Rumsfeld told Fox News in 2004 al Jazeera was causing Iraqis to be killed.

According to Juan Cole at salon.com, Rumsfeld considered al Jazeera's coverage of civilian casualties of American bombs dangerous to the war effort. It's not at all unlikely that he wanted al Jazeera removed from the picture. He also told an al Jazeera anchorman in an interview in 2001 that he believed in "total war" and that anti-American radio stations in Afghanistan were legitimate targets. So is it so hard to believe Rumsfeld, in particular, wanted al Jazeera bombed? Is it so hard to believe Bush regurgitated this wish to Blair?


http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/11/30/al_jazeera/print.html

Among the chief criticisms launched by Bush administration figures such as Rumsfeld against Al-Jazeera was that it showed graphic images of the dead and wounded from both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The Bush administration had learned the lesson of Vietnam, that images of actual warfare generally appall the American public, which seems less bothered by words describing the horrors than it does by pictures. Reporters were forbidden to photograph the caskets of dead American soldiers coming into Dover Air Force base. U.S. newspaper editors exercised a rigorous self-censorship, routinely declining the more graphic images of war on offer from the wire services, apparently on the belief that they would not be acceptable to an American public.

Al-Jazeera was the prime source of pictures of warfare, including dead and wounded, for the Afghanistan war. On Nov. 11, 2001, the New York Times quoted Auberi Edler, a foreign news editor at France 2, as complaining about the Pentagon policy of embargoing images from the war: "Our greatest pressure is that we have no images ... The only interesting images we get are from Al-Jazeera. It's bad for everybody."

The U.S. tactic of using smart bombs to target foreign fighters holing up in urban areas proved a challenge to Western news photographers, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. If they were not embedded with U.S. troops in areas where such bombing was taking place, they were in extreme danger. If they were with the troops, they could say little more than that they had heard bombing in the distance. The horror sometimes inflicted on civilians, despite the best efforts of military targeters, remained off camera for American audiences. Al-Jazeera, however, developed stringers who could provide that footage.

Rumsfeld became increasingly exasperated with the channel as the Iraq adventure went bad. In early 2004, according to Fox News, he began equating its news coverage of Iraq with murder: "'We are being hurt by Al-Jazeera in the Arab world,' he said. 'There is no question about it. The quality of the journalism is outrageous -- inexcusably biased -- and there is nothing you can do about it except try to counteract it.' He said it was turning Arabs against the United States. 'You could say it causes the loss of life,' he added. 'It's causing Iraqi people to be killed' by inflaming anti-American passions and encouraging attacks against Iraqis who assist the Americans, he added."

they see the pictures of the people that Americans have killed and get pissed. He lives in some kind of alternative universe where right is wrong, wrong is right, up is down, down is up, and bush** is pResident.