A-Changin' Times (ACT)
Born in the aftermath of 9/11, ACT has become as political as the times.
Now a blog for alternative news, views and rants offered with a twist, a song and a smile. Fair and balanced.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize [sic] with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.
 — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Copyright 1963
(1991 Special Rider)

"A-Changin' Times: taking the best from the past to make the most of the present and to create a better future."

"What marching through the streets was to the Sixties, walking through the halls of Congress is now."

 — Marianne Williamson

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Saturday, April 17, 2004

	:: Nora		4/17/2004 01:24:00 PM

Just another dead Iraqi?


FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH -- Actions to Take to Make a Difference

Just Another Dead Iraqi

By FAIR
April 16

As the casualties mount in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, Qatar-based Al Jazeera has been one of the only news networks broadcasting from the inside, relaying images of destruction and civilian victims –- including women and children. But when CNN anchor Daryn Kagan interviewed the network's editor-in-chief, Ahmed Al-Sheik, on Monday, Apr. 12 –- a rare opportunity to get independent information about events in Fallujah –- she used the occasion to badger Al-Sheik about whether the civilian deaths were really "the story" in Fallujah.

Al Jazeera has recently come under sharp criticism from U.S. officials, who claim the Iraqi casualties are 95 percent "military-age males." "We have reason to believe that several news organizations do not engage in truthful reporting," CPA spokesman Dan Senor said. "In fact it is no reporting." Senior military spokesman Mark Kimmitt had a suggestion for Iraqis who saw civilian deaths on Al Jazeera: "Change the channel to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies."

Acting as the substitute anchor on CNN's "Wolf Blitzer Reports," Kagan began the interview by asking Al-Sheik to respond to those accusations, citing U.S. officials "saying the pictures and the reporting that Al Jazeera put on the air only adds to the sense of frustration and anger and adds to the problems in Iraq, rather than helping to solve them." After Al-Sheik defended Al Jazeera's work as "accurate" and the images as representative of "what takes place on the ground," Kagan pressed on:

"Isn't the story, though, bigger than just the simple numbers, with all due respect to the Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives – the story bigger than just the numbers of people who were killed or the fact that they might have been killed by the U.S. military, that the insurgents, the people trying to cause problems within Fallujah, are mixing in among the civilians, making it actually possibly that even more civilians would be killed, that the story is what the Iraqi insurgents are doing, in addition to what is the response from the U.S. military?"

CNN's argument that a bigger story than civilian deaths is "what the Iraqi insurgents are doing" to provoke a U.S. "response" is startling. Especially in light of official U.S. denials of civilian deaths, video footage of women and children killed by the U.S. military is evidence that needs to be seen.

And Al Jazeera is not alone in reporting a reality very different from the one U.S. officials describe. Authorities have been able to keep a tight rein on the information flow from Fallujah, with only one small television network pool in the city that "travels and operates" under the watch of the Marines. (It's noteworthy that the U.S. has reportedly demanded, as a condition for lifting the siege of Fallujah, that Al Jazeera cameras be removed from the city.)

But independent journalists reporting from Fallujah have described a scene consistent with the one broadcast by Al Jazeera. Rahul Mahajan, a U.S. journalist in Fallujah, estimated that of the 600 Iraqis killed in Fallujah, 200 were women and 100 young children, with many of the adult male casualties also non-combatants. He reported witnessing "a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head" and "a young boy with massive internal bleeding" at a clinic. Mahajan recounted that during the "cease-fire," "Americans were attacking with heavy artillery but primarily with snipers" –- with ambulances among the targets. The sniper activity was also reported by U.S. journalist Dahr Jamail: "Fallujah residents say Marines are opening fire randomly on unarmed civilians and have attacked clearly marked ambulances."

When reports from the ground are describing hundreds of civilians being killed by U.S. forces, CNN should be looking to Al Jazeera's footage to see if it corroborates those accounts –- not badgering Al Jazeera's editor about why he doesn't suppress that footage.

Take Action: Please tell CNN that there is no bigger story in Fallujah than the deaths of civilians. Ask the network to report the reality of the siege –- including eyewitness accounts and video footage shot by non-embedded journalists –- before dismissing civilian victims as the responsibility of the resistance.

Contact CNN's "Wolf Blitzer Reports" at wolf@cnn.com.

As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone.
Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.

[Emphasis above is mine - N]

Source

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Thursday, April 15, 2004

	:: Nora		4/15/2004 08:06:00 AM

US military see Iraqi people as sub-human?

"Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate. One senior officer said that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of ‘unease and frustration' among the British high command.

"The officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen -- the Nazi expression for ‘sub-humans.' Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: ‘My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are.'" (Sean Rayment, British commanders condemn US military tactics, the [British] Telegraph)

Source: TomDispatch

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	:: Nora		4/15/2004 08:03:00 AM

Hear no evil, read no evil, speak drivel


BATTLE LINES BEIN' DRAWN -- War and Peace

Bush's press conference shows just how ill-informed he is about Iraq

Sidney Blumenthal
April 15, The Guardian

"On April 21 1961, President Kennedy held a press conference to answer questions on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles that he had approved. "There's an old saying," he said, "that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan ... I am the responsible officer of the government and that is quite obvious."

"On Wednesday, President Bush held only his third press conference and was asked three times whether he accepted responsibility for failing to act on warning before September 11. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't [sic] yet," he said. "I just haven't - you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not quick - as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

"Bush's press conference was the culmination of his recent efforts to staunch the political wounds of his bleeding polls since the 9/11 commission began public hearings and violence spiralled in Iraq. Bush had tried to divert blame by declaring that the August 6 memo he was forced to declassify at the commission's insistence contained no "actionable intelligence", even though it specifically mentioned the World Trade Centre and Washington as targets.

"Bush, in fact, does not read his President's Daily Briefs, but has them orally summarised every morning by the CIA director, George Tenet. President Clinton, by contrast, read them closely and alone, preventing any aides from interpreting what he wanted to know first-hand. He extensively marked up his PDBs, demanding action on this or that, which is almost certainly the likely reason the Bush administration withheld his memoranda from the 9/11 commission.

"'I know he doesn't read,' one former Bush national security council staffer told me. Several other former NSC staffers corroborated this. It seems highly unlikely that he read the national intelligence estimate on WMD before the Iraq war that consigned contrary evidence and caveats that undermined the case to footnotes and fine print. Nor is there any evidence that he read the state department's 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq, warning of nearly all the postwar pitfalls, that was shelved by the neocons in the Pentagon and Vice-President Cheney's office.

"Nor was Bush aware of similar warnings urgently being sounded by the military's top strategic analysts ..."

Continue here

[Emphasis mine - N]

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and Washington bureau chief of Salon.com

Sidney_Blumenthal@yahoo.com

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Wednesday, April 14, 2004

	:: Nora		4/14/2004 02:38:00 PM

Bush Missed Billboard Of Osama


BITS AND BOBS FROM THE ROVING BLOGGER

60-Foot-Tall Sign Appeared Outside White House

The Bush administration today grappled with allegations that President George W. Bush did not see a sixty-foot-tall billboard featuring Osama bin Laden that appeared suddenly across the street from the White House in August 2001.

The gigantic billboard, which featured bin Laden’s stern visage and the words “I AM GOING TO HIJACK U.S. AIRPLANES VERY SOON,” was first spotted by a UPS driver, Clayton Spedding, while making his morning deliveries on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“I was like, ‘Didn’t there use to be a Bacardi ad up there?’” Mr. Spedding, 34, told reporters today.

After making his startling discovery, Mr. Spedding called the White House, but was told to call back when he had “something more specific.”

As Mr. Bush’s apparent failure to notice the bin Laden billboard ignited a new round of finger-pointing in Washington, the President went on the offensive, warning the al-Qaeda kingpin to make future terror threats more explicit or “face the consequences.”

In a nationally televised address, Mr. Bush said that all future terror threats that did not include “the who, what, when, where and why” in the first paragraph “would be completely and categorically ignored.”

In addition to Mr. bin Laden, Mr. Bush singled out Iran and North Korea for making terror threats that were not specific enough, calling them “The Axis of Vagueness.”

As for the billboard of bin Laden, Mr. Bush said that once he was notified of its existence he took appropriate action: “I asked the national security staff to find out if Saddam Hussein had put it up there.”

The Borowitz Report

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Tuesday, April 13, 2004

	:: Nora		4/13/2004 01:52:00 PM

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Monday, April 12, 2004

	:: DUG853		4/12/2004 11:02:00 PM

Pre-9/11 memo shows al-Qaida's intent

CRAWFORD, Texas -- President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America's shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot.

[Subsequently deciding that this MUST be the perfect time for yet ANOTHER vacation. -- DUG]

Update · 6:15 a.m.

CONTINUE

Text of Bush's Aug. 6, 2001, intel brief

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