bombing Al-Jazeera

[slum_goddess]

did bush really wanna bomb Al Jazeera?

'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...' (more at above link)

going by his prior behavior, i totally believe this shit and especially after the Official Secrets Act or whatever was used here. but then again, i'm built that way :)

[DudeAsInCool]

I think he was joking...

[Kooperman]

Was he joking the two times he DID bomb them?

Al Jazeera said that, if true, the story would raise serious doubts about the U.S. administration's version of previous incidents involving the station's journalists and offices.

In 2001, the station's Kabul office was hit by U.S. bombs and in 2003 Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a U.S. strike on its Baghdad office. The United States has denied deliberately targeting the station.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051123/ts_nm/..._usa_jazeera_dc

[DudeAsInCool]

Hmmm...

[Malicious Intent]

Hmmm...

mmmm, I agree.

[Kooperman]

To see the actual attack on the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad, and the last moments of Tareq Ayyoub's life, find the brilliant documentary Control Room. I saw it on Robert Redford's Sundance Channel a few months ago, and it is riviting.

Here's the Salon review of it ( a minute or so of a commercial must be watched before you can enter Salon, but it's worth it):

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2004/05/27/beyond/

[Kooperman]

Iraq Wife To Sue US in Death of Husband

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=1...-name_page.html

[method77]

The United States has denied...

Just by that you know it's true. Perhaps it was one of those "smart bombs" that are always on target. Wrong target though

[slum_goddess]

from The Guardian:

'...Fears that fresh revelations about disputes between Tony Blair and George Bush on the Iraq conflict could damage Downing Street's intimate relationship with the White House prompted this week's unprecedented threat by the attorney general to use the Official Secrets Act against national newspapers.

'Senior MPs, Whitehall officials and lawyers were agreed yesterday that Lord Goldsmith had "read the riot act" to the media because of political embarrassment caused by a sensitive leak of face-to-face exchanges between the prime minister and the US president in the White House in April 2004. He acted after the Daily Mirror said a memo recorded a threat by Mr Bush to take "military action" against the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera. Mr Blair replied that that would cause a big problem, reported the Mirror. David Keogh, a former Cabinet Office official, has been charged under the secrets act with sending the memo on the Blair-Bush conversation to Leo O 'Connor, researcher to the former Labour MP Tony Clarke. Mr Keogh and Mr O'Connor will appear before Bow Street magistrates next week...

'...Andrew Nicol QC, a media law expert, said he was unaware of any case going to trial where a newspaper or journalist had been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. He said Lord Goldsmith appeared to be trying to "put down a marker" to prevent further leaks or publication of further disclosures from the document already allegedly leaked.

'Last night the former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle tabled a Commons motion saying Mr Blair should publish the record of his discussion with Mr Bush.

'Downing Street stressed that the decision to take action was "entirely up to the attorney general" and was intended to "draw a line in the sand" on further leaks.'

[slum_goddess]

The Guardian: Al-Jazeera demands answers after claim that Bush wanted to bomb headquarters

'A senior executive of the Arabic news channel, al-Jazeera, is seeking an urgent meeting with Tony Blair over a report that George Bush discussed bombing the satellite channel's headquarters in Qatar.

'Wadah Khanfar, al-Jazeera's director general, is flying to Britain this weekend after newspaper reports that President Bush made the comments during a face-to-face meeting with Mr Blair at the White House on April 16 last year...

'...In the Commons yesterday, the Liberal Democrat MP David Heath said Lord Goldsmith had threatened editors with the Official Secrets Act to prevent government embarrassment rather than protect national security. The attorney general's warning was "not on the grounds of national security but on the grounds of potential embarrassment to the prime minister or to any presidents he happens to have conversations with", he said...

'...Al-Jazeera staff yesterday held protests demanding an investigation into the reports. At the station's HQ in Doha they held pictures of Sami al-Haj, a colleague who is an inmate at Guantánamo Bay, and Tarek Ayoub, an al-Jazeera journalist killed in April 2003 when a US missile hit his office in Baghdad. The US state department said the air strike was a mistake.

'In November 2002 al-Jazeera's office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a US missile. No staff were in the office. US officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site.'

apart from the preznit's spoilt brat behavior, i believe he said about bombing Al-Jazeera cause he already has a history of violent fantasies: Sidney Blumenthal wrote last year at the opening of the Clinton Library:

'Bush appeared distracted, and glanced repeatedly at his watch. When he stopped to gaze at the river, where secret service agents were stationed in boats, the guide said: “Usually, you might see some bass fishermen out there.” Bush replied: “A submarine could take this place out.”…'

any regular citizen would've been investigated thoroughly for saying that shit.

[Malicious Intent]

Well, for anyone who doesn't believe it, we know it is true now - and not a joke.

The Attorney General, a buddy of Blairs and a sin in separation of powers, has announced that he will prosecute anyone printing the exact facts of the memo.

This whole thing could be laid to rest by publishing the memo. Instead everyone has been told to shut and move along.

I hope that the papers keep to their promise of publishing anything they can get hold of. Lots of MPs have also said they are prepared to go to jail if they get hold of it.

This article was in the paper today. It is by a good-guy MP, even if he did vote for the war.

Worth reading. Well balanced compared to my comments and light, even if the message is serious:

It must be said that subsequent events have not made life easy for those of us who were so optimistic as to support the war in Iraq. There were those who believed the Government's rubbish about Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Then the WMD made their historic no-show.

Some of us were so innocent as to suppose that the Pentagon had a well-thought-out plan for the removal of the dictator and the introduction of peace. Then we had the insurgency, in which tens of thousands have died.

Some of us thought it was about ensuring that chemical weapons could never again be used on Iraqi soil. Then we heard about the white phosphorus deployed by the Pentagon. Some people believed that the American liberation would mean the end of torture in Iraqi jails. Then we had Abu Ghraib.

Some of us thought it was all about the dissemination of the institutions of a civil society - above all a free press, in which journalists could work without fear of being murdered. Then we heard about the Bush plan to blow up al-Jazeera.

Some of us feel that we have an abusive relationship with this war. Every time we get our hopes up, we get punched by some piece of bad news. We yearn to be told that we're wrong, that things are going to get better, that the glass is half full. That's why I would love to think that Dubya was just having one of his little frat-house wisecracks, when he talked of destroying the Qatar-based satellite TV station. Maybe he was only horsing around. Maybe it was a flippant one-liner, of the kind that he delivers before making one of his dramatic exits into the broom-closet. Perhaps it was a kind of Henry II moment: you know, who will rid me of this turbulent TV station? Maybe he had a burst of spacy Reagan-esque surrealism, like the time the old boy forgot that the mikes were switched on, and startled a press conference with the announcement that he was going to start bombing Russia in five minutes. Maybe Bush thought he was Kenny Everett. Perhaps he was playing Basil Brush. Boom boom.

Who knows? But if his remarks were just an innocent piece of cretinism, then why in the name of holy thunder has the British state decreed that anyone printing those remarks will be sent to prison?

We all hope and pray that the American President was engaging in nothing more than neo-con Tourette-style babble about blowing things up. We are quite prepared to believe that the Daily Mirror is wrong. We are ready to accept that the two British civil servants who have leaked the account are either malicious or mistaken. But if there is one thing that would seem to confirm the essential accuracy of the story, it is that the Attorney General has announced that he will prosecute anyone printing the exact facts.

What are we supposed to think? The meeting between Bush and Blair took place on April 16, 2004, at the height of the US assault on Fallujah, and there is circumstantial evidence for believing that Bush may indeed have said what he is alleged to have said.

We know that the administration was infuriated with the al-Jazeera coverage of the battle, and the way the station focused on the deaths of hundreds of people, including civilians, rather than the necessity of ridding the town of dangerous terrorists. We remember how Cheney and Rumsfeld both launched vehement attacks on the station, and accused it of aiding the rebels. We are told by the New York Times that there were shouty-crackers arguments within the administration, with some officials yelling that the channel should be shut down, and others saying that it would be better to work with the journalists in the hope of producing better coverage.

We also recall that the Americans have form when it comes to the mass media outlets of regimes they dislike. They blew up the Kabul bureau of al-Jazeera in 2002, and they pulverised the Baghdad bureau in April 2003, killing one of the reporters. In 1999 they managed to blow up the Serb TV station, killing two make-up girls, in circumstances that were never satisfactorily explained.

To be fair to the Americans, we must also accept that they had good grounds for resenting al-Jazeera. The station is hugely respected in the Arab world, has about 35 million viewers, and yet it gives what can only be described as a thoroughly Arab perspective of current affairs. It assists in the glorification of suicide bombers; it publishes the rambling tapes of Bin Laden and others among the world's leading creeps and whackos; it is overwhelmingly hostile to America and sceptical about the neo-con project of imposing western values and political systems in the Middle East.

And yet however wrong you may think al-Jazeera is in its slant and its views, you must accept that what it is providing is recognisably journalism. It is not always helpful to the American cause in Iraq, but then nor is the BBC; and would anybody in London or Washington suggest sending a Tomahawk into White City? Well, they might, but only as a joke. Exhausted Western leaders, living in the nightmare of a media-dominated democracy, are allowed to make jokes about blowing up journalists. I seem to remember that when I was sent to Belgrade to cover the Nato attacks, Tony Blair told the then proprietor of The Daily Telegraph that he would "tell Nato to step up the bombing!" Ho ho ho.

But if there is an ounce of truth in the notion that George Bush seriously proposed the destruction of al-Jazeera, and was only dissuaded by the Prime Minister, then we need to know, and we need to know urgently. We need to know what we have been fighting for, and there is only one way to find out.

The Attorney General's ban is ridiculous, untenable, and redolent of guilt. I do not like people to break the Official Secrets Act, and, as it happens, I would not object to the continued prosecution of those who are alleged to have broken it. But we now have allegations of such severity, against the US President and his motives, that we need to clear them up.

If someone passes me the document within the next few days I will be very happy to publish it in The Spectator, and risk a jail sentence. The public need to judge for themselves. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we suppress the truth, we forget what we are fighting for, and in an important respect we become as sick and as bad as our enemies.

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion.../ixopinion.html

[slum_goddess]

This whole thing could be laid to rest by publishing the memo. Instead everyone has been told to shut and move along.

my friends over at Blairwatch have taken up Boris Johnson's challenge: 'If someone passes me the document within the next few days I will be very happy to publish it in The Spectator, and risk a jail sentence. The public need to judge for themselves. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we suppress the truth, we forget what we are fighting for, and in an important respect we become as sick and as bad as our enemies.'

they post: 'We're with you Boris. Here's the deal. If you get it, send it to us and we will also publish it. We will also risk jail.'

and then they ask for sites/blogs who'll join them in prison (the Blairwatch dude mailed me last night asking to add Dateline : Bristol and, of course i told him YES! a few minutes ago. now there's about 40 sites already listed and i'd be proud to be on that list) :)

[DudeAsInCool]

Salon takes an in depth look at the story:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/11/30/al_jazeera/

[method77]

unbelievable stuff