The pan-Arab media has become yet another target of US aggression. Sherine Bahaa investigates "It was not as much surprising news as it was peculiar timing," one Arab observer remarked during an interview on Al-Jazeera this week. For many, reports that United States President George Bush has considered bombing Al-Jazeera fits only too well with norms of the US administration and its neo-cons. By now, their method of dealing with any irk -- whether person, place or institution -- has become somewhat familiar: just bomb it out of existence. One has to view this recent incident in the same frame as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret prisons scattered throughout Europe. And US aggression against Al-Jazeera -- whether its offices, reporters, or cameramen -- carries a long history. Al-Jazeera journalists have been harassed, denigrated, condemned and, when captured, accused of being Al-Qaeda operatives. Like CNN in the 1991 Gulf War, the Arabic Al-Jazeera news network has became a main part of the story of the present war in Iraq. According to Al-Jazeera, the number of subscribers to the channel in Europe has doubled since the start of the war. The channel has posed a comprehensive alternative to Western-style reporting of the war. In fact, Al-Jazeera drastically changed the face of Arab broadcasting when it was first launched in 1996 from the ashes of a BBC joint venture with a Saudi broadcaster. The station is expected to inaugurate the opening of its English transmission by March 2006. The plot thickened last week after the British tabloid the Mirror reported news gleaned from a leaked top-secret British government memo. The five-page transcript contained a note of a meeting which took place on 16 April between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. At the time, the US assault against Iraqi insurgents in Falluja was at its height. The transcript of the pair's talk revealed Bush's suggestion that Al-Jazeera's building in Doha be bombed. According to the report in the Mirror, Al-Jazeera owed it to Blair -- who allegedly feared the consequences of such an act against an ally -- for talking Bush out of launching a military strike on the pan-Arab station. According to the Mirror, if that strike was to occur it would be "the most spectacular foreign policy disaster since the Iraq war itself". The British daily paper has taken an anti-war stance since the war began. For its part, Al-Jazeera's perspective on the war have drawn criticism from Washington since the US-led March 2003 invasion. The station has broadcast messages from heads of Al-Qaeda including Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahri, along with the beheadings of Western hostages by insurgents in Iraq and images of the US army returning to their relatives in their coffins. But these features have remained true to Al-Jazeera's well-known motto: "opinion and the counter-opinion". Al-Jazeera was also the first Arab station to carry out interviews with Israeli officials. Its presentation of Bin Laden's sermons were balanced by interviews with Western leaders. Soon after, news of the memo spread, Al-Jazeera set up a blog in its defence. "Don't bomb us" ( www.dontbomb.blogspot.com ) spelled things out in facts and figures: while Bush has received about 500 hours of airtime, Bin Laden has received only five. Around 50 million people across the world watch Al-Jazeera. For his part, Lord Goldsmith, the British attorney-general, warned that anyone who dared to publish the actual contents of the document would be prosecuted under the provisions of the country's long standing Official Secrets Act. But suppressing British journalists is hardly going to be the best way to annul the report. Unwittingly, such an act by the attorney-general is likely to confirm the report rather than undermine it. According to a poll on www.cnn.com, out of 138,305 votes, 70 per cent of respondents believe that the memo is true. With that sort of response, Al-Jazeera's managing director held consultations with the station's lawyers and requested an explanation and a meeting with Blair, which Blair simply shrugged off. "Al-Jazeera is not just a TV station. It has become something people are very attached to. People are angry," Wadah Khanfar, the station's managing director explained. Protests by the stations staff all over the world were organised simultaneously, while in front of the head office in Doha pictures of Sami Mohieddin Al-Haj, held in Guantanamo; Tareq Ayoub, an Al-Jazeera journalist killed in Baghdad and Tayseer Allouni were displayed. The scene raised questions about whether the attacks on the stations' offices in Kabul and Baghdad in 2002 and 2003 respectively were deliberate or simply "unfortunate accidents". Even the answer to this was obvious. In an article published earlier this week by top British journalist Robert Fisk, he recalled a conversation with Al-Jazeera's correspondent in Baghdad before the Arab Media Centre which housed his offices was bombed: "I remarked how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage -- seen across the Arab world -- of civilian victims of the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. 'Don't worry, Robert,' Tareq Ayoub replied. 'We've given the Americans the exact location of our bureau so we won't get hit.' Three days later, Tareq was dead." Meanwhile, Allouni, an Al-Jazeera correspondent in the Afghanistan war, is expecting a verdict by a Spanish Court after being accused of taking part in a terrorist plot. Al-Haj, another Al-Jazeera cameraman, was arrested in Afghanistan in 2001 and detained in Guantanamo. US interrogators are obsessed with the idea of Al-Qaeda infiltration of the channel. But why Bush's profound obsession with Al-Jazeera? Why, for that matter, is the most powerful man in the world worried about a 24-hour news organisation? By now, the answer is obvious. Bush has failed to provide a coherent explanation for his country's mission in Iraq. In short, the outcome of the Iraq war has embarrassed the US administration, and it is this very truth that Bush does not want to be revealed.
