From Thomas Paine’s Corner
By Barry Fockler

The readers of Barry’s Blogs have probably noticed that the sending of my progressive news journal has been erratic the last couple of days. The reason for this is because Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech seem to be dying a rather hasty death in France.

Bloggers were recently arrested in Paris for daring to write that they were sympathetic with the social plight of the young people who were rioting at that time. The last I heard they were being taken to jail. (Editors: See the following Internet site for further information: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=french+bloggers+arrested+&btnG=Search+News) There is evidently a new get tough policy aimed at bloggers and other Internet freedom lovers who use the ‘net as a vehicle for expressing their views and beliefs on what’s happening in the world today. The freedom of the Internet must be preserved!!!

As the editor of Barry’s Blogs, I am now being threatened, by my mainly French government owned Internet Service Provider (ISP), wanadoo.fr, telling me that if I don’t stop sending out my progressive news journal, I will certainly be disconnected from the Internet. Further, they inform me, I can expect to be refused service from any other ISP in France.

Read more Barry’s Blog

From Yahoo News
By ROBERT H. REID

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A suicide car bomber killed 21 people in northern
Iraq on Tuesday after insurgents lured police to the scene by shooting an officer, officials said. One more U.S. soldier was killed, pushing the American death toll for the conflict to 2,100, the U.S. military said.

Elsewhere, insurgents fired a mortar shell at a U.S. ceremony transferring one of
Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Tikrit to Iraqi control. The shell failed to explode but sent the U.S. ambassador, the top American commander and robed tribal sheiks scurrying for cover as the round whistled overhead.

The suicide bomber struck on a busy commercial street in Kirkuk, a mixed Arab, Kurdish and Turkoman city in an oil-producing region 180 miles north of Baghdad. About half the dead were police who rushed to the scene after gunmen killed a fellow officer.

In addition to the 21 dead, another 24 people were wounded, according to police Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qader.

Read more Iraq

From The National Journal
By Murray Waas

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the “President’s Daily Brief,” a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

Read more Intelligence

From Yahoo News
By Anna Johnson

CHICAGO – Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday called for a troop reduction in
Iraq and criticized the Bush administration for questioning the patriotism of people who have spoken out against the war.

“I believe that U.S. forces are still a part of the solution in Iraq,” the Illinois Democrat said during a speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. “The strategic goals should be to allow for a limited drawdown of U.S. troops, coupled with a shift to a more effective counter-insurgency strategy that puts the Iraqi security forces in the lead and intensifies our efforts to train Iraqi forces.”

The debate over when to bring troops home has turned bitter since decorated Vietnam War vet Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., called last week for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. He was criticized by the Bush administration and other Republicans.

Obama defended Murtha and called any criticism of his patriotism “shameful.” But he said it was inappropriate to pull troops out immediately.

Read more Obama

From The Nation
By David Corn

“No Q and A.” That’s what Chris DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, said to me on the elevator at his think tank on Monday morning. I knew what he meant. Dick Cheney was coming to AEI, the prowar, neocon headquarters, to give yet another speech on the Iraq war. Last week, Cheney blasted critics who claim Bush misled the nation into war, calling these accusations the most “dishonest” and “reprehensible” statements he’s ever encountered in Washington. (And he’s been around a long time.) But Cheney, as is his custom, refused at AEI to take questions from reporters on this or any other subject. Presumably, if he held a press conference, he’d be asked to explain his prewar claims about Iraq’s supposed WMDs and its supposed contacts with al Qaeda that were not supported by the existing intelligence. (I came prepared to inquire if Cheney thought it had been “dishonest” of him to point to a Czech intelligence report that claimed 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five months before September 11, even though the CIA and FBI had discounted this report.) Cheney also might have been asked about the recent news that executives from four large oil companies did meet with his energy task force in 2001, even though CEOs from these firms testified to Congress this month their executives had not. So many Qs for Cheney. But no As.

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From The Guardian UK
By George Monbiot

The media couldn’t have made a bigger pig’s ear of the white phosphorus story. So, before moving on to the new revelations from Falluja, I would like to try to clear up the old ones. There is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians. The claim was made in a documentary broadcast on the Italian network RAI, called Falluja: the Hidden Massacre. It claimed that the corpses in the pictures it ran “showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh … The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact.” These assertions were supported by a human-rights advocate who, it said, possessed “a biology degree”.

The media couldn’t have made a bigger pig’s ear of the white phosphorus story. So, before moving on to the new revelations from Falluja, I would like to try to clear up the old ones. There is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians. The claim was made in a documentary broadcast on the Italian network RAI, called Falluja: the Hidden Massacre. It claimed that the corpses in the pictures it ran “showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh … The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact.” These assertions were supported by a human-rights advocate who, it said, possessed “a biology degree”.

I, too, possess a biology degree, and I am as well qualified to determine someone’s cause of death as I am to perform open-heart surgery. So I asked Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield, to watch the film. He reported that “nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt”. They had turned black and lost their skin “through decomposition”. We don’t yet know how these people died.

But there is hard evidence that white phosphorus was deployed as a weapon against combatants in Falluja. As this column revealed last Tuesday, US infantry officers confessed that they had used it to flush out insurgents. A Pentagon spokesman told the BBC that white phosphorus “was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants”. He claimed “it is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal.” This denial has been accepted by most of the mainstream media. UN conventions, the Times said, “ban its use on civilian but not military targets”. But the word “civilian” does not occur in the chemical weapons convention. The use of the toxic properties of a chemical as a weapon is illegal, whoever the target is.

Read more Phosphorus Clouds

From MSNBC

LONDON – A civil servant has been charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking a government memo that a newspaper said Tuesday suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded President Bush not to bomb the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.

The Daily Mirror reported that Bush spoke of targeting Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, when he met Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004. The Bush administration has regularly accused Al-Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments.

The Daily Mirror attributed its information to unidentified sources. One source, said to be in the government, was quoted as saying that the alleged threat was humorous, not serious, but the newspaper quoted another source as saying that Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair.

We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told The Associated Press in an e-mail. Blair’s office declined to comment on the report, stressing it never discussed leaked documents.

Al-Jazeera said in a statement that it was investigating the report. If the report is correct then this would be both shocking and worrisome not only to Al-Jazeera but to media organizations across the world, it said.

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From OpEdNews
By Margaret Kimberley

On Election Day in Ohio, four ballot provisions that would have brought greater integrity to the elections process went down to defeat at the polls. Not only were all four defeated, but polls predicted that all four would either win, or be decided by thin margins.

Reform Ohio Now had initiated the four proposals. The proposals would have changed rules on campaign finance, established a legislative redistricting commission, allowed the option of voting by mail, and put electoral issues in the hands of an independent commission, beyond the reach of Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.

Polling conducted by the Republican newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, has a history of accurately predicting Ohio election results. Is it possible that the Dispatch pollsters suddenly lost their touch? Anything is possible, but the decisive loss of all four proposals by unexpected margins is highly improbable.

In November 2004 Republicans used a combination of schemes to insure victory in Ohio for George W. Bush. Some of the chicanery was decidedly low tech and simple. Black voting precincts didn’t receive all of the voting machines they needed. More than 60 machines sat in storage while thousands of Ohioans waited on lines for hours to cast their ballots. Inevitably, some could not spend an entire day attempting to vote.

Read more Voter Theft

From The Guardian UK

KIRKUK, Iraq (AP) – A suicide car bomber attacked a police patrol Tuesday on a busy commercial street, killing at least 17 people and wounding 26, officials said. The attackers lured the patrol to the scene by shooting a policeman, officials said.

The suicide bomb struck as the investigation was underway, police said.

Police Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qader gave the casualty figure of 17 dead and 26 wounded but did not say how many were civilians. Police Capt. Farhad Talabani said the bombing took place on a road leaving Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad.

Attacks on the security forces in Kirkuk are common. Insurgents last week opened fire on a police patrol in Kirkuk killing three officers, while a roadside bomb a few miles away killed two more police officers.

From The Chicago Sun Times
By Jesse Jackson

Is the Internal Revenue Service starting to police free speech in America? Has it, in this administration of cronies and corruption, become an arm of the White House, using tax law to squelch those who would question the president? The IRS pursuit of All Saints Church in Pasadena makes you wonder if our tax agency is turning itself into Big Brother.

On Oct. 31, 2004, the Rev. George F. Regas, a retired rector of All Saints, returned to the pulpit to deliver a probing sermon on morality. He posed an imaginary debate between Jesus on one side and John F. Kerry and President Bush on the other. At the outset, he told his parishioners that “I don’t intend to tell you how to vote.” He went on to describe how the Jesus he knew from the Bible would have been saddened by the war in Iraq and the untended poverty in the United States.

He imagined Jesus saying, “Shame on those conservative politicians in the nation’s Congress and in state legislatures who have for years so proudly proclaimed their love for children when they were only fetuses but ignored their needs after they were born.” His Jesus rebuked Bush, saying, “Your doctrine of pre-emptive war is a failed doctrine.” The Los Angeles Times reported his sermon as a “searing indictment” of the Bush policies on Iraq.

On June 9, after the election, the IRS sent an initial letter to the church, citing the newspaper article. This was part of some 60 inquiries launched by the IRS into churches after the 2004 election, about three times the historic average.

Read more Goons