Al-Jazeera in the Crosshairs: The Arab Media Scrutinize the Bush-Blair Memo

By Peter C. Valenti


	An employee of the Qatar-based al-Jazeera satellite channel holds a portrait of his colleage Tariq Ayoub, killed in a 2003 U.S. missile attack on al-Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau. Along with journalists in several Arab capitals on Nov. 24, 2005, employees at al-Jazeera’s Doha headquarters protested reports that U.S. President George W. Bush wanted to attack it (AFP photo/Karim Jaafar).

IN A DEC. 2 Senate briefing, Pentagon officials admitted they had contracted with a public relations firm to plant news articles in the Iraqi news media. The firm in question, the Lincoln Group, was part of a special program to disseminate positive stories about the U.S. occupation. Democrats have pointed to this episode and other media manipulation as evidence of White House attempts to control and doctor information on its policies. While Republicans and Democrats may differ on the significance of this latest PR move, at the very least, the assertion of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) seems to ring true: “If Americans were truly welcomed in Iraq as liberators, we wouldn’t have to doctor the news for the Iraqi people.”

White House frustration over the tone of Arab news coverage of Iraq may explain the logic behind an even more serious action allegedly considered personally by President George W. Bush—to bomb the Qatar headquarters of the Arab satellite news channel al-Jazeera.

This explosive news story, which has flown practically undetected beneath the U.S. media radar, first appeared Nov. 22 in England’s The Daily Mirror. The paper claimed that the information was obtained from a top-secret memo detailing an April 2004 meeting between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In discussing the war in Iraq, Bush reportedly raised the idea of bombing al-Jazeera, while Blair attempted to dissuade him. Though The Daily Mirror is often dismissed as a tabloid, the story gained immediate credibility when the British attorney general, citing the Official Secrets Act, gagged the paper and other British media and brought charges against the two civil servants accused of leaking the memo. A White House spokesman and Blair himself have dismissed the story as bogus and conspiratorial.

While the veracity of the story has yet to be determined, it is true that the U.S. already has attacked offending satellite TV bureaus: in November 2002 it bombed al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, and the following April it simultaneously attacked the Baghdad bureaus of al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV. The White House later described the bombings as accidents.

If the Bush-Blair memo turns out to be accurate, it represents a potential threat to media throughout the world. Since it directly affects the Arab media, however, Arab journalists have been quick to respond. Al-Jazeera director general Wadah Khanfar personalized the threat with his article, “Why Did You Want to Bomb Me, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair?” Published Dec. 1 in Arabic, in the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi, and in English, in the UK’s liberal The Guardian, Khanfar’s op-ed explained how “I brought many questions with me to London; it would seem that I shall return to Doha—where al-Jazeera is based—with even more misgivings. Officials in Britain have come up with nothing, and their silence is likely to reinforce suspicion and mistrust.”

For their part, al-Jazeera employees have created an online blog entitled “Don’t Bomb Us” at <http://dontbomb.blogspot.com/>.

Comments in English e-mailed to al-Jazeera.net have represented a wide range of opinions. One e-mail from the U.S. read, “‘Bush to bomb al-Jazeera’…Good idea,” while a writer from Switzerland noted, “If the story is fabricated why have the newspapers now been threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Acts? As for lies and half truths, this is actually what Bush and Blair took us to war on…”

Despite the prevalent view in the U.S., Arab commentators are not unanimous in their opinions of the Bush administration, the “Bomb al-Jazeera” revelation—or on al-Jazeera itself. Regardless of their position, however, most recognize the importance of the news channel and its impact in the region. (Interestingly, much of the public debate takes place in op-eds printed in London-based Arab newspapers.) There is no question that al-Jazeera has been the only Arab news station to routinely interview Israeli authorities, as well as interviewing and covering the speeches of U.S. politicians. One of the reasons Osama bin Laden may have chosen to send his cassettes to al-Jazeera was that he knew that it wasn’t government-run, and thus could be assured of some coverage. Khanfar himself suggested that the fact that some Arab countries have shut down their al-Jazeera bureaus is an indication that governments in the region view the channel as challenging their hegemony over information.

A good example of a defense of al-Jazeera can be found in al-Quds al-Arabi, which editorialized on Nov. 24: “Al-Jazeera possesses great credibility in the hearts of its Arab viewers because it strives for broadcasting the greatest extent possible of the truth, whether concerning American aggression on Iraq, [or] treating issues that are forbidden in the Arab media, such as corruption, dictatorships and human rights abuse.”

Nidal Hamdan, a believer in the veracity of the leaked memo, includes the possibility that Bush would bomb al-Jazeera in a list of what he considers the Bush administration’s flagrant disregard for international law. In a Nov. 29 op-ed in the United Arab Emirates’ al-Bayan, Hamdan cited the U.S. army’s use of white phosphorus in its 2004 attack on Falluja, its use of torture on detainees, secret prisons, and the White House attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002.

According to Muhammad Ali al-Harfi, the “Bomb al-Jazeera” memo reveals the kind of disconnect between Bush’s rhetoric and actions. “I am not surprised by this manner of American thinking,” he wrote in the Saudi reformist al-Watan on Nov. 29, “but what does surprise me is the American talk on democracy and freedom in that ridiculous manner, as if they think they are talking to a simple-minded people who believe what they are talking about.”

Writing in the pan-Arab al-Hayat on Nov. 26, Jihad al-Khazin situated the context of Bush’s alleged intention to bomb al-Jazeera within what he sees as the many White House attempts to “control the media”—such as the Armstrong Williams episode, the installation of right-wing Ken Tomlinson as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the softball questions lobbed at the president by fake White House reporter Jeff Gannon, and pressures on other White House reporters to tone down criticism or lose valuable insider sources and opportunities for interviews.

Mashari al-Dhayidi took issue with al-Khazin and his emphasis on the White House, however. Haven’t al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda and other groups also targeted Arab reporters in Iraq, he asked in his Nov. 29 op-ed in Saudi Arabia’s Asharq al-Awsat. Al-Dhayidi also refuted the idea that al-Jazeera is the main—or even a—voice of balance and fairness in the Arab media. “It has transformed itself into [taking] a vociferous side in its partiality toward the fundamentalist camp and incitement of the Arab street,” he charged. Al-Dhayidi even claimed that many Iraqis do not agree with al-Jazeera’s coverage of events in Iraq and prefer not to watch it. The biggest problem with the argument of al-Khazin and others like him, in al-Dhayidi’s opinion, is that they are too eager to believe the worst about Bush. It clearly makes no sense for Bush to want to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar, al-Dhayid maintained, a country which openly allowed U.S. bases, supported the U.S. war effort in Iraq, and the only Gulf country to have thawed relations with Israel.

Al-Dhayidi’s op-ed incited many responses. One letter from Jordan agreed with him, adding that Bush couldn’t have wanted to bomb al-Jazeera because the channel has “given a great free service to America and Israel” by causing so much divisiveness and trouble for Arab nations. However, an Arab writing from France took al-Dhayidi to task for forgetting to consider the earlier U.S. attacks on al-Jazeera’s offices in Kabul and Baghdad, as well as its having targeted Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, a known and popular media headquarters.

In a Nov. 26 Asharq al-Awsat op-ed entitled “No to al-Jazeera and No to Bombing It,” former Kuwaiti Information Minister Sa‘d bin Taflah wrote that while he also believes al-Jazeera is not an objective news source, this doesn’t justify bombing it. The way to counter al-Jazeera, he chided, is through useful and successful “media alternatives of greater professionalism and objectivity.” The problem, he observed, is that the leaking of the memooccurred at “a time when criticism has increased over issues of freedoms in [the U.S. and UK], then Guantanamo, [then] the disgrace of Abu Ghraib…just as the news of The Daily Mirror came out at the same time as the report by The Washington Post that the CIA is using secret prisons for terrorism suspects in Eastern Europe…”

A very astute Saudi reader wrote back that “We should not say no to al-Jazeera in its entirety, but rather to some of its reports, and we also shouldn’t say no to the freedom and democracy in America and Britain, but rather we say no to their two leaders.”

Whether Bin Taflah intended it or not, his alluding to an alternative to al-Jazeera is something Arab commentators do mention—but in order to make a different point. Writers like Yusuf Nur Iwad remind readers that it is not far-fetched that Bush wants to dominate, or perhaps destroy, independent Arab news media. Like other articles, his Dec. 1 op-ed in al-Quds al-Arabi pointed to the establishment of the U.S.-funded Arabic-language satellite news channel al-Hurra to compete with al-Jazeera as both an example of U.S. propaganda and as evidence of its failure to influence Arab audiences. Since its creation in February 2004, al-Hurra has been ridiculed as a transparent attempt to win Arab hearts and minds. The reason al-Hurra or other Western news outlets won’t make much headway in the Arab world, as Iwad was quick to point out, is “because what the Western world needs is not only a medium [of communication] but a complete revision and reconsideration of its political and social reality…”

At the very least, Iwad clarified, this whole episode has revealed one truth. “The decision of the British attorney general,” he intoned, “induces questions about whether there really is freedom of the British press.”

Peter C. Valenti, a free-lance writer and translator, teaches Islam and modern Middle East history at New York’s New School University.