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Did Bush Plan to Bomb al-Jazeera?
By Juan Cole
Salon.com
Wednesday 30 November 2005
The American press is
predictably
ignoring the story. Yet it is only too plausible that Bush wanted to
wipe out what he saw as a nest of terrorists.
Last week, the British newspaper
the
Daily Mirror reported that George W. Bush had told U.K. Prime Minister
Tony Blair in April 2004 that he was planning to bomb the al-Jazeera
offices in Qatar. The report, based on a leaked top-secret government
memo, claimed that Blair dissuaded Bush from bombing the Arab cable
news channel's offices. An anonymous source told the Mirror, "There's
no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do
it." The Mirror quoted a government spokesperson, also anonymous, as
suggesting that Bush's threat had been "humorous, not serious." But the
newspaper quoted another source who said, "Bush was deadly serious, as
was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both
men."
White House press secretary
Scott
McClellan brushed off the report, telling the Associated Press in an
e-mail, "We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish
and inconceivable with a response." In a response to a question asked
in Parliament, Tony Blair denied that Bush had told him he planned to
take action against al-Jazeera. The two men involved in the leak have
been charged with violating Britain's Official Secrets Act.
The report kicked off a furor in
Europe and the Middle East. It was, predictably, virtually ignored by
the American press. It would be premature to claim that the Mirror's
report, based on anonymous sources and a document that has not been
made public, proves that Bush intended to bomb al-Jazeera. But the
frightening truth is that it is only too possible that the Mirror's
report is accurate. Bush and his inner circle, in particular Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had long demonized the channel as
"vicious," "inexcusably biased" and abetting terrorists. Considering
the administration's no-holds-barred approach to the "war on terror,"
the closed circle of ideologues that surround Bush, and his own
messianic certainty about his divine mission to rid the world of
"evil," the idea that he seriously considered bombing what he perceived
as a nest of terrorist sympathizers simply cannot be ruled out. Add in
the fact that the US military had previously bombed al-Jazeera's Kabul,
Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq, offices (the US pleaded ignorance in
the Kabul case, and claimed the Baghdad bombing was a mistake), and the
case becomes stronger still.
Skeptics have argued that it is
inconceivable that even Bush would consider bombing an office
containing 400 journalists, located in the friendly Gulf nation of
Qatar. But again, it is more than conceivable that Bush decided that it
was essential to neutralize an enemy outpost, and left the tactical
question of execution to spooks and generals. Certainly there is strong
evidence that Bush and his advisors, in particular Rumsfeld, were
thinking along these lines.
Ironically, Rumsfeld himself had
telegraphed the strategy during an interview in 2001 on ... al-Jazeera!
On Oct. 16, 2001, Rumsfeld talked to the channel's Washington anchor
Hafez Mirazi (who once worked for the Voice of America but left in
disgust at the level of censorship he faced there). Although most such
interviews are archived at the Department of Defense, this one appears
to be absent. Mirazi showed it again on Monday, and it contained a
segment in which Rumsfeld defended the targeting of radio stations that
supported the Taliban. He made it clear right then that he believed in
total war, and made no distinction between civilian and military
targets. The radio stations, he said, were part of the Taliban war
effort.
In fact, al-Jazeera bears no
resemblance to the pro-Taliban radio stations that Rumsfeld defended
attacking.
Despite the extensive censorship
regimes in the Middle East, Arab intellectuals joke, it is possible to
get news about everything from only two sources. The al-Jazeera
television channel will report frankly on every Arab government save
that of Qatar, its host and benefactor. On the other hand, Saudi
pan-Arab newspapers published in London will report fully on all Arab
governments save Saudi Arabia's own. Put them together, and you have
complete coverage.
Al-Jazeera was founded in the
1990s by
disgruntled Arab journalists, many of whom had worked for the BBC
Arabic service, though a few came from the Voice of America. The
station was a breath of fresh air in the stultified world of Arab news
broadcasting, where news producers' idea of an exciting segment is a
stationary camera on two Arab leaders sitting ceremonially on a Louis
XIV sofa while martial music plays for several minutes. In contrast,
al-Jazeera anchors host live debates that often turn heated, and do not
hesitate to ask sharp questions.
Despite the false stereotypes
that
circulate in the United States among pundits and politicians who have
never watched the station, most of al-Jazeera's programming is not
Muslim fundamentalist in orientation. The rhetoric is that of Arab
nationalism, and the reporters are only interested in fundamentalism to
the extent that it is anti-imperialist in tone. This slant gives many
of the programs the musty, antiquated feel of an old Gamal Abdul Nasser
speech from the 1960s. In the Arab world, clothes speak to politics.
The male anchors and reporters usually sport business suits, and the
mostly unveiled women might as well be on the runway of a European
fashion show. The station does carry a program with the Egyptian cleric
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Muslim brother who fled Abdul Nasser's regime. But
even al-Qaradawi gave a fatwa (ruling) allowing Muslims to fight in the
US military against al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
Al-Jazeera broadcasts videotapes
by
Muslim radicals such as Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, angering Bush administration officials. But
broadcasting their tapes does not constitute an endorsement, and it
seems clear what the al-Qaida leaders would do to the modern,
non-theocratic journalists of al-Jazeera if they took over Qatar. The
sensibilities about such matters, in any case, differ from country to
country. There was a time when an Irish Republican Army figure such as
Gerry Adams could not be shown speaking on British television, on the
grounds that he was a terrorist. But the US was notoriously unhelpful
in boycotting the IRA, whose cause was popular among many
Irish-Americans. Rumsfeld has complained bitterly about other news
servicing, calling the German press, for example, "worse than
al-Qaida."
Political scientist Marc Lynch,
in his
just-published "Voices of the New Arab Public," notes that despite
their tilt toward Arab nationalism, the station's anchors often ask
sharp questions of state spokesmen. For example, one quizzed Iraq
Foreign Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf (later notorious as "Baghdad
Bob") in 1998, inquiring why, if Iraq had no forbidden weapons, it did
not simply allow the inspectors into the country.
Among the chief criticisms
launched by
Bush administration figures such as Rumsfeld against al-Jazeera was
that it showed graphic images of the dead and wounded from both the
Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The Bush administration had learned the
lesson of Vietnam, that images of actual warfare generally appall the
American public, which seems less bothered by words describing the
horrors than it does by pictures. Reporters were forbidden to
photograph the caskets of dead American soldiers coming into Dover Air
Force base. US newspaper editors exercised a rigorous self-censorship,
routinely declining the more graphic images of war on offer from the
wire services, apparently on the belief that they would not be
acceptable to an American public.
Al-Jazeera was the prime source
of
pictures of warfare, including dead and wounded, for the Afghanistan
war. On Nov. 11, 2001, the New York Times quoted Auberi Edler, a
foreign news editor at France 2, as complaining about the Pentagon
policy of embargoing images from the war: "Our greatest pressure is
that we have no images ... The only interesting images we get are from
al-Jazeera. It's bad for everybody."
The US tactic of using smart
bombs to
target foreign fighters holing up in urban areas proved a challenge to
Western news photographers, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. If they were
not embedded with US troops in areas where such bombing was taking
place, they were in extreme danger. If they were with the troops, they
could say little more than that they had heard bombing in the distance.
The horror sometimes inflicted on civilians, despite the best efforts
of military targeters, remained off camera for American audiences.
Al-Jazeera, however, developed stringers who could provide that
footage.
Rumsfeld became increasingly
exasperated with the channel as the Iraq adventure went bad. In early
2004, according to Fox News, he began equating its news coverage of
Iraq with murder: "'We are being hurt by al-Jazeera in the Arab world,'
he said. 'There is no question about it. The quality of the journalism
is outrageous - inexcusably biased - and there is nothing you can do
about it except try to counteract it.' He said it was turning Arabs
against the United States. 'You could say it causes the loss of life,'
he added. 'It's causing Iraqi people to be killed' by inflaming
anti-American passions and encouraging attacks against Iraqis who
assist the Americans, he added."
The notion that reporting on the
guerrilla war in Iraq abets terrorism is typical of the logic of any
extreme right-wing political movement. All censorship by all military
regimes in the Middle East has been imposed on the grounds that
journalists' speech is dangerous to society and could cause public
turmoil (fitna). Rumsfeld's reasoning in this regard would be instantly
recognizable to any Arab journalist from their experience with their
own governments.
Of course, Rumsfeld did not
consider
how many lives - tens of thousands - have been lost because of his own
inaccurate statements to the American public about Iraq, which he
maintained had dangerous weapons of mass destructions and even more
dangerous weapons programs. He and Vice President Dick Cheney also
alleged an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin
Laden that did not exist, implying repeatedly that Saddam was involved
in Sept. 11. If speech really is murder, Rumsfeld is the Ted Bundy of
governmental officials.
Rumsfeld, then, considered
al-Jazeera
an accessory to terror, and there is no reason to suppose that Bush did
not share this view. Seen in this light, Bush's plan to bomb its
central offices makes perfect sense. Bush has often boasted about his
harshness toward murderers, and during his debate with Al Gore in 2000,
he positively scared some in his audience by the macho swagger with
which he described executing criminals while he was governor of Texas.
The secretary's rage grew in
intensity
thereafter. At the height of the first US attack on Fallujah, which was
ordered by Bush in a fit of pique over the killing and desecration of
four private security guards (three of them Americans, one South
African), Rumsfeld exploded at a Pentagon briefing on April 15:
If I could follow up, Monday
General
Abizaid chastised al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyah for their coverage of
Fallujah and saying that hundreds of civilians were being killed. Is
there an estimate on how many civilians have been killed in that
fighting? And can you definitively say that hundreds of women and
children and innocent civilians have not been killed?
Sec. Rumsfeld: I can
definitively say that what al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate
and inexcusable.
Do you have a civilian casualty
count?
Sec. 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.
In fact, local medical
authorities put
the number of dead at Fallujah, most of them women, children and
noncombatants, at around 600.
As the London Times pointed out
on
Sunday, Bush's conference with Blair, at which he announced his plan to
bomb the channel's Doha offices, occurred the very next day.
The outrage of the Bush
administration
had to do in part with what it saw as inaccuracies in al-Jazeera
reporting (as when it incorrectly alleged that spring that a US
helicopter had been downed, based on local eyewitnesses or Iraqi
guerrilla sources). In the fog of war, however, most news outlets
commit such errors. The real source of Rumsfeld's volcanic ire, and
Bush's alleged turn as would-be mafia don and war criminal, was the
graphic images of the warfare in Iraq that al-Jazeera was willing to
display at a time when no major US news source would do so. Enraged,
Rumsfeld began accusing the station of sins it never committed. In
summer of 2005, in Singapore, the secretary of defense said, "If anyone
lived in the Middle East and watched a network like the al-Jazeera day
after day after day, even if he was an American, he would start waking
up and asking what's wrong. But America is not wrong. It's the people
who are going on television chopping off people's heads, that is wrong.
And television networks that carry it and promote it and jump on the
spark every time there is a terrorist act are promoting the acts."
In fact, according to its media
spokesman Jihad Ballout, al-Jazeera "has never, ever shown a beheading
of any hostage." Nor had its anchors come on the screen and urged
beheadings in the manic way that Rumsfeld suggested. Al-Jazeera
reporters may not like US imperialism very much, but they are not
fundamentalist murderers.
Despite the smokescreens that
politicians and diplomats are attempting to throw up by suggesting that
Bush was just joking, there is every reason to suspect that he was
deadly serious and that Blair barely managed to argue him out of this
parlous course of action. First, the Kabul and Baghdad offices of
al-Jazeera had already been bombed by the US military. In each case the
action was called a mistake. One such bombing might indeed have been an
error, but two arouses suspicion. And now we know there was talk of a
third.
The reaction in the Arab world
to the
Daily Mirror report has been a firestorm of outrage. Some Qataris are
calling for the government to end US basing rights in that country.
Others are lamenting the hypocrisy of a superpower that represents
itself as the leading edge of liberty in the Middle East but has so
little respect for press freedom that its leader would cavalierly speak
of wiping out hundreds of civilian journalists. If the British
documents surface and the story's seriousness is borne out, whatever
shreds of credibility Bush still has in the Middle East will be
completely gone. After all, the current phase of US involvement in the
Middle East, and the two wars Americans have fought in the region, came
in response to the terrorist bombing of innocent civilians in downtown
office buildings.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Juan Cole is professor of Middle
East
and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and author of
Sacred Space and Holy War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002). He maintains the
weblog Informed Comment
Jennifer Loewenstein
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