Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-09-09 Wednesday

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Democracy Now! Wednesday, September 9, 2026

This is Democracy Now. I find myself defending myself, my faith, my people, my community, my fellow Americans who are Muslims. Islam and terrorism are not synonymous. Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, we look at the impact of 9-11 on Muslim communities in the United States. with longtime organizer Pahad Amin and journalist Razina Ali, her new book, Seasons of Fury, four families and the rise of Islamophobia in America. But first, Mayor Mamdani releases 170,000 long-hidden records from the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. We'll speak to Ben Shab of 9-11 Health Watch, which sued the city for release of

the records. Mr. Mayor, I want to thank you for being the mayor who after 25 years begins to answer the question, what did the city know about the dangers from the toxic cloud at ground zero and when did it know it? All that and more coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now, DemocritoryNow. Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. The governments of Canada, France and the United Kingdom said Tuesday they will ban good. and some services from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. They joined several other U.S. allies, including Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Spain, which already have taken steps to ban imports from settlements.

UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliban announced the sanctions in a speech to the House of Commons Tuesday, where he accused Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. Ethnic cleansing is defined by the UN as a point. purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists. And all too often, the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this. Miliband also tightened restrictions on UK arms exports to Israel. However, the limited

embargo does not exclude the transfer of F-35 fighter jet parts. Israel responded by closing the British consulate in East Jerusalem. Far right minister Bezalos Motrich declared the Oslo Accords null and void demanding the expulsion of the British ambassador. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports British diplomats privately told the U.S., the sanctions are largely symbolic and will have no material impact on the U.K.'s wider relationship with Israel on trade or security. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to sue the newspaper Haaretz.

After it reported, he failed to heed a warning that Hamas was planning a major operation ahead of the October 7, 2023 attacks. Ha'Aritz said in response that it stands by its reporting. On Tuesday, the paper published excerpts of a forthcoming book by its reporters that found that UA.E. President Muhammad bin Zayed warned Netanyahu a week and a half before the attacks and that the Israeli leader failed to inform his security chiefs. On Tuesday, opposition politicians accused Netanyahu of evading responsibility for security lapses and called him unfit to serve. U.S. forces bomb five Iranian tankers Tuesday, including one near Iran's main oil export terminal carg.

Iran retaliated by firing missiles at a U.S. base in Jordanian forces say they intercepted nearly all of them. Iran's Revolutionary Guard also claim retaliatory strikes on U.S. and commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries a fifth of the world's oil and gas. U.S. Central Command denied Iran's claims that struck two Navy destroyers. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since the U.S. war. on Iran began in late February. On Tuesday, Brent crude oil futures topped $100 a barrel the highest fuel prices since the U.S. Iran ceasefire collapsed in July. In Missouri, a pair of court rulings has thrown planning for November's midterm elections into chaos. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow Republicans to use a Trump-backed map gerrymandered to target Democratic Congress member, Emmanuel Cleaver, can't. city seat. The ruling left in place a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that sends the new map to a public referendum. Hours later, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump appointee,

ordered Missouri to use the gerrymandered map anyway, ruling switching maps after the August primary would lead to voter confusion. Judge Clark's order has been appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Postal Services Inspector General says it'll review a whistleblower's warning that the Trump administration's new mail-in-voting rule could result in thousands of legal ballots being discarded. The new rule would require states to hand over lists of mail ballot recipients and use approved envelopes with unique barcodes, allowing the agency to refuse ballots that don't follow those standards. This comes as a federal judge has extended a block on the rule. The Trump administration's asked the Supreme Court to allow it to enforce the rule before the midterm elections. A federal appeals court has blocked the IRS from sharing taxpayer data with ICE.

ICE had demanded the last known addresses of 1.28 million people, it says, are in the U.S. unlawfully. The three-judge panel for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., found ICE's request violated laws passed after the Watergate scandal when the Nixon administration weaponized tax files against its enemies. The IRS and ICE had set up a mechanism that allowed immigration officials to submit lists to tax authorities to check against their records. Judge Cornelia Pallard wrote, quote, The IRS is now unnoticed twice over regarding the legal inadequacies of its summer 2025 disclosures. the government and its personnel face steep civil and criminal consequences for willful disclosure of information, unquote. UN experts warn a sharp rise in wildfires and heat waves intensified by the climate crisis is undercutting air quality worldwide.

A new report finds areas which had slash pollution from vehicles and industry now face fresh risks from wildfire smoke, while higher temperatures brought by severe heat waves are driving up ground-level ozone. This is Lorenzo Labrador, a scientific officer of the World Meteorological Organization, which issued the report. Wildfires have the potential to undermine progress brought about by air quality measures in many countries. Because no matter how clean your city or your region is because of reduced emissions due to whatever measures you put in place, if you have a lot of pollution brought about by wildfires, that has the potential to negatively impact air quality. in those regions as well. So yes. A federal appeals court has ruled the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee the right to clean

drinking water, rejecting a lawsuit by residents of Jackson, Mississippi, who say their city knowingly allowed them to drink tap water contaminated with lead. On Friday, a full panel of judges in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 10 to 5 to uphold lower court's dismissal of the case, which argued city officials violated residents' constitutional. right to bodily integrity under the 14th Amendment's due process clause. The Trump administration's looking to obtain greater access to Venezuela's minerals, including gold. That's according to Reuters, which reports the move would open up Venezuela's mining sector to U.S. investment, giving U.S. companies access to crucial minerals. President Trump has

already taken steps to control Venezuela's vast oil wealth, announcing the U.S. will take majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves. The deal has been widely condemned after the abduction of former President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Celia Flores in January. President Trump has proposed renaming the state of New Mexico, New America. In a series of memes, he shared on social media over Labor Day weekend. Any such move, would violate New Mexico's state constitution. In response, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham wrote, quote, New Mexico's name isn't up for debate. It's been hours since before the United States existed, end quote. In August, President Trump issued an executive order renaming Lake

Ontario, Lake America, Google Maps, and Apple Maps quickly complied, switching the lake's name for U.S. users of their popular app. But after MapQuest refused to comply with the name change, it saw its app surge and popularity to become the number one download in Apple's App Store. President Trump gave his executive assistant Natalie Harp and two other young female White House AIDS, $45,000 each. According to financial disclosures, the payments are described as, quote, cash gift for holidays, unquote, and amount to a third of the AIDS $150,000 annual salary. Walt Nauta, the director of Oval Office Operations, also reported a $20,000 gift from the president. The Trump administrations published a new study purporting to show links between support for

transgender rights, left-wing authoritarianism and political violence. The report claims of that evidence, the killing of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, was connected to so-called gender ideology. The unfinished report was commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services and conducted by researchers with Rutgers University, the Manhattan Institute, and the Network Contagion Research Institute think tank. It has neither been peer-reviewed or accepted for publication in an academic journal. In response, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism said,

quote, this study is not a neutral scientific inquiry. Instead, it attempts to reframe a health care consensus as a security and radicalization concern, furthering the administration's aims of dehumanizing and abusing the transgender community, unquote. A researcher at the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic publicly resigned Tuesday, warning the race to produce frontier AI models could lead to self-improving superintelligent machines that pose an existential threat. to humans. Jacob Coxon specialized in training new AI models on vast amounts of data. In a social media post explaining his resignation, he wrote, quote, The people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible. But I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger, he said.

His warning comes just days after OpenAI released its most capable model yet, GPT6 Astra, which prompted NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to proclaim AGI has arrived, referring to artificial general intelligence. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's asks Open AI to provide it with a special version of its artificial intelligence technology designed to refuse commands as infrequently as possible. That's according to the Intercept, which reports a large language model that would aid in the process of spying on targeting and killing people, would require a substantial relaxation of existing safeguards. In Albania, police blocked protesters from reaching the Parliament Tuesday. As demonstrations against the development of a luxury resort, linked to U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, turned violent. In the capital, Tehrana, protesters pelted officers in riot gear with eggs and tomatoes. Albania's prime minister supports Kushner's development project, despite critics claiming it would cause massive environmental damage.

This is a protester Tuesday's demonstration. They were very violent, but they don't understand that their violence is keeping us more pumped and we'll bring here more people. They think they by arresting us, by illegally keeping us in prison, they think that they can scare us, but it's kind of the opposite. Like, we are not scared. We are, everyone is seeing the regime here, how it is operating. I think so, yeah, we are not scared anymore. So we'll keep going. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now.

Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. And I'm Anjali Kometh. Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. This week marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. On Tuesday, New York City mayors, Oran Mamdani, announced the historic release of more than 170,000 pages of city records from the aftermath of 9-11, some of which indicate New York City officials lied to the public about the hazardous toxins that burned and remained in the air

for months, up to half a mile from ground zero. Mamdani also announced the settlement of two 9-11-related lawsuits. He spoke at City Hall yesterday. We are together this morning to stand steadfast alongside survivors and their families and to deliver the account of accountability around city government's response to September 11th that New Yorkers have been denied for years. I am proud to announce that our administration has settled two lawsuits between the city and 9-11 Health Watch, ending what has been a multi-year legal battle and restrictions on New Yorkers' ability to access information

that can shed valuable insight on air quality and health concerns. administration after administration has ignored those calling for answers and clarity, instead choosing to bury them in legal arguments and in red tape. We will do no such thing. As we mark 25 years, it is time for this painful chapter to end. Mayor Mamdani was joined at the press conference by talk show host John Stewart, who's advocated for years on behalf of 9-11 first responders, survivors, and their families. people had to fight sick and dying for years. And I'm not saying that the information may have

changed the outcomes, unfortunately, for their families. But I guarantee you it would not have been the struggle that it was to get people to recognize that what they all knew, and what we all knew who live in downtown Manhattan, is that there was poison in the air and on the ground and in the windowsills and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes and it stayed there for months. And this is Congress member Gerald Nadler speaking at Tuesday's City Hall Press Conference. My colleagues and I who represented Ground Zero and the surrounding communities immediately warned local and federal officials about the health risks posed by the toxins in the air.

I was screaming at the top of my lungs to protect our communities, my constituents, but officials like EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Mayor Giuliani denied claims like mine, saying the air was perfectly safe. Blastomous. City Hall, led by former Mayor Giuliani, predicted that thousands of responders and community members would face devastating long-term health consequences from these toxins. despite this, he stayed silent on the hazards. The release of the documents comes as part of litigation brought by the advocacy group 9-11 Health Watch,

which sued New York City to force the publication of the records. We're joined now by Ben Chavat, Executive Director of 9-11 Health Watch. Welcome to Democracy Now. Give us a little background. How did these documents get released? Why was it your group that's responsible for this? So thank you for having me. 9-11 Health Watch was created by the state, New York State, AFL, CIO.

How I got here is that I was Congressman Maloney's chief of staff on 9-11, and I worked for her as she helped to develop the legislation that became the Zagrova Act, which provides health care. Zagrova was the detective that we named the bill after who died in 2009. and he was the first person to have a medical examiner declare that his death was related to dying from 9-11 exposures to the toxic chemicals that were present downtown. And at the time, we working for the congresswoman, we worked on the legislation. We had a real fight because the Bush administration, the Giuliani administration, all denied that there was an impact from these toxins.

I just have to point out Juan Gonzalez, who was at the time the Daily News columnists, wrote several... And democracy now for us. That's why I bring it up, wrote several early columns, raising questions about what was called 9-11 cough. And for that, the Giuliana administration apparently called the Daily News demanding that he'd be fired. And that was just an example of people like Congressman Nadler,

Kimberly Flynn of Environmental Action, the local residents, including my mother, who was lived in Battery Park, was 74 at the time, was there when the towers collapsed, was evacuated over the seawall to Jersey and hitchhiked to my brother's house, and then returned in spring like everyone else, because the city administration at the time said it was safe. They brought kids back to school to Stuyvesant, but not just Stuyvesant, to all the schools, the high school of finance, which is next door to the Stock Exchange. And they brought people back, and there were questions being raised all the time.

Is it safe? And there's been a continuing sort of attempt. You know, we got involved many years later, but there were always attempt, obviously, one, wrote a book about it. Anthony DePalmer from the New York Times wrote a book about it. There were hints about it. In 2007, Anthony DePalmer mentioned the Harding memo, which was written to Deputy Mayor Harding at the time in October of 2001, which laid out that there would be 10,000 toxic claims they expected because of what was happening. But this was at the same time that they said that

it was safe, that the air was safe, not just Christy Todd Whitman, but the city administration. And the latest sort of effort was really after Congressman Adler and my old boss, Congresswoman Bloney, wrote a letter to then Mayor de Blasio in 2021 to say, it's the 20th anniversary, it's time for the city to sort of say what it knew. Mayor de Blasier didn't respond to that. They wrote to Mayor Adams when he was coming in, who was a 9-11 respond. responder himself. And Mayor Adams responded, but said that he would only reveal what they knew or reveal their documents if the city got more liability protection, which was sort of like

an admission of, well, what's in there? And that's really, so I went to Andy Carboy and Matt McCauley, two lawyers who, Matt is actually a 9-11 responder himself, NYPD, and I asked them to help volunteer. We filed FOIAs. And the city kept, you know, FOIA is not a great process. Freedom of Information Act. Yeah, the Freedom of Information Act. And for whatever documents, for documents, for the Harding memo,

for especially documents, because in the October and November, the Giuliani administration went to Congress, and I, you know, Mrs. Maloney was not aware of it. Mr. Nadler was not aware of it. You know, in the aftermath of 9-11, there were a lot of legislation going, apparently they actually inserted into the law a limit of the city's liability to no more than $350 million. Which sort of says, well, why were they at the same, exactly, at the same time they were saying if the air was safe, why were they worried about liability? And that's really the core of what we were trying to get at is, and I don't fault the city and the response to the tragedy, and ultimately it's the terrorists who are responsible. But instead of mitigating the harm, they mitigated the city's liability. And instead of maybe slowing down and not bringing kids back or maybe not bringing my mother back and other residents, they could have said, well, maybe we need to be more careful.

And I just want to be clear. I'm not a responder. I've talked to a lot of responders. A lot of responders would probably have still gone and done what they did. But I think they would have liked to have known and been given that choice. And that's really the core of the issue. So we filed this FOIA. I think the really sort of the breakthrough here, because other people had done it before,

and the Adams administration was just saying no all along, was that I approached Councilman Gail Brewer, and we were talking, and she said, well, I'll put in a bill. And her staff doing some research found that the last major city charter revision had given the City Council the power to order the Department of Investigation to do an investigation. This power had never been exercised by the City Council. She put in the resolution at the time Speaker Adams, Adrian Adams, supported it, and last summer, the city council passed this resolution ordering DOI to do this investigation. And then three weeks later, four weeks later, the city informed us that they had found 68 boxes. Obviously, they had said there were no boxes, there were no, there was nothing available. the way FOIL works, once they made that administrative decision, we filed what's called

an Article 78, which is under New York State law, sort of demanding that the, asking the question was the law followed. Once the city council acted, and last September, I think it was, that they said they found those 68 boxes, that's when things really started to happen. And, you know, we, the election happened, Mayor Mandami came in, and we've been waiting, trying, you know, hoping that Mayor Mandami would change the direction of the Corporation Council, because this is really four administrations that have not allowed people to see these documents. And what's the most important to you about the documents that have been released as we begin to wrap up? Well, I think just that they're being seen, people will see it. I don't,

And let me be clear. I don't know whether there's going to be a smoking gun or like a memo or something like that, but we've already seen there was a lot more that the city was keeping from people for actively preventing people from seeing. You know, we won our court case. Judge Klein's in our case, in one of our cases, found that the city violated the law, actively preventing us from receiving the documents that we were entitled to see. And, you know, that's really the key part. And I give the mayor, and then Steve Banks, the new corporation council, a lot of credit to that. And Ben Shabat, what's been the reaction of previous mayors from the four administrations that did not release the 68 boxes? I haven't heard from them.

Or I haven't seen any press reports about it of what they've said. So what do you do with these documents in the last 30 seconds? Well, this is still, this is just the first batch of documents. over the next year, there's going to be a lot more. We are working as part of our settlement agreement. We are working with Steve Banks. And Steve Banks is formerly with legal aid. Formerly with legal aid, yes. And we're working with them on search terms. There's just a vast amount of these documents that have to go through it. People can go through a portal and get access to. And people will be able to go to the portal, go to New York City, go to the New York City website.

They can go through it and they can see for themselves. And we're already hearing people saying, well, I see this. And just to say that it's, it is difficult for the city. The city has to make sure there's no personal information we don't want. Social Security numbers, I mean, it's a vast amount of information, so it is going to take time. And Mandani has, what, given something like $30, $40 million. It's $34 million. $34 million.

And it's not just too much to say with the mayor, it's not just about the documents. The mayor is going to be working to promote the president. I mean, before you and I were talking before this segment, you live downtown, you might qualify for it. There are so many more people who may not understand what's in the Zagrove Act, what's available for them. And more importantly, there's work that should have been done a long time ago. There's now this new, what's called the youth research cohort that the mayor is going to help to promote, to try to really do some research that hasn't been done on those who were children at the time. at the time and to really see what their health effects have been.

Benjamin Chavout, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Executive Director of 9-11 Health Watch. He participated in yesterday's news conference. His organization is the one that forced the release of these 170,000 pages of 9-11 documents. This is DemocracyNow. DemocracyNow.org. When we come back, seasons of fury for families and the rise of of Islamophobia and America.

We look at what's happened in this last 25 years, the targeting of the Muslim community. Stay with us. Slow howling wind, beat on fragile heart. Open in your eyes won't tear us apart. This was the year our father's father's father's, fell down and all that we once held

they broke upon the ground and the crowds they disappeared the scaffold removed the circle was drawn around me and you don't hide so a child learns to walk and learns wrong from right

from right. Wild gods by David Berkeley. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Anjali Comment. New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani, the city's first Muslim mayor will be attending the 9-11 commemoration ceremony this week, along with the families of victims. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former New York Governor George Pataki have led critics

who say Mayor Mamdani should skip the ceremony. Speaking on Newsmax, Giuliani criticized Mayor Mamdani for giving a symbolic pen to his chief legal counsel, Ramsey Qasim, during the signing of an executive order establishing September 11th as an official citywide day of remembrance and service. Ramsey Kassam previously represented several detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Giuliani then went on an Islamophobic tirade against Mayor Mondani. Too many Americans fall for that Islamic propaganda, which is the reason they're taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe.

They have every desire to take us over. This is not they want to be just another religion. They want to dominate us. That's what they're taught. From the day they begin their extremist religious education, Mandami is a clear, a clear supporter of that. A circulating online petition that expresses concern regarding Mamdani's attendance at the ceremony has reached 100,000 signatures.

This was Mayor Mamdani's response to Giuliani's remarks. What I want this week to be a focus on is on the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago in the horrific act of terror of September 11th. And a focus also on the first responders who give everything they could to this city and to the people who came together to try and help their fellow New Yorkers.

For more on Islamophobia after 9-11 and its impacts on communities here in the United States, we're joined by two guests. Razina Ali is an award-winning journalist, a New York Times contributing writer, author of the new book, Seasons of Fury, four families and the rise of Islamophobia in America.

She's reported on the global war on terror from Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. And Fahad Ahmed is the executive director of Drum. That's Desi's Rising Up and Moving, a grassroots group for South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrant workers and families in New York City. He also runs Drumbeats, one of the first organizations to endorse Zoran. Mamdani during his run for mayor. We welcome you both to democracy now. Let's begin with Rosina. You spent years writing this book. This is a sacred week here in New York, this 25th anniversary of 9-11. Talk about what happened after 9-11, the rise of hate against people of the Islamic faith. There is, there were so many responses.

to 9-11. One was obviously fear and grief and shock, but another was rage, and so much of that rage was towards Muslims and those who looked like Muslims. Around the country, we obviously saw a lot of hate crimes, violent killings, of actually brown people who were not Muslims, but they were actually Sikhs. There were also, in Bridgeview, outside of Chicago, a mass group of about 300 people who marched towards a mosque shouting death to Arabs. And I think what's particularly fascinating, too, is what the government did, which was in the weeks after, in the days and weeks after, they started arresting people. They started arresting Muslim and brown men and boys from streets, from their homes, from

their workplaces. I want to bring Fahad Ahmed into the conversation. Fahad, Executive Director of Drum, DASY's rising up and moving. you've been a grassroots organizer with Drum for over 25 years. Take us back to that immediate aftermath and that panic and fear that Rosina talked about. What was it like organizing and what were people worried about and what was going on? Yeah. Within a day or two after 9-11, we had printed a flyer and set up a hotline and said if you're facing hate crimes,

if you're facing discrimination, if you're facing targeting. please reach out to us. And the calls that we started getting were largely related to people experiencing targeting by law enforcement. I remember one call being a children calling us and saying, my father left for work four days ago and he hasn't come home.

Women calling and saying, police burst down my door and they grab my brother and my husband and I don't know where they are. workers called and said, a black van pulled up and grabbed my co-worker and another guy off the street and just drove off with them. And so in New York City and in New Jersey and across the country, but particularly in New York, New Jersey, we saw these massive roundups of mostly Muslim men or people that were perceived to be Muslim. And this included citizens, green card holders, and undocumented people.

In the beginning, it was just mass around. roundups, and then they held them, and then they tried to figure out what is the reason that we're holding them. And sometimes they would dig up, you know, false charge, like they would make up some charges, but most of the time they would be able to use immigration, immigrant status. And this was happening at, there was at least 1,200 men that were picked up this way. I want to talk about one person. I want to talk about Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a New York city police cadet trained as an EMT, who was headed to work at Rockefeller University with his Quran, then race to ground zero. We only learn this later, attempting to save whatever lives

he could at the Twin Towers, September 11, 2001. Democracy now spoke to his parents on the eve of the second anniversary of his death in 2003, as they joined hundreds in a quiet, procession to ground zero. His mother, Talatamdani, remembered searching for him for days. The reality started to hit us at that moment. Something did happen to him. And the third day, we went down to the center that they had made for the families to come and write there, give their names of their loved ones. Armory, it was. Yes, it was the army. It was. Yes, it was the We went down there and we registered his name and we gave our swab samples for the DNA. We made a flyer searching for him.

We put down his name as Sal Hamdani. My brother did not put down his name, the first name, Muhammad, for certain reasons. And we searched for him. Nobody had seen him. So while they search for weeks through all hospitals giving their own DNA samples, Salman's parents, they then went to Mecca to pray. As they were there, the New York Post portrayed Salman as a possible terrorist. The Post article was headlined missing or hiding. mystery of NYPD cadet from Pakistan.

You know, this is what the newspaper, the post printed a very horrible heading, you know, missing or hiding. And amongst the news that the way they presented it, it had, you know, insinuations that he was seen near the, at 11 a.m., he was seen near the Midtown Tunnel. And is he really hiding? Most probably, is he really missing? He's not missing, but he's hiding.

And he could be one of the, the terrorists. Talaamdani's mother, Talaamam Dani told me how difficult it felt to be Muslim in the United States at the time. We have these sisters and nephews in second and third grade they were at that time. They were in second grade. And believe me, they changed their names. You know, some Armen became Amy and one became. Mickey and the other one became Mikey. And the fourth one became Adam. And we asked them why you change their names.

Then they said, you know, because we don't want to be called terrorists in the school. We are Muslims. So it came at that moment, you know, like a year and a half ago, like Islam and terrorism were synonymous terms. And that is where I find myself defending myself, my faith,

my people, my community, My fellow Americans who are Muslims. Islam and terrorism are not synonymous. Talat Hamdani, the mother of Salman Hamdani, in fact, when she was looking for him in hospitals, she said his name was Sao, because she already knew there would be discrimination. The mayor would later apologize. The police commissioner would later apologize. He's named in the USA Patriot Act.

And the president, President Bush, would praise Salmon for the hero that he was. How typical was this? It was quite common. You know, a lot of the people that we were encountering in detention centers were people that were just picked out by other people who said that they look suspicious. And there was just a overall framework of anybody that looks Muslim is likely, complicit and let's just round them up and figure things out. And maybe just to give an example of to the extent, we heard about Talat searching for Salman.

We found a Salman Hamdani in the detention center. And it turned out to be a 53-year-old man. And, you know, there was just tons of these stories of particular neighborhoods, and in particular in New York City, Midwood and Bay Ridge. that there was just large numbers of men that just disappeared. And it was really disappearance because, as I mentioned, people would go to work and not come home. And so the campaign that we launched would stop the disappearance campaign. And these people were held in communicato without access to lawyers, without being able to contact their families,

some for six months, some for nine months. and there was almost like whatever basic constitutional rights exist do not apply in this situation. Rizina, I want to go back to you. I know we've been talking about this post-9-11 dragnet and how many Muslim men were kind of caught in this. You've got the 1,200 men who were disappeared. But then you also had the special registration. So talk about that and how many people were affected. And also how the Bush administration kind of.

used its immigration arm to deal with what they called preventing terrorism. So we know one of the things that we have learned over the years is that one of the failures of 9-11, one of the reasons that happened, was because of an intelligence failure, not an immigration failure, except the Bush administration kept using immigration as a tool to clamp down on what they thought were terrorist threats. what happened after the mass arrests of the 1,200 people was that the Bush administration thought that they should do something a bit more systematic and something perhaps a bit more orderly.

And they created what is called the National Security Exit Entry Registration System and Sears, which was basically a registry for men and boys of at least 15 years of age from about two dozen Muslim majority countries. They had to register with the government. The result of that was that about 80,000 people registered. Thousands of them were deported, and not a single one was found to have ties with terrorism. And there has been no apology about that. And it's interesting because I actually, years later, I interviewed a few former officials

asking about the NCEARS system. And I found two responses. One main response was a lot of them didn't remember that the Bush administration had instituted this. It wrecked so many lives, but officials just have forgotten. But the other thing, the other response I usually get is we did what we had to do, and it was necessary. Civil rights may have been violated, but we did what was necessary. The problem is, I don't think it was necessary. My reporting has found that actually we didn't find terrorists this way at all. We're going to go into the four families that you profile in Seasons of Fury,

Rosina Ali, award-winning journalist New York Times contributing writer. And we are also speaking with Fahat Ahmed, the executive director of Drum, Desi's rising up and moving. on this week of the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks and what happened after. Stay with us. Chano Jani Jani Janii Janii

Janii Pappetri Pavetak by Sani Singh, performing in our Democracy Now studio. This is Democracy Now,

Democercy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Mimi Goodman with Anjali Komet. Our guest, Sir Rosina Ali, author of Seasons of Fury, Four Families in the Rise of

Islamophobia in America, and Fah Ahmed, the executive director of Drum, as he's rising up and moving. An Julie? Rosina, you write about the long shadow of post-9-11 use of terrorism prosecutions and the material support laws. And you write, one of the families you write about is the family of Matin Siraj.

And he was a young Pakistani immigrant. In 2007, Syraj, then just 24, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station in New York City. Attorneys for Siraj said he was set up by a police informant who pushed the idea of bombing. Democracy now spoke to his attorney, Martin Stolar, soon after the sentencing. If we could just go to that clip, Saraj, while they get that clip ready. So Mathiet Saraj was living in New York City. He was living in Queens and working in Brooklyn at his uncle's Islamic bookstore.

And this was during the time of obviously the Iraq War. there was a lot of conversation about foreign policy and what the U.S. was doing. Mathin was very vocally critical, and he was visited one day by a man who turned out to be an undercover NYPD informant who befriended him over months and goaded him towards a plot to blow up Harold Square. Now, it is worth remembering and recognizing that there was actually no details of the plot. There were no weapons. There was no date or time set for the plot. And perhaps most critically, Mathene actually tried to back out of this plan multiple times.

And yet he was still arrested by the NYPD, convicted and eventually sentenced to 30 years in prison. We have that clip ready. This is his lawyer, Martin Stolar, speaking to Amy Goodman, back in 2007. This young man becomes a symbol of terrorism in the United States. In essence, what we have is the new... York City Police Department creating a crime so they could solve the crime and claim a victory in the war on terror. That is not the way to investigate terrorism, as far as I'm concerned. And so he recorded on tape saying, I don't want to do this. I'm going to talk to my money.

Oh, yes. He's recorded on videotape saying, I'd better not do this. I have to check with my parents to see if I really want to go forward with this. So he says he has to check with his parents. And the attorney for the case and you as well talk about the use of informants. So how prevalent was the use of informants at this time? And what did this do to the sort of community of Muslims in the U.S. who could be, you know, who were dealing with infiltration, being surveilled? Can you talk about how all of that was related to the prosecutions? So what's fascinating to me is the difference between the pre-9-11 era and the post-9-11 era.

before 9-11, law enforcement really did not have good or closed relationships with the Muslim community, nor do they have a lot of knowledge about Islam or the Arab world. After 9-11, they were in desperate need of any ties to Muslims, and so they started recruiting informants, and they could recruit informants by paying them, or by bribing them and saying, we're going to speed up your immigration status or application, or they would use a stick approach and say,

if you don't help us, we might make things more difficult for you. Eventually, the FBI amassed a base of about 15,000 informants, which is absolutely wild. But what's so critical is that Muslims became scared of going to the mosque, of going to bookstores, of going to cafes, because these undercover informants were everywhere. They were infiltrating practically every restaurant and cafes, certainly in the tri-state area, but also around the country. You know, we have used informants in the past.

The FBI certainly has, but in those cases, usually an informant has a tie to a mafia member or a gang member. After 9-11, the only tie that informants had to another Muslim was that they were Muslim. Fahad, you've worked with Matin Saraj's family. what was the impact of his arrest and his being sentenced to 30 years in prison on the community? And, I mean, 25 years after 9-11, what's changed for the communities you're working with, working class, South Asian and Muslim communities? Yeah. We worked with the Sradt family for more than 20 years.

And first and foremost, this has absolutely devastated the family. Every day that Mantine has spent in prison, his mother and his family have been in prison with him every single day. The family, it becomes hard to find work. Your own family becomes afraid. Do I stay in contact with them or do I not? If I support them, will I get targeted? And that same dynamic plays out in the community. People that were your neighbors now are like,

I'm not sure. Who should I talk to this family? Who should I talk to? And what we saw was the complete devastation of the social fabric in Muslim communities for many, many years, for almost two decades. to where people were afraid to have political conversations. And if you know anything about Muslim communities and Mashid,

it's like that's pretty much all people do. You do the ritual, like religious things, and then you sit around and talk about what's happening back home, what's happening here, what do we think about the war, what do we think about this. And there were large number of places where people said no political conversations allowed. You know, there was like Muslim students,

associations that started putting up signs and political conversations here are not allowed. And all of this was happening at a time that several Muslim countries were being targeted by U.S. wars while civil rights of Muslim communities were being violated. And so our communities were in this difficult situation that at the very moment where people needed to defend themselves, there was a high level of uncertainty on Ken and should we talk or should we not talk? Should we engage in political activism or should we not? And this, of course, all didn't begin 9-11. Razina, you write about Abdeen Jabara,

co-founder of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee and longtime leader of the National Lawyers Guild. In the 1970s, he exposed the Nixon administration's surveillance program against Arab Americans and forced the NSA to admit it had been spying on him, Abdeen, since 1967. We spoke to him in 2013 about his groundbreaking case. I had been very, very active in Palestinian support work. And one day I read in Newsweek magazine in the Periscope section that 26 Arabs in the United

States had been targeted for surveillance and electronic surveillance. So I thought surely some of those had been clients of mine. or had talked to me on the phone about issues and so forth, and that's when I brought the lawsuit. I was surprised after all the revelations about the Snowden NSA Brouhaha, that nobody had looked back at, what had occurred back in the 70s, to show that at that time,

it came out in the press that over 1,600 Americans had been, surveilled by the NSA. So that's Abdin Jabara, former head founder of American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. And at the time, we had a lower third that said friend of Alex Oda. Razina explained. So Alex O'Day was one of the vice presidents of the ADC for the West Coast chapter. And in 1985, there was a bomb in that office that killed him, unfortunately. And his murder was never solved.

Although at the time, the FBI did suspect the Jewish Defense League, and there was actually a lot of conversation about the rise of terrorism in the U.S. against Arab Americans coming, emanating from the J.D.L. Unfortunately, what has happened in these intervening years since then is that terrorism has become more and more aligned with Islam, and we forget that terrorists can be from any group or any ethnicity or any religion. But really, what this long history shows us, that how we think about terrorism and Arabs and Muslims has been a problem much longer than 9-11. And where do you see, I mean, your book is called Seasons of Fury and you trace the kind of changing Islamophobia, both through the institutions and practices and bigotry of people, but also different administrations. Where are we today, 25 years later? I mean, this is also a time of the rise of so many Muslim politicians, outspoken Muslim politicians, including. including our own mayor, Mayor Mamdani, who is once again facing Islamophobic attacks. I would say we're probably at a really worse place than we have ever been

because it is so accepted and policymakers are peddling anti-Muslim rhetoric. But just even take the example of Giuliani. It's funny to me that he apologized to Talat Hamdani because years later, he's essentially doing the same thing over again towards Mayor Mamdani by saying, Muslims cannot be victims of 9-11, right? Muslims can only be the perpetrators. And this is a narrative that has been repeated over and over again, and certainly around election season.

And to be clear, this is about Giuliani and former Governor Pataki saying that Mamdani, the mayor of New York, should not be allowed at the ceremonies for the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. Exactly, correct, yes. And one wonder is how much longer do Muslims have to apologize for 9-11? 11. And Fahadhas, you look back on these 25 years and, you know, your organization drum beats was one of the first to endorse around Mamdani. You know, how do you see the community having changed? I mean, from that time of fear and putting their heads down to now having a political voice. Yeah. I think there's divergent consequences. On one hand, we are seeing a resurgence of Islamphobia at levels that is unprecedented. And at the same time, it's not as effective as it used to be. And I I think part of what we see, you know, the emergence of Mayor Ram Dani and similar politicians, a lot of it is because of a lot of the organizing efforts that built the foundations in the aftermath of 9-11,

that built the communities, and also just the humiliation and the resentment that the communities had for being targeted for so long, that part of the ways of being able to resist back is like, all right, we've been through it enough. We're going to organize ourselves, and we're going to sort of. support people that are going to be much more aligned with the experiences and the perspectives of our communities. And so part of what we're seeing in the rise of more Muslim politicians and, you know, I unsubscribe to identity politics in terms of just identities enough, but there is a confidence around like, I'm not going to hide it anymore. And I think that deeply resonates with our communities who felt for two decades that they had to hide it. And I

think now we're sort of seeing the response to them. We want to thank you both for being with us. Thank you to Rosina Ali, author of Seasons of Fury, four families and the rise of Islamophobia in America. And Fahat Ahmed, executive director of Drum, Desi's Rising Up and Moving. That does it for our show. On September 17th, I'll be going home to Bayshore, New York and Long Island for the screening of Steal the Story, please.

Check our website at to markshadow.org. And then September 22nd at the IFC. I'm Amy Goodman with Anjali Kamen.