Did Bush Really Want to Bomb Al Jazeera?

By Jeremy Scahill, TheNation.com. Posted November 28, 2005.

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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

The Falluja offensive was one of the bloodiest assaults of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. On April 5, 2004, U.S. forces laid siege to the city after the killing of four Blackwater mercenaries days earlier. When the U.S. forces, led by the First Marine Expeditionary Force, attempted to take Falluja on April 7, they faced fierce guerrilla resistance. A U.S. helicopter attacked a mosque, hitting the minaret and killing at least a dozen people. Within a week, some 600 Iraqis were dead, many of them women and children. By April 9, some thirty Marines had been killed and Falluja had become a symbol of resistance against the occupation.

What was more devastating than the direct resistance U.S. forces encountered in Falluja was the effect the story of the local defense of the city and the U.S. killing of civilians was having on the broader Iraqi population. A handful of unembedded journalists, most prominently from Al Jazeera, were providing the world with independent, eyewitness accounts. Al Jazeera's camera crew was also uploading video of the devastation for all the world, including Iraqis, to see. Inspired by the defense of Falluja and outraged by the U.S. onslaught, smaller uprisings broke out across Iraq, as members of the Iraqi police and army abandoned their posts, some joining the resistance.

Jeremy Scahill is a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!. He has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, where he covered the 1999 NATO bombing.

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