Flashback: Beyond That Memo - Bush Wanted Al Jazeera Gone (Jeremy Scahill)

[Turborama]

As http://www.salon.com/news/media_criticism/?story=/politics/war_room/2011/01/28/cable_news_egypt">everyone appears to be finally seeing how excellent a news organization Al Jazeera English is, I thought it would be a pertinent time to remind everyone how and why their image had been severely tarnished by the Bush junta...

Beyond That Memo - Bush Wanted Al Jazeera Gone
by Jeremy Scahill

On November 22, Britain's Daily Mirror published a startling allegation: In an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush proposed bombing the Arab TV network Al Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. The report was based on a memo stamped "Top Secret" that had been leaked by a Cabinet official in Blair's government.

Is the allegation "outlandish," as the White House claims? Or was it a deadly serious option? Until a news organization or British official defies the Official Secrets Act and publishes the five-page memo, we have no way of knowing. But what we do know is that at the time of Bush's White House meeting with Blair, the Bush Administration was in the throes of a very public, high-level temper tantrum directed against Al Jazeera. The Bush-Blair summit took place on April 16, at the peak of the first US siege of Falluja, and Al Jazeera was there to witness the assault and the fierce resistance.

A day before Bush's meeting with Blair, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld slammed Al Jazeera in distinctly undiplomatic terms:

REPORTER: Can you definitively say that hundreds of women and children and innocent civilians have not been killed?
RUMSFELD: I can definitively say that what Al Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.
REPORTER: Do you have a civilian casualty count?
RUMSFELD: Of course not, we're not in the city. But you know what our forces do; they don't go around killing hundreds of civilians. That's just outrageous nonsense. It's disgraceful what that station is doing.

What Al Jazeera was doing in Falluja is exactly what it was doing when the United States bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001 and when US forces killed Al Jazeera's Baghdad correspondent, Tareq Ayoub, during the April 2003 occupation of Baghdad. Al Jazeera was witnessing and reporting on events Washington did not want the world to see.

Full article: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1124-22.htm

Much more about how the Bush Junta wanted to wipe Al Jazeera off the map, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=6848728">here.#

Until this day they are still finding it next to impossible to get on cable networks in the US. However, they do upload all their http://www.youtube.com/user/AlJazeeraEnglish#g/p">shows & http://www.youtube.com/user/AlJazeeraEnglish#g/u">news reports to YouTube and http://english.aljazeera.net/video/">their website. As most have found out by now, they also broadcast live 24/7 free here: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

Also, if you want to try and pressure your cable company to broadcast them, there's a special website set up called "I Want Al Jazeera English". The image in my sig. line is a live link to it...

[polly7]

1. Bush / invasion supporters, also hated Al Jazeera. I was kicked off

one message board for a time for just linking to it. We were called terrorist-supporters and every foul name they could think of, not that that bothered me ... it was realizing those people were choosing to get their facts from Fox, NewsMax, etc and spreading disinformation day in and day out, while getting sites like Al Jazeera completely banned from message boards. Frustrating.

[Turborama]

3. I had similar experiences with them on AOL boards

One idiot said during a discussion leading up to the invasion, "It won't be like Vietnam, there's no jungle in Iraq".

I kid you not.

[lonestarnot]

2. K & R!

[Turborama]

4. Changed the link in my sig line. Here's the link I mentioned --->

http://iwantaje.com/ :fistbump:

[upi402]

5. "I can definitively say that what Al Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable"

Rumsfeld is getting away with just that- and by a "Democratic" WH too.

[EFerrari]

6. LINK TV has been running AJE. LINK is on Dish and DirecTV

a San Francisco, viewer-supported INDY. :hi: