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Originally Posted by *~$kAnDaLouZ~*
Hey zteccc. I have a little question, not really worth a new thread. You seem to have an opinion on most political situations, so I was just curious...
We all know Bush isn't exactly the best president in the world.
What do you think of this new "Al Jazeera bombing intentions" scandal?
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I believe, based on what I know about President Bush, that he was joking and that someone read a transcript and couldn't see the tone of his voice in the transcript. I believe that there are many people out there who don't like President Bush, and in fact there are many people in Britian who don't like Prime Minister Blair, and are searching for anything to make him look bad, and one of those people got ahold of the memo and decided to leak it.
Lets look at the facts here. The referenced discussion occurred during the Fallujah operations in Iraq. At that time (and currently), Qatar was a coalition member in Iraq. Al-Jezeera is based in Qatar and to bomb it would mean using coalition forces to attack a coalition member's soverign territory. That simply doesn't ring true. If there's anything that we know about President Bush, it is that he is (sometimes fanatically) loyal to his friends and allies. Even his strongest opponents will admit that. I suspect that the tone of the discussion had a large amount of sarcastic humor to it, possibly due to some bad press that the U.S. military had gotten from Al-Jezeera and the fact that Al-Qaeda uses Al-Jezeera to deliver many of its statements. That doesn't mean that it was serious.
There is a film, released in 1992 called "My Cousin Vinny". In that film, a young man and his friend are arrested for the killing of a store clerk. They didn't know what the charges were (they had accidentally left the store without paying for an item and they thought the charges would be shoplifting). During questioning, the Sherrif surprised one of them with the question "Why did you shoot the clerk" to which the young man, who was obviously surprised, incredulously asked, "I shot the clerk?". Later, in court, the transcript of this questioning was read to the jury, only the inflection was removed. So what the jury heard was "Why did you shoot the clerk", and the response was "I shot the clerk." which sounds like a confession instead of a confused question. The transcript was factually accurate, the words were a direct quote, but the meaning had been changed. I suspect that the same thing is happening with the allegations of President Bush wanting to bomb Al-Jezeera.
Now for the record, I wasn't there. I don't know the tone of the meeting. It may be as bad as some would like to make it. It may be worse. It just wouldn't make sense, and it wouldn't mesh with what we know about President Bush.
-- Jeff