[Nettime-bold] Laura Flanders - Live reports from Manhattan

[Harsh Kapoor <aiindex@mnet.fr>]

Laura Flanders Filed 1:05 p.m. EST Wed.
         WorkingForChange.com

Live reports from Manhattan -- A WEB LOG

The headlines roar war.

"This battle will take time and resolve, but make no mistake about it we
will win,said George W. Bush a few hours ago. By that time, Senator Joseph
Lieberman, loyal opposition Democrat, had already chimed in: "An act of
war was committed against us. It's more than a crime. It's certainly at
least a war crime. And I think Congress has to effectively declare war
against terrorism." On ABC's Good Morning America, the Secretary of State,
Colin Powell said, "The American people have a clear understanding that
this is a war. That's the way they see it." Does he see it that way? He
was asked. "I do."

I beg to differ. In Manhattan, we aren't in a state of war, we're in a
state of mourning. And for the whole country to join us right now would be
a really good idea.

They're calling it "The Pit" where the World Trade Towers were. "You don't
want to get too close," Pvt. Maldonado of the National Guard told
downtown-dwellers as we maneuvered through the multiple checkpoints in our
neighborhood. "1,400 National Guardsmen are down there," said Maldonado.

On Lafayette Street, at the neighborhood firehouse, the Stars and Stripes
flies at half mast. The local crew, among the first to go to The Towers,
is missing six members. A rack of dusty coats and rubber knee-highs hangs
by the station door.

The Washington politicians' talk about war is helping some people to vent,
to rage, to rally to kill more innocent civilians -- is that what we're
going to do -- kill them back? And the revenge talk is reaping a harvest
of hate.

An Iranian-American friend received an email yesterday, from a volunteer
at a Moslem Mosque in Los Angeles, with disclaimer that "these are the
letters of hate my dad's mosque in LA got just in the past few hrs...

Excerpted:

"Go back to the middle east before you get burned at the Stake, who the
fuck do you think you guys are coming to our communities and bringing your
dirt with you? Muslims and their hate are not wanted in LA"

"Fuck you all for bringing your mud dirt people to our country and after
that bringing your evil uncivilized ways here to harm and hurt our people.
Watch out because we know who you are and we know where you live and we
will make sure that you pay for all those American lives lost"

"Fuck Muslims and fuck you, you will die for doing this"

"You middle eastern mud people need to die and pay for what you did."

This is a time to think about death and rage. To think about it for once,
and to pause. Will we too be burned at the stake or something similar if
we say that "terrorists" are people made by their circumstances, not born
hankering to kill or to kill themselves. And most of them believe they
have a cause -- political or religious. Will we too, the immigrants among
us, be banished for saying that the source of that belief is worth
thinking about? Do we risk becoming "harborers" of terrorists -- or
terrorist thoughts -- if we murmur anything about the U.S. bombing of
major cities: Hiroshima, Hanoi, Tripoli, Beirut, Panama City, Baghdad,
Khartoum, Belgrade? I wonder.

Meanwhile, in New York, we the people inhale the dust, gather at blockaded
streets and watch, and I've heard no hate. Not yet.

FILED 10:35 P.M. EST TUES.

President or Priest?

Some New Yorkers gathered around a television two hours ago, to hear words
from the only president we've got. Around the set were three people who
make movies who had a friend on the hijacked Boston-Los Angeles flight; a
painter and a poet whose home, a few blocks from ground zero, has no
electricity and no gas. Rumors of underground gas explosions swirl like
the dust-clouds.

A civil rights attorney was on her morning bicycle ride when she saw the
first plane hit the first Trade Tower. People have started calling them
"our towers" now. "It was so huge, so low." Many of us saw "our towers"
drop out of our sky before our eyes. A writer believes she saw a city
school bus pass her, filled ceiling-to-floor with body bags. So when the
only president we have talked to us about "terrible sadness" New Yorkers
weren't impressed. When he gave us cliches about the day's events many of
us were furious. "We know what happened, we weren't in a bunker," one
shouted at the set. As for the government functioning and the economy
continuing... "Who's he kidding? Wall Street is under dust." He asked us
to pray: "What is he," we said. "A president or a priest?"

In lower Manhattan at least, it's clear that this president has no idea
what happened today. "That's the scariest part of all," some people said.
There was no leadership coming from politicians tonight. Nor pundits, try
as they might. And no light of freedom shining 'round here except the
headlights of a thousand emergency vehicles and the reflective vests on
several thousand workers, heading back into the smoke-filled streets.

FILED 5:30 P.M. EST

Where do we turn in a crisis? To public workers, the ones we have left. I
just spoke to two dozen of them at an emergency staging area on
Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas. Bused in from as far away as Far
Rockaway, Queens they are massed here: the men and women of the New York
City Housing Authority with their blue suits, hard hats, city-issue
respirators and their 52 flatbed trucks lined up, awaiting the call to
head downtown to start the ghastly clean up.

Usually these people -- almost exclusively Black and Latino, mostly men
with a couple of women -- manage Manhattan's housing projects. Today,
they're coming to the World Financial Center's aid. Where are the
sanitation workers? Standard garbage crushers are poorly suited to the
delicate clean-up operation downtown. That's part of the story. Besides,
as one NYCHA worker put it, "The city's been getting out of the trash
business." It's true. More and more city garbage is picked up these days
by private contractors. These city workers, members of the Teamsters local
127, have been without a contract for a year.

"It's always police and hospital workers who get the credit, but we're
here when you need us," said union member Ray Garcia. It's true. Dark
skinned, blue collared, hot and waiting, these are emergency workers.
Workers we depend on in an emergency. Cut public spending on social
services? Think about it. Right now, chances are, I'd be looking at an
empty street.

FILED 1:56 P.M. EST

911.

It's the date. It is also the situation. At St. Vincent's hospital, where
there are some 180 casualties and two at last count dead, about 500 people
are waiting to give blood. Civilian cars are driving casualties to the
door. New Yorkers are turning out to help. That's the good news.

The bad news: on televison, reporters are fanning flames with
irresponsible reports. Just an hour ago, CBS Channel 2 in New York
interview with a transit employee who, with no evidence and no data, was
broadcast live, telling the already terrified public that biological
agents might be entering people's lungs.

Tom Brokaw on NBC can't get enough of State Department officials. For
hours this morning, NBC "reported" that the Democratic Front for the
Liberation of Palestine had "claimed responsibility" for the attack on the
World Financial Center. Brokaw's source, it turns out, was an anonymous
caller to Abu Dhabi television. By 9.58 EST, the Reuters newswire was
reporting that a senior official from the Democratic Front had denied any
connection to the attack:

"I emphasize that the story released on Abu Dhabi TV by an anonymous
person is totally incorrect," Tayseer Khaled, a senior official from the
DFLP politburo in the Palestinian territories, told Reuters. "The DFLP is
against hijacking planes and against endangering the lives of civilians
who are not connected with the struggle of this region," he said.

FILED 12:27 P.M. EST

It looks like nuclear winter out there. Police are trying their best to
close off all streets from my block south (Canal St.) I think of Baghdad,
Belgrade. Speculation on tv runs rampant. I am going now to St. Vincent's
hospital in Greenwich Village to give blood.

FILED 10:33 A.M. EST

The smoke is heading my way in lower Manhattan. I can see it. And I can no
longer see either of the World Trade Towers that were clearly visible from
my block as I walked home last night.

That's about all I can tell you about this morning's attack in New York.
In CNN's News Center in Atlanta, they know even less, but that isn't
stopping their talk.

Two hours after attacks on two U.S. cities, it's not clear how the
coverage will develop. There's no question, however, that TV speakers will
be filling the rest of the day with talk about an event that none of them
can explain. As the hours progress, "experts" will no doubt be
interviewed. Greta Van Sustern was already asked for her analysis. CNN's
legal expert talked from her vantage point at Washington's National
Airport.

We can't predict the coverage, but we can recall the past. Here, thanks to
our friends at FAIR, from 1995:

"Seldom have so many been so wrong -- so quickly. In the wake of the
explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media
rushed -- almost en masse -- to the assumption that the bombing was the
work of Muslim extremists. "The betting here is on Middle East
terrorists," declared CBS News' Jim Stewart just hours after the blast
(4/19/95). "The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City
immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have
roots in the Middle East," ABC's John McQuethy proclaimed the same day.

"It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle
East,' wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (Chicago Tribune,
4/21/95). "Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief
terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working," declared the
New York Times' A.M. Rosenthal (4/21/95). The Geyer and Rosenthal columns
were filed after the FBI released sketches of two suspects who looked more
like Midwestern frat boys than mujahideen." There's been a tragedy. May
all of us in the media not add to it today.

======================

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