
Plus, they've already taken pictures of them for you on the Web,
and there's a picture right there.
Yeah, and at least at the airport, you would think
maybe they would just cover the logo or something
and it wasn't identifiable.
No, no.
They're advertising.
It's business.
And, you know, that's the way it should be.
People should know how technology works.
They should know, you know, the ins and outs of what's going on here.
And there were nice press releases, but, of course, that was under the investors' page.
All right.
So that's, of course, what they want you to do.
Let's see if we can squeeze in a couple more phone calls.
Let's go over here.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, hi.
I've just been wanting to share with WBAI a story that I witnessed yesterday on the Lower East Side.
Go ahead.
It was around Houston Avenue B where there's a big building that's used by a mural artist.
And he had put up a peace mural with the Pope in the center, Saddam Hussein on one side of the Pope,
and George Bush on the other side.
And the mural artist explained that, you know, he needs permission from the guy who owns the building when he puts up murals.
And so apparently this went up on Sunday, and on Monday night the guy who owns the building
and has a liquor store on the ground floor was visited by these people,
pulled out a badge and said that they were FBI.
And yesterday the artist was made to cover the mural up, except for the Pope.
He was able to leave the Pope.
He was forced to cover the mural up.
Yeah.
And this is on Houston and Avenue B.
Right, and I tried to get through to BAI yesterday and couldn't, but I think it's a story that people should know.
It absolutely is a story.
Now, the owner of the building said it was perfectly okay to have this mural up there.
Yeah, in fact, the artist has done many murals on this building,
and he and the owner have a very good relationship.
But in this case, you know, at night I guess the mural artist was not around,
but these people came in, flashed badges, you know, a couple of men,
and this is according to the owner of the building who has this liquor store.
They came into the liquor store and just showed their badges,
and then the next day the owner said to the artist they want George Bush and Saddam Hussein covered up.
So he was out there yesterday covering it, you know, painting over the two of them and leaving the Pope,
and he was going to put up something else around the Pope, and I didn't go over there again today.
I don't know what.
Did you get a picture before it was taken down?
Yeah, well, three of us went over there.
I work at Houston and First, and we heard about this because we work with this artist.
I work for an organization called CityLore, and we work with the artist.
We work with the artist.
We're doing an exhibit on the Puerto Rican flag, and so he's involved in that,
and he called us up to tell us what happened.
And so we ran over there, but he was already covering up.
Saddam Hussein was gone.
Bush was half gone.
But we did get, there was a photographer, a woman there who had photographed the whole thing, you know, before and after.
And so CityLore has information about this and has made a tape with the artist
and is very anxious to get this out to the media.
I think that NPR might be picking up on it and maybe even the New York Times.
Okay.
Have you tried contacting our news department?
I left a message with Matthew Finch that was the only person whose voicemail was not full.
Okay.
But I didn't send, I just thought a little while ago about emails.
If you call back during the day and ask to be transferred to the news department,
I'm sure somebody there will pick up.
I don't think you'll get voicemail.
I think there's people here all day long.
If you call 2800, you usually don't get, well, of course, this was after, this was around 6 o'clock last night.
Yeah, that's after hours.
You have to do it during business hours.
But I'll certainly tell people, and hopefully more people will know about this as well.
Yeah.
The owner of the liquor store, who's also the owner of the building, is not too eager to talk about this.
Of course not.
Who was it who showed the badges?
Who were they representing?
Well, he said that they were FBI.
Really?
They flashed badges.
Now, he's the only one who's saying this.
Nobody, you know, was witness to these guys coming into the store.
But, you know, it just kind of fits in with a lot of what's going on.
Well, it's something to investigate to see if that actually happened.
And if it did, which would not surprise me, it's something that needs to be condemned in the most vigorous ways.
But we'll look into this.
Is there a site that's covering this right now?
You said CityLore?
CityLore, which is my employer, and I can give you their number if you want to contact the director.
Okay, fine.
212-529-1955.
Okay. I'm sure there'll be many follow-ups to this.
Yeah.
Okay, and ask to talk to the director, Steve.
Okay. Thanks for sharing that with us.
Okay. Thank you.
All right.
And that's just a good indication of how BIA listeners are our eyes and ears watching out for all the things that are going on out there.
And there's going to be a whole lot more.
As we count down, we're down to about three minutes or so left before this deadline.
This could be a very interesting night ahead.
I hope people continue to listen to this radio station because we'll be watching this situation as it unfolds throughout the night,
throughout the course of the next few weeks, months, whatever it takes.
We always welcome your input, oth at 2600.com.
And hopefully we'll be back again next week.
But either way, there'll be more coverage on this radio station that you won't hear anywhere else.
A note of brevity?
I'm sorry?
A note of brevity, something we can at least laugh at this whole situation.
You have like three seconds, Bernie.
Okay.
Go to titaniumcounter.com slash temp slash emergency.
Vince Ferrari sent in some excellent pictures from the ready.gov website with new captions.
Okay.
Thanks.
And that's, yeah, there's some very humorous things there.
So hopefully people will be able to check that out and get a good laugh.
We'll see you next week.
Good night.
In the fields a body's burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds
Oh, Lord, yeah!
Oh, Lord, yeah!
Politicians hide themselves away
They only start in the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave their all to the poor
Yeah!
Yeah!
Say we can chase down all our enemies
We can even bring them to their knees
Yes, we can bomb the world into pieces
But we can't bomb it into pieces
But we can love the world to pieces