PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a “Top Secret” No 10 memo reveals. But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair. … The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors. In 2001 the station’s Kabul office was knocked out by two “smart” bombs. In 2003, al-Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a US missile strike on the station’s Baghdad centre.
Al-Jazeera TV says one of its journalists was killed Tuesday when a U.S. airstrike hit a building housing Arab media … An Al-Jazeera reporter on-air said he felt, as did his colleagues, the U.S. strike was a deliberate attack against the network, since two missiles hit the building, not one, and that the raid happened at about the same time Abu Dhabi TV offices were hit.
The [UK] attorney general last night threatened newspapers with the Official Secrets Act if they revealed the contents of a document allegedly relating to a dispute between Tony Blair and George Bush over the conduct of military operations in Iraq. It is believed to be the first time the Blair government has threatened newspapers in this way. Though it has obtained court injunctions against newspapers, the government has never prosecuted editors for publishing the contents of leaked documents.
[UK] Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh is accused of passing [the memo] to Leo O’Connor, who formerly worked for former British lawmaker Tony Clarke. Both Keogh and O’Connor are scheduled to appear at London’s Bow Street Magistrates Court next week … Keogh was charged with an offense under Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act relating to “a damaging disclosure” by a servant of the Crown of information relating to international relations or information obtained from a state other than the United Kingdom. O’Connor was charged under Section 5, which relates to receiving and disclosing illegally disclosed information.
When top CNN news executive Eason Jordan made comments at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the US military had targeted journalists in Iraq, he set off a firestorm of controversy that eventually led to his resignation. (Mr. Jordan eventually “backpedalled” from his remarks, and said he did not mean to imply that “US forces acted with ill intent when US forces accidentally killed journalists.”)
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