Rumsfeld Rant on Al-Jazeera

An article by the Times on Line provides additional mens rea for the President's alleged suggestion to bomb Al-Jazeera in Qatar. Donald Rumsfeld described the network's broadcasting as “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” the day before the Blair/Bush meeting. But the station was on the Pentagon radar long before that: In 2001, after the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon awarded the Rendon Group, a public affairs firm, a $16.7m contract to monitor media in the Islamic world. It was assigned to track “the location and use of Al-Jazeera news bureaux, reporters and stringers”, and was asked to “identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances”. Put in context, this isn't as dark as it seems. Shortly after 9/11 it was incumbent on the Pentagon to learn as much as possible about Arab voices and to "potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances”. At the same time, it's a legitimate question to ask how any information collected was used. Al-Jazeera's offices have been hit in both Kabul and Iraq; in the latter incident a reporter was killed. The Pentagon says they were accidents and there's been no evidence to suggest otherwise. But the notorious memo is extremely problematic for the administration—it will continue to feed conspiracy theories until it sees the light of day. British MP Boris Johnson put it more succinctly: "sunlight is the best disinfectant".