The circumstantial evidence was fairly clear - the U.S. intentionally bombed Al-Jazeera office in Afghanistan.
guardian.co.uk
Al-Jazeera Accuses US of Bombing its Kabul Office
Matt Wells in Barcelona
Saturday November 17, 2001
The Guardian
The Qatar-based satellite television channel, al-Jazeera, claimed
yesterday that its Kabul office had been targeted by United
States bombers. Ibrahim Hilal, the chief editor of the Arabic
language network, said it had given the location of its office in
Kabul to the authorities in Washington - yet on Monday night,
its office was destroyed by a bomb that almost wrecked the
nearby BBC bureau.
The Pentagon yesterday denied that it had deliberately targeted
al-Jazeera, but said it could not explain why the office was hit.
Speaking by telephone to the News World conference of media
executives in Barcelona, Mr Hilal said he believed that
al-Jazeera's office in Kabul had been on the Pentagon's list of
targets since the beginning of the conflict but the US did not
want to bomb it while the broadcaster was the only one based in
Kabul.
By this week, however, the BBC had reopened its Kabul office
under Taliban supervision, with the correspondents William
Reeve and Rageh Omar.
On Monday, al-Jazeera executives in Qatar called their
correspondent in Kabul and told him to leave, because they
feared for his safety after the Northern Alliance took over.
However, after receiving assurances from the Northern Alliance
that he would be safe, the reporter decided to stay. He did not
tell Qatar of his decision - that night, his office was bombed. At
the time, Reeve was being interviewed on BBC World from his
bureau in the same street. Pictures of him diving under his desk
to avoid fall-out from the blast have been shown on BBC
television.
Mr Hilal said he believed the attack was deliberate and
long-planned. "I still believe the decision to exclude our office
from the coverage was taken weeks before the bombing. But I
don't think they would do that while we were the only office in
Kabul."
He said that US intelligence forces routinely monitored
communications between Qatar and Kabul - a recent videotape
of an Osama bin Laden statement was played out by satellite to
Qatar from Kabul, but not broadcast until seven days later.
Yet Washington knew of its existence and demanded the right
to broadcast a response.
The US would have known, therefore, that al-Jazeera had
ordered its Kabul correspondent to leave, but would not have
realised that he was still in the city. If the correspondent had
died, there would have been an outcry, and the disaster would
have been compounded if Reeve had been seriously injured or
killed.
Speaking to the conference from the US military's Florida
command centre for the Afghan bombings, Colonel Brian Hoey
denied that al-Jazeera was a target. "The US military does not
and will not target media. We would not, as a policy, target
news media organisations - it would not even begin to make
sense."
He said that the bombing of Serb television in Belgrade during
the Kosovo conflict was a different issue. Col Hoey said the
targets in question "appeared to have government facilities
associated with them".
He said the Pentagon did not have the location coordinates of
the al-Jazeera office in Kabul even though the broadcaster said it
had passed them, on several times, via its partner CNN in
Washington. |
