No wonder al-Jazeera was a target

by: Robert Fisk on: 26th Nov, 05

On 4 April 2003, I was standing on the roof of al-Jazeera's office in Baghdad. The horizon was a towering epic of oil fires and burning buildings. Anti-aircraft guns in a public park close to the bureau were pumping shells into the sky and the howl of jets echoed across the city. I was about to start a two-way interview with al-Jazeera's head office in Qatar when an American rocket came racing up the Tigris river behind me. Its rail-train "swish" brought a cry from the Qatar technician who picked up the sound on his earphones. "Was that what I think it was?" he asked. I fear so, I replied, as the white-painted cruise missile zipped beneath one of the Tigris's bridges and disappeared upstream.

After finishing my "stand-upper" - television demands rooftop scenes from Baghdad even to this day, when most of the reporters are confined to their offices and hotels by teams of hired mercenaries - I descended to the al-Jazeera newsroom where the Jordanian-Palestinian bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub, was trying to put together his next report. You, I told him, have the most dangerous television office in the history of the world. I remarked how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage - seen across the Arab world - of civilian victims of the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. "Don't worry, Robert," Tareq had replied. "We've given the Americans the exact location of our bureau so we won't get hit." Three days later, Tareq was dead.

Al-Jazeera had indeed given their office's map co-ordinates to the Pentagon. In fact, the State Department's public affairs officer in Qatar - a man of Lebanese descent called Nabil Khoury - had pointedly gone to the station's management on 6 April to assure them their bureau would be spared. Then on 7 April, as Tareq Ayoub broadcast at 7.45am from the same spot on the roof on which I had been standing, an American jet flew across the Tigris and fired a single missile at al-Jazeera. Its explosion killed Tareq instantly. This was no errant attack. "The plane was so low, we thought it was going to land on the roof," Tareq's colleague Taiseer Alouni told me afterwards.

And Taiseer should know. He had been Kabul correspondent for al-Jazeera in 2001 when a cruise missile smashed into his (mercifully empty) bureau. Al-Jazeera had been broadcasting bin Laden's threats and sermons from Afghanistan and no one doubted at the time that the attack - which the Americans claimed was a mistake - was deliberate. After the killing of Tareq Ayoub in Baghdad in 2003, the Pentagon's soulless letter of explanation expressed its sorrow for Ayoub's death but did not even bother to offer an explanation for the attack. Why should it? After all, on the very same day, an American Abrams M-1 A-1 tank fired a shell into the Palestine Hotel, killing three more journalists. Small arms fire, the Americans said, had been coming from the building. It was a lie.

rest of the article
http://www.globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=5950

"Let no truth come before the people" - Republican policy



"Please don't cut off our access to your brilliant White House staff, and we will do whatever you say. You are a wonderful wise man, Mr. Bush, and are not a Connecticut preppy AWOL cheerleader or anything like that, and what the hell they are all Infidel Media anyway so take them out and we will remain Bent Over for you." - 'American' corporate media

This seems to be happening spontaneously too. I have friends in several parts of the US and they tell me that their local papers just don't cover things like the bombing threat, Fallujah and so on. Perhaps they are afraid of the sort of vicious, anti liberal campaign that threatened the marvellous Iconoclast, of course.

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