The free clean air of democracy

Ahhh, can you smell it? It's the clean air of freedom.

British newspapers are being threatened with the Official Secrets Act if they publish sections of a leaked Downing Street memo dealing with a dispute between Bush and Tony the Poodle over Iraq.

Quoting from the account of a meeting between the two on 16 April 2004, The Mirror revealed this morning that Dubya wanted to bomb the Arab TV station Aljazeera. This was too mad even for Blair apparently and he supposedly talked Shrub out of it. (I have my doubts about this: I doubt Blair has any influence over the US President aside from saying "Yes" in the right places. And the wrong ones for that matter.)

Of course, the US has killed Aljazeera staff before. The staion notes in its article on the memo that:

In April 2003, an Aljazeera journalist died when its Baghdad office was struck during a US bombing campaign. Nabil Khoury, a US State Department spokesman in Doha, said the strike was a mistake.

In November 2002, Aljazeera's office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a US missile. None of the crew was at the office at the time. US officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site and did not know it was Aljazeera's office.

What a pair. One wants to stop journalists writing stories. The other wants to kill them.

The big question is what else is in the memo? Aside from a frank admission that the intelligence behind the war was just made up for political reasons, I suspect there is one terrifying revelation.

This blog can exclusively reveal the contents of that memo. Bush wanted to bom Aljazeera because he thought it was a country.

He actually meant Iran.

(OK, this is a joke but you read it here first.)