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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Thursday, December 01, 2005

The 'Bush to bomb Al Jazeera' memo is not going away.

I was cruising around over at Reidblog, and he had a link to this Newsweek story.

Bush administration officials initially dismissed the memo’s allegations about Bush’s threat against Al-Jazeera as “outlandish.” U.S. officials later suggested that if Bush did talk with Blair about bombing Al-Jazeera, the president was only joking. Asked directly today about Bush's purported threat to bomb Al-Jazeera, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said: "Any such notion that we would engage in that kind of activity is just absurd." McLellan did not respond to follow-up questions as to whether Bush actually said what the memo says he did.

But a senior official at 10 Downing Street, Blair’s official residence, who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, recently seemed to give credence to the Al-Jazeera threat. The official told NEWSWEEK London Bureau chief Stryker McGuire: "I don't think Tony Blair thought it was a joke."

That last line would be a second source and second leak that said Blair thought it was real. Release the memo, it's not going to go away.

1 Comments:

  • Agreed. I don't think this story is going away (not that it even arrived on these shores. Nor is the story about the secret detention facilities. That one continues to reverberate in foreign newspapers. Not that one would ever know from watching CNN.

    By Blogger JUSIPER, at 9:48 PM  

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