October 27, 2003

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David Potorti, Author/Editor of "September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows: Turning our Grief into Action for Peace"

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Sometimes it seems that the world is moving in one direction and the Bush administration is headed the opposite way as fast as they can. That's what happened after the tragic events of 9/11, when everyone wanted an answer, but BushCo saw a political opportunity to create a never-ending "war on terror."

However, instead of stemming terrorism, the Bush administration's aggressive and destructive actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have increased Al Qaeda's membership (and destroyed much of the good will the U.S. received from the world following 9/11).

Peaceful Tomorrows rose out of the destruction of 9/11 with a mission opposite of BushCo: "to seek effective, nonviolent solutions to terrorism, and to acknowledge our common experience with all people similarly affected by violence throughout the world. By conscientiously exploring peaceful options in our search for justice, we hope to spare additional families the suffering we have experienced -- as well as to break the cycle of violence and retaliation engendered by war. In doing so, we work to create a safer world for the present and future generations."

"September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows: Turning our Grief into Action for Peace" celebrates that mission, and "recounts the first year and a half of Peaceful Tomorrows' existence -- how they came together to form the group and how they have struggled to keep their losses from being used as a justification for further violence and terror."

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BUZZFLASH: Could you give our readers some background about how September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows got started?

DAVID POTORTI: I think we owe all of that to the Internet. After the bombing of Afghanistan began, the core members who would eventually form the group were bothered by the bombing campaign as a response to Sept. 11. I think we had an almost identical reaction. On the practical side, this was simply not going to prevent another terrorist attack; it was not going to capture Osama; and it was not going to make things better in the long term. It was probably going to solve a short-term need for shutting down the terrorist training camps, and a short-term need for sating the vengeance of a lot of angry and hurt people. But I think in the long run we all felt like this was not going to honor our loved ones who had died, including my brother who died at the World Trade Center.

We started writing letters to the editor to The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune, etc. I was a writer for a newspaper in North Carolina called The Independent Weekly, so I wrote an essay for them. I did a commentary on Pacifica Network News at the time. Because we had all written pieces, they started showing up on the Internet and people started seeing them. One of those people was Kathy Kelly from Voices in the Wilderness in Chicago.

Kelly had this campaign against the sanctions against Iraq, that for all practical purposes were killing civilians and doing nothing to diminish the power of Saddam Hussein. And even though it didn't fall under their banner, Voices in the Wilderness was trying to figure out how to respond to Sept. 11. They started seeing our letters on the Internet and collected them on their website. Another group that saw some of them was the Institute for Public Accuracy, which directs progressive guests to radio and TV stations -- they send out press releases highlighting issues which might not be covered by the mainstream press. They collected a few of those family members' statements and sent a press release out. That's how I started hearing about other families.

At the time, I just felt really sick at heart. I thought, here it is October, it's going to be Thanksgiving and Christmas soon, and we're going to be congratulating ourselves and patting ourselves on the back about how wonderful and patriotic we are. And at the same time, all these people are going to be suffering in Afghanistan. And we didn't want other people's family members to die.

My feeling was: What if I could get in touch with some of these other families who had spoken out, and maybe we could have some kind of a joint statement? Or, what if we could all go to Washington and stand in front of the Christmas tree and say some of us do not support the bombing of Afghanistan? That we've got to find a better way, a more practical way of dealing with the problem of terrorism, which was very real.

BUZZFLASH: By the time you got to the point where you formalized the organization, was the war in Afghanistan over?

POTORTI: The first week of December we participated in a walk from the Pentagon to Ground Zero. The war and the bombing were still going on quite heavily. And that's when we decided to try to form a group. Then Global Exchange invited four members of the group to go to Afghanistan to meet with civilians.

When the group went to Afghanistan in January of 2002, there was a sense of urgency, because the media were about to pull up stakes and leave, since it was pretty much a done deal by then. We were very concerned that once the media left, that there would never be any attention paid to the plight of Afghan civilians again.

When the people who would later form Peaceful Tomorrows visited Afghanistan that January, it was clear that even the American media were very sympathetic to the civilians there. The reporters had seen all of the damage and all of the civilians who had been killed, and they were writing articles about it. But none of their editors would run those articles because they would be accused of being "un-American" and "unpatriotic."

Once our people got there, it gave them an excuse to start mentioning Afghan civilians. So it was this real catalyst to have American victims of Sept. 11 go over there, and it gave reporters a reason to write about Afghan victims of the bombing campaign. So that was a wonderful result of that trip, and the coverage really did change in January.

BUZZFLASH: An interesting little footnote to what happened during the bombing of Afghanistan is that the Pentagon was able to effectively block most, if not all, transmission of TV and radio news reports from the ground. I remember watching the news very closely and hardly ever saw footage of what was actually happening.

POTORTI: The first thing we did was bomb the Al-Jazeera network in Kabul. I Remember a TIME/CNN poll which was taken only two days after Sept.11 that found that 46 percent of Americans said they would not support the bombing of Afghanistan if it would result in significant civilian casualties. So, while the towers were still burning, almost half of Americans had serious concerns about the bombing campaign. And that explains, as far as I'm concerned, why there was so much care given to denying the reality of civilian casualties.

Every time there was a press conference, somebody would ask about a wedding party getting bombed or some other civilian tragedy and Rumsfeld would always respond with the mantra "we have no independent confirmation." It's pretty clear that the reason the Pentagon was doing that was because they knew if Americans became aware of how many civilians were dying, they would not support the bombing effort. And I'm sure that that's exactly why they denied those deaths.

BUZZFLASH: Tell me a little bit about the book and how you collected so many personal stories from different families.

POTORTI: We were aware that it really was a unique story of ordinary people put into this extraordinary circumstance. I think all of us in the group were just completely ordinary. I certainly consider myself an ordinary person. And we were thrust overnight into this international incident, which is seen by billions of people. I went to bed Sept. 10 not realizing that suddenly a member of my family would be dead, and that billions of people would see his death on TV.

We found ourselves in this incredible situation, and it was quite unpleasant to see that it had been almost immediately "hijacked." That's the only word I can use. It was hijacked by a lot of other people to further their own agendas.

And here it was -- these incredibly personal, individual murders, which are bad enough. But to have them taken from us and used as an excuse to wage war, an excuse to beat up on any opposing voices, was really hurtful. And the world really got ugly that fall. Certainly part of why we wrote the book was to remind people of just how weird the world was in the fall of 2001.

Everybody had flag decals on their car. I remember my sister-in-law's sister got yelled at by somebody in a parking lot in New Jersey because she didn't have a flag sticker on her car. This person was quite upset that she wasn't displaying her patriotism. And I just remember flags all over the neighborhood here in North Carolina, and those bumper stickers from Home Depot which said, "The Power of Pride."

I remember the silence. Everybody just shut up, and it was so eerie. Particularly the Democratic Party just seemed to vanish. The opposition party seemed to just disappear.

We started doing interviews after we did this walk from the Pentagon to the World Trade Center. And I remember how weird it was to be the focus of people's anger. I'm a good person. I've never broken the law, and I've never been reviled by people, but there we were getting yelled at by people on talk shows and radio shows. Part of writing the book was just to remind people of how odd that time was, because it almost seems like we've forgotten it two years later. I guess one of the ways that we get along with our lives is to put those things behind us and forget about them, but I just didn't think we should forget. A big part of writing the book was to remind people and to humanize the stories of Sept. 11, because it seemed that we forgot about the people who were affected.

This international incident became about the Pentagon and about Osama, and about George Bush, and about Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and we forgot about all the victims. We stopped caring about victims in Afghanistan and the suffering we've caused in Iraq. So we wanted to call attention to the human beings that were at the center of this tragedy, and also to tell people that you don't get over this stuff quickly and that people are affected for a really long time. This will be the focal point of my life for the rest of my life.

BUZZFLASH: Your response to Sept. 11 is not what a lot of Americans would expect. You're saying that Sept. 11 should have sparked a greater dialogue about violence in general -- not just in the United States but around the world. Do you find that when you represent families of victims and survivors of 9/11 that you in some ways "disarm" people who call for an aggressive military stance in the Middle East as a response to 9/11?

POTORTI: I think people cut us a little more slack because of who we are. I'm not sure that we just automatically change people's minds, particularly those who already have their minds made up. But we've definitely connected with a segment of society that wants what we want, or at least is willing to ask questions about it. I like to think we've given people "permission" to follow their better instincts. Somebody described us as their "North Star" once, which suggests that we do occupy a special place for people. But I also dismiss the idea that we are special, or we are saints, or we're just these wonderful, loving people. I think a lot of us still have anger about this. The world is not a simple place, and our feelings are complex. I think the people in my group are very brave to face those realities.

Speaking personally, instead of our country coming together in pursuit of a common goal, I feel like the foreign policy of the Bush Administration is almost like a second assault on us. We had this terrorist attack and now it's almost like we have this other attack from our own government which is doing things which clearly are not in our interests, and clearly are not reducing the chances of another terrorist attack happening again. Sometimes I feel quite assaulted from all quarters. And it's just a very odd place to be -- to feel like your own government is not operating in your best interest.

BUZZFLASH: 9/11 has been politicized and used to justify the invasion of Iraq as part of the "war on terrorism." It is no surprise that nearly 70 percent of Americans falsely believe that Iraq was directly behind 9/11 due to the Bush administration's deception and PR strategy. How has Peaceful Tomorrows responded to the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq?

POTORTI: In the summer of 2002, we held a retreat. We were still unsure whether we should talk about Iraq because we knew then that there was absolutely no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I remember talking to the members of my group and wondering: Are people going to think we're just a bunch of gadflies if we try to go to Iraq, or if we start addressing the issue of invading Iraq? Are they going to think that we're just taking advantage of our status as family members to start poking around in all these other foreign policy issues?

And then it became so clear in September of 2002 that this was the next step in the war without end. We started writing to the White House. We wrote a letter to the President -- I think we've written four letters to him now. We did a press conference hosted by Dennis Kucinich in September of 2002, in Washington, specifically to address the Iraq issue.

Because we did that little press conference, we actually got a response from Condoleezza Rice to one of the letters that we had written to the President. And it was a very make-nice letter where she said the President is working with the United Nations, and doing everything he possibly can to make sure that we can disarm Saddam Hussein and not have to go to war. This was October of 2002, and it's pretty obvious that the Bush administration was not doing that. We did get that letter and it did acknowledge that they knew who we were. But Rice did not address our key issue, which was to stop using our families as a reason for going to war, whether it was in Afghanistan or Iraq. We wound up sending a delegation to Iraq in January of 2003, primarily because the administration had made it a 9/11 issue -- which we still know, it wasn't.

BUZZFLASH: There is a prevailing criticism that talking about the victims of 9/11 in context with conflicts and suffering throughout the rest of the world trivialized the tragedy to the victims and family members such as yourself. I think the underlying assumption for a lot of people is that an American life is twice or three times as important as someone from Iraq, or someone from Afghanistan. What is your response?

POTORTI: I think almost all of us knew, in varying degrees, that these things were not uncommon. The specifics of what happened on Sept. 11 were pretty unique. But I think massive loss of civilian lives, whether at Hiroshima or Vietnam, or in Rwanda or elsewhere, happens all the time. Human beings kill each other in huge numbers all the time. There are civil wars going on all over the world that have been killing thousands of people for dozens of years, and we never hear about them. We viewed our loss as a connection with all those other people around the world. For us, we didn't feel exceptional -- we just felt like we were part of the human family.

One of the things that made us feel that way is that we started hearing from people all over the world. We immediately heard from a group called Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace. They are parents of children that have been killed in the back-and-forth violence over in the Middle East. And they formed a group to say enough is enough -- let's find a way beyond the cycle of violence. We started getting e-mails from people in Kenya who had lost people in the Kenyan Embassy bombing. We got e-mails from families of terrorism victims in Northern Ireland and Oklahoma City. We got e-mails from Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. And they actually came over and visited us, and we took them to the World Trade Center site.

Peaceful Tomorrows heard from all these people and immediately realized that we were part of this bigger family. And because we had that response, we didn't think of what happened on Sept. 11 as being particularly exceptional.

I think that most people in America -- because we're so isolated and insulated in this little bubble -- think that we're going to live forever and nothing bad ever happens to us. We looked at Sept. 11 as this exceptional incident, this never-before-happened historical event. Because we viewed it in such an exceptional way, it gave us license to respond in an exceptional way. And I think the way we responded was quite exceptional -- to have this massive bombing campaign in Afghanistan, and now this massive bombing campaign and invasion in Iraq. That comes out of a belief that what happened on Sept. 11 was so exceptional that we're allowed to respond any manner that we choose.

I think if you take a realistic point of view, it was 3,000 people who died. But it wasn't 100,000 people such as in Hiroshima. It wasn't 500,000 people, as in Rwanda. Obviously, you don't dismiss the deaths of our families on Sept. 11. But it does put it in perspective. This was a horrible thing -- but horrible things happen between human beings. And so our response has been to be kind of humble about it, and to reach out to the rest of the world and say, "We know you've suffered and we're suffering now. We're all human beings and let's try to stop this from happening again."

BUZZFLASH: As family members who lost loved ones, you're still seeking answers. The Bush administration has refused to disclose any real information about what was not done prior to 9/11 to prevent the attack. What's next for you in terms of getting the answers that you want?

POTORTI: Well, one of the goals of our group is to demand a full, fair and open investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks that took the lives of our loved ones. We're pursuing that, and we're supporting other family groups that are pursuing that.

The first question is: How can we make sure that the next 9/11 report, which is the independent inquiry, actually gets released, and gets released in a timely fashion? It is supposed to come out in May of 2004, and should contain a lot of information that was not contained in the joint inquiry report from July, which was really just about the intelligence leading up to Sept 11.

One of the things we've learned is that the President has the power to withhold any information that he deems to be a national security issue. There's no check and balance on that power. If Bush sees something in a report that is politically embarrassing to him, or personally embarrassing to him, there's nothing preventing him from just blacking it out and saying this is a national security issue. We don't want him to be able to invoke that kind of executive privilege. We also don't want "government minders" to be present when testimony is taken, and we want testimony to be taken under oath.

It's just astounding to me that so little attention is being paid to the worst terrorist attack in American history. We spent over $50 million investigating Whitewater, and only $3 million has been spent investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Why isn't the media covering it wall to wall on television, like the O.J. trial or Watergate? Why is nobody paying attention to the worst terrorist attack in American history, and the fact that the Bush administration has thwarted a thorough investigation of it?

It really bothers me when I hear critics and whistleblowers from inside the government saying that we remain completely unprepared for another terrorist attack. Because if somebody dies in your family, at least you can feel like their death meant something, or that their death led to some change which prevented other people from suffering the same fate. And when you hear that nothing changed, and people are just as likely to die unnecessarily as they were on Sept. 11, then it bothers you. We definitely want to spare other people that same suffering.

BUZZFLASH: The second anniversary of 9/11 was by many accounts, tame. I don't foresee that in 2004. The Republican National Convention is going to be in New York only a few weeks from the date of Sept. 11. And there's an expectation that the convention is going to be using 9/11 as a significant symbol for re-electing George Bush. How do you feel about the decision to hold the event in New York?

POTORTI: The audacity of the Republicans, in coming to New York, is something that I can't believe. I can't even imagine how George Bush could come to the World Trade Center site and even show his face after what happened on that day. How can you depict what happened on that day as some kind of a success story? It was an absolute failure on Bush's part and on the Administration's part, and on the military's part, and on everybody's part.

Their visit next year is certainly raising a lot of concern in New York. There's a coalition called The Accountability Project. They're welcoming the Republicans to New York, but what they're basically saying is hands off Ground Zero. Don't use it as a backdrop. Don't use it as a photo op. Come to New York, stay in our hotels, spend money in our restaurants, but hands off Ground Zero.

We're already hearing that Republicans are booking tour buses for tours of Ground Zero, so that all the Republican delegates can see the big hole in the ground. And it's just personally offensive that they would use that for their own purposes. I don't think that they'll be able to pull it off. Peaceful Tomorrows will definitely be there, and we will make our concerns known.

BUZZFLASH: David, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, we sincerely appreciate it.

POTORTI: Thank you.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW