Beyond That Memo: Bush Wanted al Jazeera Gone

[cal04]

On November 22, Britain's Daily Mirror published a startling allegation: In an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush proposed bombing the Arab TV network Al Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. The report was based on a memo stamped "Top Secret" that had been leaked by a Cabinet official in Blair's government.

Is the allegation "outlandish," as the White House claims? Or was it a deadly serious option? Until a news organization or British official defies the Official Secrets Act and publishes the five-page memo, we have no way of knowing. But what we do know is that at the time of Bush's White House meeting with Blair, the Bush Administration was in the throes of a very public, high-level temper tantrum directed against Al Jazeera. The Bush-Blair summit took place on April 16, at the peak of the first US siege of Falluja, and Al Jazeera was there to witness the assault and the fierce resistance.

A day before Bush's meeting with Blair, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld slammed Al Jazeera in distinctly undiplomatic terms:

REPORTER: Can you definitively say that hundreds of women and children and innocent civilians have not been killed?

RUMSFELD: I can definitively say that what Al Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.

REPORTER: Do you have a civilian casualty count?

RUMSFELD: Of course not, we're not in the city. But you know what our forces do; they don't go around killing hundreds of civilians. That's just outrageous nonsense. It's disgraceful what that station is doing.

What Al Jazeera was doing in Falluja is exactly what it was doing when the United States bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001 and when US forces killed Al Jazeera's Baghdad correspondent, Tareq Ayoub, during the April 2003 occupation of Baghdad. Al Jazeera was witnessing and reporting on events Washington did not want the world to see.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1124-22.htm

[spindrifter]

1. And the civilian Iraqi death

toll per Newsweek's 11-28-05 edition is 1900 people with 147 U.S. military dead.

Now, Mr. Rumsfeld--who is doing "disgraceful" things? I would actually substitute another word: immoral.