The Daily Mirror reports that George Bush planned to bomb Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar, but that Tony Blair managed to talk Bush out of the idea in a face-to-face meeting at the White House on April 16, 2004.
Josh Marshall has more on the Al Jazeera bombing memo. He concludes that there is a secret memo from April 2004 in which Bush suggests bombing Al Jazeera. Two British civil servants have already been charged under the Official Secrets act for leaking that 5-page transcript. The only question is whether Bush was serious. Maybe he was just kidding about murdering innocents in a friendly country. He's funny like that.
As Kevin Drum says, there's no way to gage Bush's intentions without seeing the memo itself. The full text would probably tell us a lot, especially about Tony Blair's reaction to Bush's suggestion. Josh wonders why a British diplomat would have bothered to memorialize Bush's remarks if they were obviously delivered as a crass joke.


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