Tourists and Terrorists: Giuliani 2000
By Robert Lederman, 12/27/99
According to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani Times Square on New Year’s Eve is the safest place to be in all of New York City with midtown Manhattan locked down like a giant maximum security Federal penitentiary.
Aptly named project Archangel, Mayor Darksides’ ominous security plans include having his imperial troops, eight thousand uniformed cops, stand guard duty in Times Square backed up by hundreds of FBI agents, private security guards and operatives from other Federal agencies. The remainder of the City’s 40,000 uniformed police officers will take time out from their Christmas assignment of rounding up and arresting homeless families to diligently search the subway tunnels and streets of New York City for potential terrorists and Giuliani critics.
Roofs in Times Square will be manned by crack teams of police snipers with night vision scopes mounted on their high-powered rifles. Every parked car in a mile long three block wide strip of midtown will be towed to prevent the deployment of car bombs. The party-going public will be herded cattle-like through an endless maze of police barricades and metal detectors and treated to body searches in below zero temperatures. Many attendees are expected to be arrested on the way to the event simply for possessing alcohol, a substance zero-tolerance Giuliani believes often leads to terroristic anti-social acts such as dancing, solicitation of prostitutes and public urination.
Manhole covers will be welded shut. Mailboxes will be sealed. Every garbage can in midtown will be removed. Hundreds of undercover police officers will be circulating through the partying crowd disguised as tourists. As they do in Washington Square Park with marijuana sales officers will run sting operations, in this case offering to sell high school kids everything they need to make their own New Year’s bomb and then busting them as "terrorists". For the past few weeks the NYPD has been bribing hundreds of informants in order to get them to report threatening comments they’ve overheard from drunks bragging in neighborhood bars or the thinly-veiled threats of community activists.
Are the enormous expenses of this event and its unprecedented and ultimately futile security precautions worth the economic and social cost to the taxpayers of New York City? This is not a Presidential inauguration, the signing of an international peace treaty or anything of genuine public value that justifies either the cost or the risks involved. This once stirring celebration of diversity and democracy has been reduced to nothing more than a slick ad for Disney, the Times Square Business Improvement District and the Giuliani for U.S. Senate campaign.
Watching the ball drop on New Year’s Eve was once an authentic celebration by actual New Yorkers who traveled by subway from ethnic neighborhoods in all five boroughs. They came to share a collective experience in the center of a real city. Giuliani’s ersatz "party" is closer to Hitler’s 1937 Olympics celebration than the New Year’s event which became a symbolic celebration of freedom renowned throughout the world.
Giuliani isn’t celebrating a New Year so much as his cleansing of New Yorkers and authentic New York culture from Times Square. The hotdog stands, shoeshine parlors, peep shows, all-night movie theaters, hookers, hustlers and gritty texture of a flesh and blood city have been replaced by a sterilized Mickey Mouse mall every square inch of which has been tagged with mind-boggling fluorescent graffiti. This corporate freakshow on steroids is prowled by an army of black uniformed cops whose sole mission is to protect tourists from low income New Yorkers and to uphold the real estate values of Giuliani’s top contributors.
Aside from terrorists, virtually all of the two million participants expected to be in Times Square this New Years Eve will be tourists. No sane New Yorker would venture anywhere near midtown as Giuliani pulls the lever on his Police State 2000.
The idea that Adolf Giuliani’s army of poorly trained and underpaid cops, who are known to despise Furhrer Giuliani, can somehow prevent a genuine attack by determined terrorists is ludicrous. Not even the real Hitler with his real Gestapo was able to prevent acts by determined terrorists. If actual terrorists wanted to make a big splash in Times Square they could have securely planted their bombs or gas canisters months ago.
Then what’s the point of Project Archangel, Lucifer-Giuliani’s aptly named contingency plan to thwart a terrorist attack? Like the event itself the security arrangements are nothing more than an advertisement for Emperor Giuliani and the police state he hopes to usher in for the new millennium.
Ironically, the biggest threat to the tourist throngs in Times Square will probably be the NYPD itself, which Giuli-anus is fond of calling, "the most restrained police force in the U.S.". Here’s the likeliest disaster scenario. While peering through a defective nightscope obtained from a supplier/contributor linked to the Giuliani administration a police sniper on the 30th floor of a Times Square office building thinks he’s seeing a drunken tourist make a threatening move, perhaps only flipping Giuliani the bird. With no time to do anything but act, he takes the poor sucker out. In a domino effect hundreds of panicky cops on the street misinterpret the police sniper fire Diallo style and begin blasting back. After thousands of rounds of newly distributed exploding bullets are expended and the Square is littered with dead and wounded tourists, Commissioner Safir and Hollowpoint Giuliani will cite "contagious fire", the same explanation they gave for how four cops fired 41 times at unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo last February.
The most cost-effective thing a government can do to reduce the threat of terrorism is to stop pissing off so many people. To be anything more than an insane act of meaningless violence politically-motivated terrorism depends on grievances that are popularly understood and commonly agreed with.
Even though Mayor Giuliani has no influence whatsoever on foreign policy, the Giuliani administration inordinately fears terrorists because it specializes in oppressing people. Vast numbers of those who live in New York City now feel victimized by the Mayor and his circle of thugs. Like a mob boss that expects to be cut down at any moment, Giuliani is paranoid because he knows better than anyone the multitude of people who have a legitimate grievance against him. He went so far as to invent bogus warnings from the FBI that City Hall was in imminent danger from terrorists in order to restrict access to New Yorkers. These imaginary warnings were later publicly denied by the FBI itself.
We do face a real terrorist threat in New York City but it’s not from fundamentalists in turbans or bible belt militias. The main suspect resides in Gracie Mansion, has a taxpayer funded office in City Hall and lately hides out in his high-tech bunker in the World Trade Center. He depicts himself as an advocate of law and order while actually being the biggest lawbreaker in the entire City. While mouthing platitudes about the glories of liberty and free speech and the dignity of work, he uses 680 lawyers to subvert the Constitution, is an outright enemy of anyone’s free speech but his own and has a view of work closer to a WWII forced labor camp than an actual job.
As the ball drops in Times Square on New Year’s Eve let’s hope we will be seeing the final curtain call in the career of Mayor Rudy Crueliani. If not, we may be seeing the opening act in what is sure to be the police state future the Malathion Madman foreshadowed in his most infamous quote:
"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it." Mayor Giuliani, New York Times, March 17, 1994.
Have a Happy and safe New Year and do yourself a favor by staying far away from Fooliani’s nightmarish party in Times Square.
Robert Lederman is an artist, a regular columnist for both the Greenwich Village Gazette [See: http://www.gvny.com/ ] and Street News, and is the author of hundreds of published essays concerning Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. His essays and letters have appeared in the NY Times, NY Post, Daily News, Newsday, Brooklyn Bridge, Park Slope Courier, The Daily Challenge, Amsterdam News, Sandbox, Penthouse, Our Town, NY Press and are available on hundreds of websites around the world. Lederman has been falsely arrested 40 times to date for his anti-Giuliani activities and has never been convicted of any of the charges. He is best known for creating hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator.
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics)
Email ARTISTpres@aol.com; Ph: 718-743-3722; Website: http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
Also see: http://www.levymultimedia.com/news.htm for Lederman’s essays on Malathion and the spraying of insecticides on NYC [scroll down the menu to the items highlighted in blue].