Jazeera Bizarra

The revelation that President Bush planned to bomb the headquarters of the al-Jazeera news service in Doha, Qatar is producing potentially disastrous consequences for the administration as well as for British PM Tony Blair’s government.

The story was first published in the British tabloid The Daily Mirror on November 22. The paper claimed to possess a five-page Downing Street (U.K. Government top-secret) memo detailing conversations between Bush and Blair at a summit in Washington in April of 2004.

Bush, unhappy with al-Jazeera’s reporting of the American attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, insisted the U.S. should bomb the TV station’s headquarters. Blair talked him out of it, citing a potential worldwide backlash of disastrous proportions.

When asked about the story at his daily press briefing of November 23, White House Spokesnebbish Scott McClellan replied, “We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response.”

The same day the Mirror ran the front-page story, however, it was ordered by U.K.’s Attorney General Lord Goldsmith not to publish any further details from the memo, whose existence was undisputed by the government. Goldsmith threatened the publishers with criminal prosecution for violating the Official Secrets Act if they persisted.

The newspaper had informed the government it planned to run the original story 24 hours in advance of its appearance.

On November 24, a British civil servant, David Keogh, and an ex-employee of former Labour MP and anti-war activist Tony Clarke, Leo O’Connor, were charged under the Official Secrets Act with leaking a copy of the memo to the Mirror. Subsequently, Clarke returned the memo to the government, without explaining how he came into possession of it.

The following day Waddah Khanfar, al-Jazeera’s general manager, announced he would soon fly to London to deliver a letter to Blair demanding a meeting and an explanation of the memo’s contents.

“People should know the facts about it,” Khanfar said. “It is not a matter that can be brushed away or dealt with in very vague statements.”

By November 25, Labour MP’s in Parliament began demanding that the government publish the entire memo. Ex-Defence Minister Peter Kilfoyle’s remarks were typical: “This is not about national security,” he said, “It’s about political embarrassment."

However, on November 26, Blair’s government announced that the document will be kept secret.

Details of all these stories are available at The Daily Mirror's site.

The Mirror is one of the world's great newspapers, although not generally recognized as such. It's one of those cheap, sensational, vulgar British tabloids that people love to hate. Besides the daily page three titty shot and overheated movie and football news, it features some top-notch reporting and serious, comprehensive world coverage.