Smoke 'Em Out of Their Holes

Jeremy Scahill over at the HuffPo has an interesting and distressing piece up entitled "Did Bush plan to bomb al Jazeera's Headquarters?":

If reports circulating in the British press today turn out to be true, there could be another smoking gun memo floating around across the Atlantic. The reports circulating in the British press today turn out to be true, there could be another smoking gun memo floating around across the Atlantic. Daily Mirror reports that, during a White House meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair last April, President Bush proposed bombing the Qatar-based international headquarters of Arab TV channel al Jazeera.

"The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush," The Mirror quotes a source as saying. "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."

Bush's suggestion reportedly came during the US onslaught of Fallujah. al Jazeera, which is considered by many in the Arab world to be too pro-American or pro-Israel, is characterized by the administration as being anti-American because it shows the civilian face of the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House has shown a passionate obsession for attacking the network.

Former Labor Defense Minister Peter Kilfoyle challenged Downing Street to publish the five-page transcript of the Bush/Blair meeting. "It's frightening to think that such a powerful man as Bush can propose such cavalier actions," he said. "I hope the Prime Minister insists this memo be published. It gives an insight into the mindset of those who were the architects of war." If this report proves true, this would significantly bolster the case of those that charge that Washington has deliberately targeted al Jazeera and other news outlets and journalists during the so-called "War on Terror."

The US military has killed more than a dozen journalists in Iraq and the Pentagon has ruled all of those that it has investigated either accidents or justified killings. Among the "mistakes" that al Jazeera has endured: the US bombing of the network's Afghanistan offices in 2001, the killing of its Baghdad correspondent, Tareq Ayoub, by a US missile during the siege of Baghdad in 2003 and the torture of several of its journalists in Iraq, among them Salah Hassan and Suheib Badr Darwish, by US forces. And this is just one news outlet. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 58 journalists and 22 other media workers have been killed in Iraq since March 2003.

From the Daily Mirror Article:

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.

A source said last night: "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."

A Government official suggested that the Bush threat had been "humorous, not serious".

But another source declared: "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."

But don't worry about it, Bushy. Because this couldn't possibly make your position in the world more difficult at all. I mean, pretty much nobody's listening to these reports, true or not...

Orchinus talks often about the poitical tendencies on the right toward eliminationism toward their ideological enemies. This memo potentially is a dangerous new part of that tradition, and it goes hand in hand with Bush's continued negligence of any opposing point of view. It does show a strange reactive desire toward actual action that we haven't seen before, except in the "strategies" of right-wing lunatics such as Tom Tancredo of CO who actively believe that a preemptive nuclear strike of a major Islamic capital would be a good thing for America's image abroad and would assist us in the War on Terror.

So. If true, Bush has, in private meetings with his only staunch international ally in the War on Terror espoused the bombing of civilian targets in ally nations- and much much more disturbing- in Islamic ally nations. The only deductions to draw from this, again, if this is true, are:

• Bush is so idiotic that his capacity to help the greatest armed forces on earth should be immediately revoked;
• Bush is so absurdly stupid when it comes to international politics and media that his right to head the civil side of the nation should immediately be revoked
• Bush is childlishly naive, coming from Texas and all, and should be given a "Time Out"
• Or that Bush, and likewise, The Administration, has no interest in "winning" the global war on terror. In this instance, they have more to gain by inflaming the enemy than they do in even placating their electorate. The systems they wish to manipulate are massive and excrutiatingly dangerous on global scales.

Aik!

[Feel Free to leave any other deductions in the Comment Box!]

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UPDATE: 11:59 pm - GeneralStan
On re-reading the above, I want to state that all of this is supposition at this point. If the memo exists and is leaked, then we'll know. Yet, it is entirely possible, and certainly hopeful, that none of this has occurred. The Administration has already denounced the claims of the Daily Mirror as "outlandish," and various political interests have already begun to debate it:

A White House official said: "We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response." Ex-UK minister Peter Kilfoyle, who opposed the Iraq war, had called for a transcript of the alleged conversation to be published.

...
A Downing Street spokesman said: "We have got nothing to say about this story. We don't comment on leaked documents."

But Mr Kilfoyle - a former defence minister and leading Labour opponent of the Iraq war - has called for the full text to be published. "I believe that Downing Street ought to publish this memo in the interests of transparency, given that much of the detail appears to be in the public domain. "I think they ought to clarify what exactly happened on this occasion.

"If it was the case that President Bush wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in what is after all a friendly country, it speaks volumes and it raises questions about subsequent attacks that took place on the press that wasn't embedded with coalition forces." Mr Kilfoyle said he had not seen the memo, but had learnt of its alleged contents at the time of the original leak and believed it tallied with the Mirror's report.

In a statement, al-Jazeera said it needed to be sure of the report's authenticity before reaching any conclusions and urged Downing Street to confirm its status as soon as possible. The statement said: "If the report is correct, then this would be both shocking and worrisome not only to al-Jazeera but to media organisations across the world. "It would cast serious doubts in regard to the US administration's version of previous incidents involving al-Jazeera's journalists and offices."