Did Bush plan to bomb Al-Jazeera?
The American press is predictably ignoring the story. Yet it is only too plausible that Bush wanted to wipe out what he saw as a nest of terrorists.
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The outrage of the Bush administration had to do in part with what it saw as inaccuracies in Al-Jazeera reporting (as when it incorrectly alleged that spring that a U.S. helicopter had been downed, based on local eyewitnesses or Iraqi guerrilla sources). In the fog of war, however, most news outlets commit such errors. The real source of Rumsfeld's volcanic ire, and Bush's alleged turn as would-be mafia don and war criminal, was the graphic images of the warfare in Iraq that Al-Jazeera was willing to display at a time when no major U.S. news source would do so. Enraged, Rumsfeld began accusing the station of sins it never committed. In summer of 2005, in Singapore, the secretary of defense said, "If anyone lived in the Middle East and watched a network like the Al-Jazeera day after day after day, even if he was an American, he would start waking up and asking what's wrong. But America is not wrong. It's the people who are going on television chopping off people's heads, that is wrong. And television networks that carry it and promote it and jump on the spark every time there is a terrorist act are promoting the acts."
In fact, according to its media spokesman Jihad Ballout, Al-Jazeera "has never, ever shown a beheading of any hostage." Nor had its anchors come on the screen and urged beheadings in the manic way that Rumsfeld suggested. Al-Jazeera reporters may not like U.S. imperialism very much, but they are not fundamentalist murderers.
Despite the smokescreens that politicians and diplomats are attempting to throw up by suggesting that Bush was just joking, there is every reason to suspect that he was deadly serious and that Blair barely managed to argue him out of this parlous course of action. First, the Kabul and Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera had already been bombed by the U.S. military. In each case the action was called a mistake. One such bombing might indeed have been an error, but two arouses suspicion. And now we know there was talk of a third.
The reaction in the Arab world to the Daily Mirror report has been a firestorm of outrage. Some Qataris are calling for the government to end U.S. basing rights in that country. Others are lamenting
the hypocrisy of a superpower that represents itself as the leading edge of liberty in the Middle East but has so little respect for press freedom that its leader would cavalierly speak of wiping out hundreds of civilian journalists. If the British documents surface and the story's seriousness is borne out, whatever shreds of credibility Bush still has in the Middle East will be completely gone. After all, the current phase of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and the two wars Americans have fought in the region, came in response to the terrorist bombing of innocent civilians in downtown office buildings.
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/11/30/al_jazeera/index.html