BUSH WANTED TO BOMB AL-JAZEERA
Which happens to be in an allied nation

From the London Mirror courtesy of the Daily Kos:

PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.

A source said: "There's no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it." Al-Jazeera is accused by the US of fuelling the Iraqi insurgency.

The attack would have led to a massacre of innocents on the territory of a key ally, enraged the Middle East and almost certainly have sparked bloody retaliation.

A source said last night: "The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush.

And

The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors.

In 2001 the station's Kabul office was knocked out by two "smart" bombs. In 2003, al-Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a US missile strike on the station's Baghdad centre.

Click here for the rest.

This gives quite a bit of insight into our President's stupidity, insanity, or callousness. Maybe all three. For those not in the know, al-Jazeera is kind of like an Arab version of CNN. In the same way that CNN as an arm of mega-media company Time-Warner tends to report from a corporate perspective, al-Jazeera reports from a Middle Eastern point of view, which has, of course, bedeviled the White House and it's "anti-terrorism" policies for years. That much we already know. We also know that al-Jazeera has accused the US on multiple occasions of intentionally targeting them in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the Pentagon has aggressively denied. As the article observes, this new British memo tends to lend credibility to those accusations. As nutty as it is to want to bomb a site inside of a friendly country, it's all the more startling that Bush would turn the propaganda war into an actual war. Let me be more clear: apparently Bush thinks it's just fine to murder journalists because he doesn't like what they report. Needless to say, that's absolutely horrifying for numerous reasons.

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