Reply #61: The story is No. 1 with Sam Smith's Undernews Today Too

[althecat]

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LEADING MEDIA CRITIC HELPS BUSH BURY AL JAZEERA BOMBING STORY

MEDIA CHANNEL - Howard Kurtz, America’s official media critic, devoted
about 20 seconds to the story reported in England about the threat to
bomb Al Jazeera. Here’s the trivialization as performed by Kurtz and
former CBS correspondent turned CNN correspondent Bruce Morton on CNN’s
Reliable Sources program:

KURTZ: Bruce, this British tabloid report in "The Mirror" relying on one
unnamed source that said that the Bush -- that President Bush considered
bombing Al-Jazeera's offices but Tony Blair talked him out of it. The
White House says us that ludicrous.

Should CNN and lots of newspapers and other news organizes have reported
that?

MORTON: I don't know that there is any evidence of that. "The Mirror" --
the British tabloids are famous -- and "The Mirror," to be fair, is not
known for reliability. It ain't "The New York Times." You know.

KURTZ: Yet just about everybody picked it up, with the White House
denials, of course.

MORTON: I think we could have laid off that probably.

KURTZ: All right.

http://www.mediachannel.org

-- The problem with Kurtz's dismissal of the supposedly nonexistent story
is that British government has charged two, apparently in connection
with releasing it. --

CBC, CANADA - Two British men have been charged with leaking a top
secret government document to a backbench MP, but no one, not even their
lawyers, is being allowed to see what is in the document. Civil servant
David Keogh, 49, and former legislative researcher Leo O'Connor, 42,
appeared in court on Tuesday to face charges under the Official Secrets
Act. . . Many people in Britain know, or think they know, what the
secret document is. They believe it's a British government memo on a
conversation between U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, in April 2004. It is suspected that the document
led to a front-page scoop in a London tabloid accusing Bush of
apparently raising the possibility of bombing the headquarters in Qatar
of Al-Jazeera, the Arabic all-news network. According to the report
Blair talked him out of it. . .

The government retaliated with a threat to prosecute under the Official
Secrets Act if anything further was published. "The government is very
keen to keep this memo under wraps, they don't want to see it
published," said Maguire.

http://www.cbc.ca/storyview/MSN/world/national/2005/11/29/aljazeera051129.html


JUAN COLE, SALON - The report kicked off a furor in Europe and the
Middle East. It was, predictably, virtually ignored by the American
press. It would be premature to claim that the Mirror's report, based on
anonymous sources and a document that has not been made public, proves
that Bush intended to bomb Al-Jazeera. But the frightening truth is that
it is only too possible that the Mirror's report is accurate. Bush and
his inner circle, in particular Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
had long demonized the channel as "vicious," "inexcusably biased" and
abetting terrorists. Considering the administration's no-holds-barred
approach to the "war on terror," the closed circle of ideologues that
surround Bush, and his own messianic certainty about his divine mission
to rid the world of "evil," the idea that he seriously considered
bombing what he perceived as a nest of terrorist sympathizers simply
cannot be ruled out. Add in the fact that the U.S. military had
previously bombed Al-Jazeera's Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq,
offices (the U.S. pleaded ignorance in the Kabul case, and claimed the
Baghdad bombing was a mistake), and the case becomes stronger still. . .


Ironically, Rumsfeld himself had telegraphed the strategy during an
interview in 2001 on . . . Al-Jazeera. On Oct. 16, 2001, Rumsfeld talked
to the channel's Washington anchor Hafez Mirazi (who once worked for the
Voice of America but left in disgust at the level of censorship he faced
there). Although most such interviews are archived at the Department of
Defense, this one appears to be absent. Mirazi showed it again on
Monday, and it contained a segment in which Rumsfeld defended the
targeting of radio stations that supported the Taliban. He made it clear
right then that he believed in total war, and made no distinction
between civilian and military targets. The radio stations, he said, were
part of the Taliban war effort. In fact, Al-Jazeera bears no resemblance
to the pro-Taliban radio stations that Rumsfeld defended attacking. . .

Al-Jazeera was founded in the 1990s by disgruntled Arab journalists,
many of whom had worked for the BBC Arabic service, though a few came
from the Voice of America. The station was a breath of fresh air in the
stultified world of Arab news broadcasting, where news producers' idea
of an exciting segment is a stationary camera on two Arab leaders
sitting ceremonially on a Louis XIV sofa while martial music plays for
several minutes. In contrast, Al-Jazeera anchors host live debates that
often turn heated, and do not hesitate to ask sharp questions.

Despite the false stereotypes that circulate in the United States among
pundits and politicians who have never watched the station, most of
Al-Jazeera's programming is not Muslim fundamentalist in orientation.
The rhetoric is that of Arab nationalism, and the reporters are only
interested in fundamentalism to the extent that it is anti-imperialist
in tone. This slant gives many of the programs the musty, antiquated
feel of an old Gamal Abdul Nasser speech from the 1960s. In the Arab
world, clothes speak to politics. The male anchors and reporters usually
sport business suits, and the mostly unveiled women might as well be on
the runway of a European fashion show. . .

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

CBS NEWS - Prime Minister Tony Blair said Monday that he had received no
information suggesting the United States planned to bomb the al Jazeera
television network. . . Lawmaker Adam Price asked Blair in a written
parliamentary question made public Monday "what information you received
on action that the United States administration proposed to take against
the al Jazeera television channel." Blair replied with a one-word
answer: "None."

EDWARD M. GOMEZ, SF CHRONICLE - After the British tabloid the Mirror
reported this news, gleaned from a leaked top-secret British-government
memo, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, warned that anyone who dared
to publish the actual contents of the document would be prosecuted under
the provisions of the country's long-standing Official Secrets Act. . .

The British weekly the Observer reported: "Government officials
suggested Bush's comments were nothing more than a joke... the
White House described the allegations as 'unfathomable,' although,
according to those who have seen the memo, 'there is no question Bush
was serious.' ... ne indisputable fact, though, is that part of the
memo -- 10 lines to be precise -- concerns a conversation between Bush
and Blair regarding Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite-television station
that the U.S. accuses of being a mouthpiece for Al-Qaeda."

After all, "most gallingly" for the Bush administration, Al-Jazeera's
"reporters have told a story that Washington either disagrees with or
would rather remain untold: that the kind of war America is prosecuting
in Iraq is messy and heavy-handed; that civilians are too often the
victims, and that the insurgents are not shadowy, sinister figures but
ordinary men with more support than politicians would like to
acknowledge."

Worth keeping in mind, too, is that, at the time of Bush and Blair's
April 2004 meeting, Bush's war making in Iraq wasn't going well and
Al-Jazeera was dutifully reporting the bad news that "the Americans were
fighting in Falluja against Sunnis backed by foreign fighters linked to
the Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," and that "ore than 600
Iraqi civilians were reported to have been killed in the offensive."
(Times)

In a radio interview, Lord Goldsmith tried to play down his threat to
invoke the Official Secrets Act against anyone who dared to publish the
contents of the memo about the April 2004 Bush-Blair powwow. "I wasn't
seeking to gag newspapers; what I said to newspapers was you need to
take legal advice," Goldsmith told a radio interviewer who accused him
"of trying to silence the media for political expediency." . . .

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, a member of Parliament and the publisher of
the British magazine the Spectator, wrote in a commentary in the
Telegraph: "If someone passes me the document memo] 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."

Or as the headline of a news story about the leaked memo in the Observer
put it, referring to Bush's urge to drop bombs: "Why is the world's most
powerful man so worried about a TV station?"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/11/29/worldviews.DTL