Moving the ball forward on the al-Jazeera story

January 11, 2006

In late-November, a British newspaper reported that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair met in April 2004 at the White House, at which time Bush raised the specter of bombing the headquarters of the Arabic television network al-Jazeera. The paper, The Daily Mirror, received a leaked, classified transcript of the Bush-Blair discussion, though there was some disagreement as to whether the president was serious in his comments.

Yesterday, David Keogh, a government communications officer, and Leo O’Connor, a former parliamentary researcher, the two men believed to have been responsible for the leak, were in court facing charges under the British Official Secrets Act. According to a New York Times report, this was the second attempt at leaking Bush’s al-Jazeera comments.

The court hearings came as Peter Kilfoyle, a legislator from Mr. Blair’s Labor Party, said he and another lawmaker, Tony Clarke, who employed Mr. O’Connor as a researcher, had tried to publicize the document in the United States in 2004.

Mr. Kilfoyle said in a telephone interview that he and Mr. Clarke had hoped to influence the 2004 presidential election by sharing information from the document with John Latham, 71, a British citizen with connections to the Democratic Party. They met Mr. Latham at the House of Commons, Mr. Kilfoyle said.

“The intention was to help the Democrats by giving them information that was germane to the kind of president that the Americans were being asked to re-elect,” he said.

I’m entirely sure it would have helped in the election — I’m afraid to know how many voters would have approved of the idea — but the fact that these MPs thought the transcript was that damaging suggests that Bush’s comments may not have been harmless banter.

Indeed, according to Latham, the remarks about bombing al-Jazeera were “defused by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Tony Blair, thank goodness.”

As for the document itself, a lawyer for O’Connor was shown the transcript as part of preparing a defense. The lawyer said yesterday, “I didn’t think there was anything in there that could embarrass the British government.”

That’s fine, but what about embarrassing the American government?

Is there any investigation going on in this country on this? I saw in the article that the White House had no comment. Maybe some reporters will push a little harder now that it’s in the New York Times?

  • Any investigation should address the actual bombing of Al jazeera’s Baghdad office days after its location was given to the US military. If I remember correctly, we bombed some other journalists the same day too.

  • O’Connor’s lawyer Neil Clark said, as reported by Reuters,

    ” It’s what I expected having read the media ,” he said. ” I didn’t think that there was anything in there that would embarrass the British government. ”

    This leaves no doubt that Bush said what he was purported to say in the media reports. An enterprising report should ask McClellan,”We now have confirmation of the report that Bush suggested bombing the Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar. How can you reconcile this with your previous comment that the report was outrageous? In your mind, exactly what made it outrageous?”

  • CB,

    I highly doubt that this revelation would have affected the outcome of the election. Most people I know would have and could still care less if Al-Jazeera was bombed. In fact, if you took a poll today, I would guess that more than half think that there is some connection between al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda and more than half would be for bombing it.

    • Comments are closed.