Bombs Away
Nov 23rd, 2005 at 7:04 am by Susie
More on Bush’s reported desire to bomb al-Jazeera:
Sir Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats, said Tuesday that, if true, the memo was worrying.
“If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration as events in Iraq began to spiral out of control,” he said. “On this occasion, the prime minister may have been successful in averting political disaster, but it shows how dangerous his relationship with President Bush has been.”
Al-Jazeera offices in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hit by U.S. bombs or missiles, but each time the U.S. military said they were not intentionally targeting the broadcaster.
In April 2003, an Al-Jazeera journalist was killed when its Baghdad office was struck during a U.S. bombing campaign. Nabil Khoury, a State Department spokesman in Doha, said the strike was a mistake.
In November 2002, Al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a U.S. missile. None of the crew was at the office at the time. U.S. officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site and did not know it was Al-Jazeera’s office.
It certainly seems we should take those disclaimers with a very large grain of salt.
UPDATE: It’s sounding truer all the time. A prominent neocon is saying it would have been entirely appropriate to bomb al-Jazeera.
Who will rid me of these meddlesome reporters, eh?
Were it not for the two bombings, I would laugh this off as at most a bad joke, something the President is occasionally prone to.
But if someone suggested bombing Fox, that makes him a terrorist, huh?