ChezLark

From the blockbuster-news-from-other-countries-that-you-have-yet-to-hear-about-in-the-US-for-some-reason-best-not-thought-about department comes this deeply disturbing item: on November 22nd, The Mirror in the UK published a story claiming:

PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a “Top Secret” No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.

A source said: “There’s no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn’t want him to do it.” Al-Jazeera is accused by the US of fuelling the Iraqi insurgency.

The attack would have led to a massacre of innocents on the territory of a key ally, enraged the Middle East and almost certainly have sparked bloody retaliation.
[...]
Dozens of al-Jazeera staff at the HQ are not, as many believe, Islamic fanatics. Instead, most are respected and highly trained technicians and journalists.

To have wiped them out would have been equivalent to bombing the BBC in London and the most spectacular foreign policy disaster since the Iraq War itself.

The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors.

In 2001 the station’s Kabul office was knocked out by two “smart” bombs. In 2003, al-Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a US missile strike on the station’s Baghdad centre.

Spookily, there is now a blog online called “Don’t Bomb Us - A blog by Al Jazeera Staffers”. It offers 5 things you should know about Al Jazeera , which includes the facts that Al Jazeera has never broadcast a beheading, has a global audience of 50 million people, and has given approximately 500 hours of airtime to President Bush, against 5 for Bin Laden. It’s also a great clearing-house for stories about the memo.

Back in the UK, the Blair administration has threatened legal action under the UK’s Official Secrets Act against anyone who publishes the memo (which has not yet been made public in its original form). True to form, the web promptly spawned a tribe of websites pledging to publish the memo and risk the consequences, coordinated by the BlairWatch site.

For its part, the White House has dismissed the reports as “outlandish”:

“We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response,” a White House official told CNN. A Pentagon official called the Daily Mirror report “absolutely absurd.”

Later in the same article, though:

Downing Street spokesman Ian Gleeson said Blair’s office would have no comment since the memo the Daily Mirror cited is the subject of court action.

The newspaper reported that two people have been charged with violating British secrecy laws in connection with its release.

It’s curious that two people would be charged with leaking a fictional document.

One last note: the UK Parliament seems to be taking the matter at least somewhat seriously: the Telegraph reports that “A Labour MP has tabled a motion in Parliament calling on Tony Blair to publish the transcript of a discussion with George W Bush in which the American president allegedly proposed bombing the Arab television station al-Jazeera”.