Bush planned to bomb Al Jazeera

LONDON: US President George W Bush planned to bomb pan-Arab television broadcaster Al Jazeera, British newspaper the Daily Mirror said on Tuesday, citing a Downing Street memo marked “Top Secret”. The five-page transcript of a conversation between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair reveals that Blair talked Bush out of launching a military strike on the station, unnamed sources told the anti-war-in-Iraq daily.

The transcript of the pair’s talks during Blair’s April 16, 2004 visit to Washington allegedly shows Bush wanted to attack the satellite channel’s headquarters. Blair allegedly feared such a strike, in the business district of Doha, a key western ally in the Persian Gulf, would spark revenge attacks. The Mirror quoted an unnamed British government official as saying Bush’s threat was “humourous, not serious”.

Al-Jazeera’s perspectives on the war in Iraq have drawn criticism from Washington since the US-led March 2003 invasion. The station has broadcast messages from Al-Qaeda terror network chief Osama bin Laden and the beheadings of Western hostages by insurgents in Iraq, as well as footage of dead coalition servicemen and Iraqi civilians killed in fighting. 

The Mirror said the memo turned up in the office of then UK lawmaker Tony Clarke, a member of Blair’s party, in May 2004. Civil servant David Keogh, is accused under the Official Secrets Act of handing it it to Clarke’s former researcher Leo O’Connor. The Mirror said the strike would have been “the most spectacular foreign policy disaster since the Iraq war itself”.