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  "Somewhere in a dusty draw in the deserted bedroom that used to belong to me and my husband Tariq before his killing, lies the statement issued by the American army apologizing for what it described then as the 'accident' of bombing Al Jazeera's office in Baghdad, which resulted in the death of my 33-year-old husband Tariq Ayyoub…"

  Above are the heartfelt words of Tariq's 27-year-old widow Dima Tariq Tahboub, who has been trying to seek justice for the incineration of her husband in April 2003, which she does not believe was an accident.

  "Three years have passed, never a day without declaring in every way and place that the US bombing of the Al Jazeera Office in Baghdad was intentional and premeditated since Al Jazeera had supplied the Pentagon with the coordinates of its Baghdad office months before the war," she writes.

  Dima is shocked and upset that the international community hasn't bothered to investigate the incident and is frustrated that the US government and forces has immunity from prosecution under the International Criminal Court. 

  Are these merely the emotional ramblings of a young woman left to bring up a baby girl on her own "with no father to read her a bedtime story or to celebrate her graduation and wedding party"? Or could her accusation that the killing of her husband was "intentional and premeditated" hold water?

Secret Memo

  A secret and explosive memo, leaked by the Daily Mirror last November and the British government's subsequent attempts to gag Britain's media may represent an important key to the truth.

  The Memo, marked 'Top Secret' is alleged to be a transcript of a conversation between the U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, which took place in the Spring of 2004 as the US military was engaged in brutally 'pacifying' the Iraqi town of Fallujah, while Al Jazeera reporters were carefully – and inconveniently - monitoring the carnage. 

  According to Kevin McGuire of the Mirror, Blair was responsible for talking Bush out of bombing Al Jazeera's headquarters, based in one of America's staunchest Gulf allies Qatar.

  But just as the Mirror planned to release the Memo in full, Britain's Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith subjected the media to what's called a 'gag order' and threatened editors and reporters with prosecution under Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act.

  The White House has characterized the Mirror's reporting as "outlandish" and Blair has brushed the accusations aside but this leaves one wondering why Downing Street retreated into crisis mode, not only prosecuting two of its own civil servants David Keogh and Leo O'Connor, considered responsible for the Memo's leak, but also threatening newspaper and network editors.

  Blair's former Minister of Defense Peter Kilfoyle immediately challenged Downing Street to publish the transcript. "I believe that Downing Street ought to publish this memo in the interests of transparency," he said.

  "If it was the case that President Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera in what is after all a friendly country, it speaks volumes and it raises questions about subsequent attacks that took place on the press that wasn't embedded with coalition forces," Kilfoyle added.

  When news of the Memo reached Al Jazeera its editors, anchors, reporters and technicians were concerned and outraged as the network's airtime burned with the story hour-after-hour.

  Many employees took to the streets with placards determined to let the world know of their plight. Others established the on-line blog www.dontbomb.blogspot.com/ in an effort to keep the story alive, as the British media maintained an eerie silence on the affair after being threatened by Lord Goldsmith. 

  The channel's Managing Director Wadah Khanfar went a step further and wrote a letter to Tony Blair before flying to London to investigate the story and meet with the British Prime Minister. In the event, Khanfar was rebuffed by Downing Street but he did manage to hand over his missive.

  "We are taking this allegation very seriously because it concerns our very lives and our organization," Khanfar told British reporters. "It concerns journalism as a whole and our audience all over the world so we indeed very concerned about it…

  "We came to London with many questions and were looking to find answers" but, "so far, we have not had any official communication from Downing Street nor the US. We have only heard general statements that did not really say much."

Publish and be damned

  There was someone else who demanded publication of the memo, too. The Conservative British MP Boris Johnson, who until recently was also editor of the right-wing Spectator magazine, asked for anyone who had the memo to forward it, saying he would publish even if this resulted in a jail term.

  Johnson is the last person one would imagine could be an Al Jazeera supporter, as he was gung ho over the invasion of Iraq from the get-go. But judging from one of his opinion columns, published in the Daily Telegraph, his views have drastically changed.

  "Some of us feel that we have an abusive relationship with this war," he writes. "Every time we get our hopes up, we get punched by some piece of bad news. We yearn to be told that we're wrong, that things are going to get better, that the glass if half-full. That's why I would love to think that Dubya (George Bush) was just having one of his little frat-house wisecracks, when he talked of destroying the Qatar-based satellite TV station. Maybe he was only horsing around. Maybe it was a flippant one-liner, of the kind that he delivers before making one of his dramatic exits into the broom-closet.

  "Perhaps it was a kind of Henry II moment. You know, who will rid me of this turbulent TV station? Maybe, he had a burst of spacy Reagan-esque surrealism, like the time the old boy forgot that the mikes were switched on, and started a press conference with the announcement that he was going to start bombing Russia in five minutes…

  "…Who knows? But if 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?"

  "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.

  "If someone passes me the document within the next few days, I will be very happy to publish it in The Spectator, and risk a jail sentence. The Public needs to judge for itself. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we suppress the truth, we forget what we are fighting for, and in an important respect we become as sick and as bad as our enemies."

  Almost overnight, there came the weird spectacle of Johnson becoming the darling of left wing anti-war bloggers. The website www.blairwatch.co.uk asked its readers "Who will stand up for press freedom, or at least the freedom not to be bombed to buggery?"  Some 304 bloggers with their own sites both in the UK and around the world responded, pledging that they too, would publish the memo.

  While we must not take the Mirror's claims as sacrosanct, the idea that a document of such magnitude with such severe implications should be brushed under the carpet and the media threatened is surely abhorrent in the free world.

  In the meantime, we can only speculate as to the veracity of the Mirror report and take a look at the circumstantial evidence referred to by Boris Johnson.

  During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Al Jazeera's Kabul office was bombed by an American 'smart bomb'. Then Matt Wells of the Guardian asked, "Did the US mean to hit the Kabul offices of Al Jazeera TV? Some journalists are convinced it was targeted for being on the 'wrong side'."

  In April 2003, when the Iraq war was in full flush, Al Jazeera's Baghdad office was hit by a US missile when cameraman Tareq Ayoubi was killed and another Al Jazeera staff member Zuhair Al-Iraqi wounded. On the same day, the office of Abu Dhabi television was also hit.

  A few days before, the Palestine Hotel, which was known to house a large contingent of foreign media, was shattered by a US tank shell, causing media deaths and injuries. The Pentagon described this incident as an accident too and refrained from punishing the perpetrators.

  Al Jazeera's then Chief Editor said: "Witnesses in the area saw the plane fly over twice before dropping its bombs. Our office is in a residential area and even the Pentagon knows its location."

  In August 2003, Mazin Dana, a Palestinian cameraman with Reuters was shot dead by US soldiers while filming outside Abu Ghraib prison. His colleague Nael Al-Shyoukhi said US troops approached the team while they were filming and opened fire without warning hitting Mazin in the chest.

  Last year, the former CEO of CNN Eason Jordan was forced to resign after telling a panel at the Davos Economic forum that he knew of 12 journalists who had been killed by coalition forces in Iraq.

  Last September, 'Reporters without Borders' called on the Iraqi army – under US command – to explain why its soldiers shot and seriously wounded Associated Press Television News (APTN) cameraman Abdul Kamil Hassan, and charged that "those responsible for restoring order in Iraq – the Iraqi army and police and US troops – had become "serious persecutors" of journalists in recent months.

  Another APTN employee Sami Shuker Naji has been incarcerated in Abu Ghraib since March 30^th last year for supposedly 'collaborating with insurgents', while a Reuters TV cameraman Ali Omar Ibrahim Al-Mashadani has been in the custody of the US military since August 10, 2005.

  Some 53 media employees were killed worldwide in 2004, many of those in Iraq and at least four at the hands of the US military.

Hateful propaganda

  Returning to the Memo, does the Bush administration have a motive for wishing Al Jazeera off the planet? Take a look at some of the comments made by senior government and military officials and be the judge.

  In June 2005, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Al Jazeera of pounding the United States image "day after day".

  In Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, the President referred to the network and other Arab channels as "hateful propaganda coming out of the Arab world".

  During the US onslaught of Fallujah, which Al Jazeera dutifully reported, Rumsfeld said, "I can definitely say that what Al Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable."

  In March 2003, Gen. John Abizaid lashed out at an Al Jazeera reporter during a press conference calling the network's coverage "totally unacceptable" and "disgusting", prompting an American reporter to ask the general whether Al Jazeera should be classed as "hostile media".

  In March 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney said the network ran the risk of being labeled "Osama's outlet to the world".

  This year, the Pentagon took coverage of Iraq into its own hands and actually paid a media agency to place "good news" stories written by members of the military in Iraqi papers as though they had been penned by Iraq journalists. And this came on the heels of Rumsfeld lauding the proliferation of free press in Iraq as the best thing that has happened since the ousting of Saddam Hussein.

  Tariq Ayoubi's grieving widow Dima does not agree. "The report published by the British Daily Mirror is an eye-opener on the secret world of American political deception and the American agenda to silence all eye witnesses and opposing voices to its policies," she said.

  "There is nothing new in the report except that it revealed the ugly face of so-called American freedom and democracy, preached to the world by the American President." Assisted by her British lawyer, the young mother continues her battle for truth and justice but, sadly, has little reason for optimism.