More on Bush’s “Joke”

The story currently not being touched with a ten-foot pole by the American media—the leaked memo revealing President Bush suggesting a military strike against the Arab television station al-Jazeera and Tony Blair arguing against an attack—is a big story in Britain. Channel 4 has an in-depth report on the subject that I really recommend you watch in whole, but here are some highlights (please note: the transcriptions are mine).

The report starts with the news that the two leakers have been charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act and will likely be tried in secret. Though Bush’s remarks about bombing al-Jazeera are being framed, particularly in America, as a joke, it has been indicated in Britain that the memo focuses on a dispute over military tactics, which would make more understandable the use of the Official Secrets Act, which is being used to threaten journalists with prosecution for the first time ever. Later in the report, the former editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston, is interviewed, and notes that not only is the invocation of the Official Secrets Act “a direct threat to the press,” but that the wide disparity in contentions—insensitive, tasteless joke versus tactical dispute—creates an urgency for the British press to not play dead.

This is a case where it doesn’t fit, it’s messy, the government looks on the back foot, and the media, I think, ought to feel extraordinarily threatened by all of this, because it’s either, as I say, absurd or it's really rather sinister.

Also interviewed is Clive Stafford-Smith, an attorney representing Sami Muyhideen al-Haj, an al-Jazeera cameraman who has been interned at Gitmo for four years. According to Stafford-Smith, al-Haj has been interrogated by the US approximately 130 times, with the sole focus of 125 of those interrogations being whether al-Jazeera is a front for and/or funded by al-Qaida. al-Haj has flatly denied the veracity of the assertion, and so remains incarcerated.

Finally, the Channel 4 anchor interviewed Wadah Khanfar, the Managing Director of al-Jazeera, who was in Rome. He asked Khanfar if al-Jazeera had taken President Bush’s remark as a joke. Khanfar, who seemed more bemused but frank, rather than angry (as he certainly has a right to be), replied:

Of course we cannot take it as a joke. A joke from President Bush cannot be regarded as an ordinary joke…Why? Because al-Jazeera was attacked twice before. Once in Kabul and again in Baghdad during the war in Iraq, and one of our colleagues was killed.

Khanfar went on to explain why this is such an important issue to resolve:

It is not a matter of al-Jazeera. It is a matter of a new definition of democracy. If that is correct, then we are in front of a story that is redefining freedom of expression. You are speaking about civilian journalists, who have been reporting for nine years, who are on the forefront of reforming democracy in the Arab world…

I would like an official explanation about what has happened. I would like to inform my people, my journalists of al-Jazeera, who have issued a statement tonight, asking for an official investigation. [Tony Blair] should be clear about this matter because it is not only al-Jazeera; it is the Arab world who is waiting for that explanation. It is the world at large; it is every journalist who feels that this is a new rule for the game of journalism.

Hat tip to BradBlog, which also points to a column in The Daily Telegraph by MP Boris Johnson, called "I'll go to jail to print the truth about Bush and al-Jazeera."

[I]f his remarks were just an innocent piece of cretinism, then why in the name of holy thunder has the British state decreed that anyone printing those remarks will be sent to prison?

We all hope and pray that the American President was engaging in nothing more than neo-con Tourette-style babble about blowing things up. We are quite prepared to believe that the Daily Mirror is wrong. We are ready to accept that the two British civil servants who have leaked the account are either malicious or mistaken. But if there is one thing that would seem to confirm the essential accuracy of the story, it is that the Attorney General has announced that he will prosecute anyone printing the exact facts.

What are we supposed to think? The meeting between Bush and Blair took place on April 16, 2004, at the height of the US assault on Fallujah, and there is circumstantial evidence for believing that Bush may indeed have said what he is alleged to have said.

I have to go with the aforementioned Peter Preston on this one. Threatening journalists with the Official Secrets Act is either a ludicrous over-reach designed to help Bush save face over a thoughtless comment, in which case the British press ought to be outraged they are being silenced for such a stupid reason, or it’s a practical application, and Bush wasn’t joking at all. Which is it?

Americans need to be concerned with this story as well. If Bush was serious, we ought to demand accountability on behalf of the killed al-Jazeera journalist as well as those currently being held at Gitmo and in Spain. If he was joking, we ought to demand at minimum that he acknowledge it and apologize for it. A man whose job affords him the protection of having arrested anyone who makes even a joke about hurting him surely ought to understand that not every joke is so easily dismissed.

In either case, refusing to address the issues raised by the leak of these remarks will allow people to believe about them whatever they want to believe—or whatever their experiences predisposes them to believe. What will the Arab world believe?