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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The notion that reporting on the guerrilla war in Iraq abets terrorism is typical of the logic of any extreme right-wing political movement. All censorship by all military regimes in the Middle East has been imposed on the grounds that journalists' speech is dangerous to society and could cause public turmoil (fitna). Rumsfeld's reasoning in this regard would be instantly recognizable to any Arab journalist from their experience with their own governments.
Of course, Rumsfeld did not consider how many lives -- tens of thousands -- have been lost because of his own inaccurate statements to the American public about Iraq, which he maintained had dangerous weapons of mass destructions and even more dangerous weapons programs. He and Vice President Dick Cheney also alleged an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that did not exist, implying repeatedly that Saddam was involved in Sept. 11. If speech really is murder, Rumsfeld is the Ted Bundy of governmental officials.
Rumsfeld, then, considered Al-Jazeera an accessory to terror, and there is no reason to suppose that Bush did not share this view. Seen in this light, Bush's plan to bomb its central offices makes perfect sense. Bush has often boasted about his harshness toward murderers, and during his debate with Al Gore in 2000, he positively scared some in his audience by the macho swagger with which he described executing criminals while he was governor of Texas.
The secretary's rage grew in intensity thereafter. At the height of the first U.S. attack on Fallujah, which was ordered by Bush in a fit of pique over the killing and desecration of four private security guards (three of them Americans, one South African), Rumsfeld exploded at a Pentagon briefing on April 15:
If I could follow up, Monday General Abizaid chastised Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyah for their coverage of Fallujah and saying that hundreds of civilians were being killed. Is there an estimate on how many civilians have been killed in that fighting? And can 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.
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.
In fact, local medical authorities put the number of dead at Fallujah, most of them women, children and noncombatants, at around 600.
As the London Times pointed out on Sunday, Bush's conference with Blair, at which he announced his plan to bomb the channel's Doha offices, occurred the very next day.
The outrage of the Bush administration had to do in part with what it saw as inaccuracies in Al-Jazeera reporting (as when it incorrectly alleged that spring that a U.S. helicopter had been downed, based on local eyewitnesses or Iraqi guerrilla sources). In the fog of war, however, most news outlets commit such errors. The real source of Rumsfeld's volcanic ire, and Bush's alleged turn as would-be mafia don and war criminal, was the graphic images of the warfare in Iraq that Al-Jazeera was willing to display at a time when no major U.S. news source would do so. Enraged, Rumsfeld began accusing the station of sins it never committed. In summer of 2005, in Singapore, the secretary of defense said, "If anyone lived in the Middle East and watched a network like the Al-Jazeera day after day after day, even if he was an American, he would start waking up and asking what's wrong. But America is not wrong. It's the people who are going on television chopping off people's heads, that is wrong. And television networks that carry it and promote it and jump on the spark every time there is a terrorist act are promoting the acts."
In fact, according to its media spokesman Jihad Ballout, Al-Jazeera "has never, ever shown a beheading of any hostage." Nor had its anchors come on the screen and urged beheadings in the manic way that Rumsfeld suggested. Al-Jazeera reporters may not like U.S. imperialism very much, but they are not fundamentalist murderers.
Despite the smokescreens that politicians and diplomats are attempting to throw up by suggesting that Bush was just joking, there is every reason to suspect that he was deadly serious and that Blair barely managed to argue him out of this parlous course of action. First, the Kabul and Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera had already been bombed by the U.S. military. In each case the action was called a mistake. One such bombing might indeed have been an error, but two arouses suspicion. And now we know there was talk of a third.
The reaction in the Arab world to the Daily Mirror report has been a firestorm of outrage. Some Qataris are calling for the government to end U.S. basing rights in that country. Others are lamenting the hypocrisy of a superpower that represents itself as the leading edge of liberty in the Middle East but has so little respect for press freedom that its leader would cavalierly speak of wiping out hundreds of civilian journalists. If the British documents surface and the story's seriousness is borne out, whatever shreds of credibility Bush still has in the Middle East will be completely gone. After all, the current phase of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and the two wars Americans have fought in the region, came in response to the terrorist bombing of innocent civilians in downtown office buildings.
