Shoot the messenger

Bush planned to bomb al-Jazeera in allied Arab country


Horrors of the US invasion (March 22, 2003) -- if the world sees this, there might be an ``insidious'' effect on the war effort (CAUTION! The link leads to extremely disturbing photos of actual results of the US war, many from al-Jazeera.)

The British newspaper Daily Mirror has reported the existence of another damaging Downing Street memo. This one reveals that President Bush wanted to blow up the home offices of popular Arab media channel al-Jazeera in Doha, the capital of Qatar. According to the report, the memo discloses a conversation between Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair on April 16, 2004. There was ``no doubt what Bush wanted to do'', but Blair ``didn't want him to do it'', according to the Mirror's source.

So President Bush did not add the home office to his collection of bombed al-Jazeera facilities. The US previously had hit it's Baghdad office at the Palestine Hotel, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub and injuring a cameraman on April 8, 2003.

US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher at the time said that the US had ``expressed our regret'' for the deaths, but also gave the disputed story that ``there was firing going on in that area and that it's necessary for our forces to return fire''. Boucher also took care to point out how the jounalists in Iraq were doing a ``difficult job under dangerous circumstances''.

A report on the incident released by Reporters Without Borders in January 2004 stated that ``US officials at first lied about what happened and then, in an official statement four months later, exonerated the US Army from any mistake or error of judgement.'' But the report raised more questions than it answered, as it tried to trace the decision to bomb the hotel up the chain of command.

In a another incident, the US bombed the al-Jazeera offices in Kabul, Afghanistan in November 2002.