Bush had al-Jazeera attack in mind, says paper
November 23, 2005
The US President, George Bush, planned to bomb the pan-Arab television broadcaster al-Jazeera, according to a British newspaper that cited a Downing Street memo marked "Top secret".
The five-page transcript of a conversation between Mr Bush and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, published in the Daily Mirror yesterday, reveals that Mr Blair talked Mr Bush out of launching a military strike on the station, unnamed sources told the newspaper.
The transcript of the pair's talks during Mr Blair's visit to Washington on April 16 last year allegedly shows Mr Bush wanted to attack the satellite channel's headquarters.
Mr Blair allegedly feared such a strike, in the business district of Doha, the capital of Qatar, a key western ally in the Persian Gulf, would spark revenge attacks.
The Mirror quoted an unnamed British government official as saying Mr Bush's threat was "humorous, not serious".
Al-Jazeera's perspectives on the war in Iraq have drawn criticism from Washington since the US-led invasion in March 2003.
The station has broadcast messages by Osama bin Laden and the beheadings of Western hostages by insurgents in Iraq, as well as footage of dead coalition servicemen and Iraqi civilians killed in fighting.
A source told the Mirror: "The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush.
"He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem.
"There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do - and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it."
Another source said: "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."
A spokesman for Mr Blair's Downing Street office said: "We have got nothing to say about this story. We don't comment on leaked documents."
The Mirror said the memo turned up in the office of the then British MP Tony Clarke, a member of Mr Blair's Labour Party, in May last year. A civil servant, David Keogh, is accused under the Official Secrets Act of handing it to Mr Clarke's former researcher Leo O'Connor. Both are to appear at Bow Street Magistrates Court in central London next week.
Mr Clarke returned the memo to Downing Street. He said O'Connor had behaved "perfectly correctly". He told Britain's domestic Press Association news agency that O'Connor had done "exactly the right thing" in bringing it to his attention.
The Mirror said such a strike would have been "the most spectacular foreign policy disaster since the Iraq war itself".
The newspaper said that the memo "casts fresh doubt on claims that other attacks on al-Jazeera were accidents". It cited the 2001 direct hit on the channel's Kabul office.
Agence France-Presse |
