Bush and Al-Jazeera
Bush philosophy: “If you don’t like what others have to say about you…bomb them!”
The Daily Mirror, a British newspaper reported the other day that it had come into possession of a “Top Secret” memo from Downing Street. The memo is said to be a five-page transcript of an April 16, 2004 meeting between President Bush and PM Tony Blair. In it, it claims that President Bush seriously considered bombing the headquarters of Qatar-based Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera. Mr. Blair apparently was able to talk Bush out of that dangerously unwise course of action.
Realize this should come as no surprise given that at the time, US forces were conducting the now famous assault on Falluja. Al-Jazeera correspondents were broadcasting from inside the city. It was blatantly obvious that the Bush administration was upset with the Arab station for focusing on the deaths of hundreds of people, some of them civilians. VP Cheney and Sec Def Rumsfeld viciously criticized the station’s reporting and accused it of aiding the insurgency.
A source cited in the Mirror article said that Bush was only joking about bombing Al-Jazeera while another source claims that Bush was deadly serious. The article also states that the memo seems to cast new doubts on whether previous attacks on Al-Jazeera in both Afghanistan and Iraq by US forces were indeed accidental. This memo, if true, would seem to illustrate a pattern of suppression of the media, or at least those that do not show the Bush administration in a favorable light.
Makes you wonder when Dubya will decide to start bombing TV stations in this country for no longer presenting the Bush version of reality in Iraq and elsewhere.
(Originally posted on Yahoo360)
The Daily Mirror, a British newspaper reported the other day that it had come into possession of a “Top Secret” memo from Downing Street. The memo is said to be a five-page transcript of an April 16, 2004 meeting between President Bush and PM Tony Blair. In it, it claims that President Bush seriously considered bombing the headquarters of Qatar-based Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera. Mr. Blair apparently was able to talk Bush out of that dangerously unwise course of action.
Realize this should come as no surprise given that at the time, US forces were conducting the now famous assault on Falluja. Al-Jazeera correspondents were broadcasting from inside the city. It was blatantly obvious that the Bush administration was upset with the Arab station for focusing on the deaths of hundreds of people, some of them civilians. VP Cheney and Sec Def Rumsfeld viciously criticized the station’s reporting and accused it of aiding the insurgency.
A source cited in the Mirror article said that Bush was only joking about bombing Al-Jazeera while another source claims that Bush was deadly serious. The article also states that the memo seems to cast new doubts on whether previous attacks on Al-Jazeera in both Afghanistan and Iraq by US forces were indeed accidental. This memo, if true, would seem to illustrate a pattern of suppression of the media, or at least those that do not show the Bush administration in a favorable light.
Makes you wonder when Dubya will decide to start bombing TV stations in this country for no longer presenting the Bush version of reality in Iraq and elsewhere.
(Originally posted on Yahoo360)
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