THE DAILY MIRROR MEMO

Re the Daily Mirror's explosive revelations, the charge that Bush wanted to take out Al Jazeera is not "outlandish."

A day before Bush's meeting with Blair, Donald Rumsfeld slammed al Jazeera in distinctly undiplomatic terms:

REPORTER: [C]an 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.
REPORTER: 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.

What al Jazeera was doing in Fallujah is exactly what it was doing when the US bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001 and when US forces killed al Jazeera's Baghdad correspondent, Tareq Ayoub, during the April 2003 occupation of Baghdad. Al Jazeera was witnessing and reporting on events Washington did not want the world to see.

Eason Jordan, you may be vindicated yet.

UPDATE: Al-Jazeera employees have called for an inquiry.

Tags: Al-Jazeera, Bush, bombing memo