Bush al-Jazeera 'plot'

[dcentity2000]

The White House has dismissed claims George Bush was talked out of bombing Arab television station al-Jazeera by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The allegations were made by an unnamed source in the Daily Mirror newspaper.

A White House official said: "We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response."

Ex-UK minister Peter Kilfoyle, who opposed the Iraq war, had called for a transcript of the alleged conversation to be published.

Launched in 1996, al-Jazeera is best known outside of the Arab world for carrying exclusive al-Qaeda messages.

The station is based in Qatar, a close ally of Washington's and the location of US military headquarters during the Iraq war.

According to the Mirror's source, the transcript records a conversation during Mr Blair's visit to the White House on 16 April 2004, in the wake of an attempt to root out insurgents in the Iraqi city of Falluja, in which 30 US Marines died.

The memo, which the Mirror says is stamped "Top Secret", allegedly details how Mr Blair argued against what the paper calls a "plot" to attack the station's buildings in the business district of Doha, the capital city of Qatar.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "We have got nothing to say about this story. We don't comment on leaked documents."

But Mr Kilfoyle - a former defence minister and leading Labour opponent of the Iraq war - has called for the full text to be published.

"I believe that Downing Street ought to publish this memo in the interests of transparency, given that much of the detail appears to be in the public domain.

"I think they ought to clarify what exactly happened on this occasion."

Source: BBC News

Sounds like a silly conspiracy theory to me, but why doesn't Downing Street either dismiss or deny it?



Rich::

 

[Tigger_Magic]

Maybe they don't want to offer any semblance of legitimacy to an absurd story that has no foundation in fact and serves no decent purpose (to paraphrase a quote from Ronald Reagan re: a book published by Kitty Kelley -- someone who would feel right at home working for the Daily Mirror).