Bush sued over TV station bombing

RAW STORYPublished: Monday July 10, 2006

The family of an Al Jazeera reporter killed during a US bombing in Iraq in 2003 will sue President Bush, RAW STORY has learned.

Tareq Ayyoub, a reporter for Al Jazeera, was killed on April 8, 2003, during a strike of the building in which the Arab-language TV station was housed. Ayyoub was on the roof of the building for a live broadcast. The Pentagon claimed that the attack had been an accident, having fired after it had detected hostile fire from the building. The incident was featured in the 2004 film Control Room, a documentary about the TV network.

Hamid Rifai, a New Jersey-based attorney for Ayyoub's family, will bring the case to court tomorrow. The lawsuit was spurred on by the revelation in the UK newspaper The Mirror in November 2005 of a British government memorandum reporting that Bush expressed a desire to bomb Al Jazeera's world headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

In a statement issued by Rifai's law firm, he said "Specifically, by falsely claiming National Security concerns and creating Orwellian designations that contradict existing law the administration has prevented the truth from being disclosed to the American public. In this case the administration has decided that since admissions of guilt had been made in the meeting between Bush and Blair that any record of such discussion had to be sealed because of national security concerns. The No. 10 memo as it has now come to be known clearly discloses the truth of Bush's vindictive personal agenda to act contrary to accepted standards and law."

Ayyoub was survived by his wife, Dima, and his daughter, Fatima, who are the plaintiffs in the case.

The law firm's release is available here.