Why should this surprise us? The imperial presidency of George W. Bush operates on the premise that the president is above the law - both domestic and international. We have seen numerous instances of this arrogance. The following story broke a couple of months ago. It is back in the news because legal proceedings surrounding this stunning revelation begins in London tomorrow. Here is what Christopher Hitchens (an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq war) writes in Slate. Read the last paragraph and decide if Bush was "joking". Fortunately for once, G.W.B.'s propensity for pre-emptively punishing those who "annoy" him was reigned in by cooler heads.
The Bush Bombshell
Did the president propose to take out Al Jazeera?
By Christopher Hitchens
Tomorrow morning, in a court in London, two men will appear to face charges under Britain's Official Secrets Act....(The first man) is accused of unlawfully handing a confidential memorandum to the second man, Leo O'Connor, a researcher for a former Labor member of Parliament, Tony Clarke
The memorandum is actually a five-page transcript stamped "Top Secret." It describes a meeting at the White House on April 16, 2004, between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. At that meeting, which took place while desperately hard fighting was in progress in the Iraqi town of Fallujah, Bush mooted the idea of taking out the headquarters of Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar. The network's correspondents inside the city had been transmitting lurid footage of extreme violence. The exchange apparently puts Blair in a good light, in that he dissuaded the president from any such course of action and was assisted in this by Colin Powell, who was then secretary of state.
So, this is ostensibly about something that never actually happened. But what if it had? The state of Qatar, which though a Wahabbi kingdom has a free press and allows women to run and to vote in elections, has not been the host of just Al Jazeera since the network's predecessor was kicked out of Saudi Arabia. It has also been the host of United States Central Command, and of many American civilians. Bombing or blowing up the Al Jazeera office would involve hitting the downtown section of Doha, the capital city of a friendly power. It's difficult to think of any policy that would have been more calamitous. (But perhaps it was proposed to do it "surgically"?)
What reason do we have to believe that this appalling proposal was actually made? First, the British government has prosecuted the two men accused of handling the memo for leaking "making a damaging disclosure of a document relating to international relations." Blair's attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, has further threatened an injunction on the Daily Mirror, which published the original story in November under the bylines of Kevin Maguire and Andy Lines, if it tries to disclose any more details of the document.
A second reason for believing in the authenticity of the memo is that an unnamed spokesman for Blair was quoted in the original story as saying that Bush's remark was "humorous, not serious." This is as much as to concede that some such conversation did in fact take place. It is of course not always possible to tell when the president is joking, but another who saw the transcript claimed that he was "deadly serious, as was Blair." (This by the way is a rebuke to those who routinely taunt the prime minister as "Bush's poodle.")
It is high time that this question was ventilated by people other than British editors and journalists who labor under the repressive conditions of the Official Secrets Act. Al Jazeera is not describable, perhaps, as a strictly objective station, but it is the main source of news in the Arab world because it is not the property of any state or party, and it has given live and unedited coverage of things like the elections in Iraq. In 2001, its office in Afghanistan was destroyed by "smart" bombs. In 2003, its correspondent in Baghdad was killed in an American missile strike. If it becomes widely believed that it has been or is being targeted, the consequences in the region will be rather more than Karen Hughes' "public diplomacy" can handle.
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