The Al Jazeera bombing memo is an unpublished memorandum made within the British government which is said to be the minutes of a discussion between United States President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Daily Mirror published a story on its front page on 22 November 2005 that said the memo quotes Bush speculating about a US bombing raid on Al Jazeera's world headquarters in the Qatari capital Doha and other locations. The story said that Blair persuaded Bush to take no action. Details of the memo The five-page memorandum is said by the Mirror to be a record of the meeting between the two leaders which took place on 16 April 2004 at the height of Operation Vigilant Resolve, an assault on Fallujah by U.S. Marines and Iraqi security forces. Al Jazeera reporters were in the city providing video footage of the conflict. The day before the meeting, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described Al Jazeera's coverage as "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable." Al Jazeera reporters defended their live broadcasts of the civilian casualties by stating "the pictures do not lie". The White House dismissed the allegations made in the article. Given that Qatar is an ally of the United States and the United Kingdom in the Iraq War, many commentators speculated that even if the reports of the memorandum were accurate, they may simply have been recording a statement which the President did not intend to be taken seriously. A White House official told CNN "We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response," and a Pentagon official called the Daily Mirror report "absolutely absurd". A BBC News correspondent has suggested that if President Bush did indeed make the comments they were intended as "some kind of joke." Writing in The Independent on 28 November Andreas Whittam Smith countered, observing that "official note takers don't normally record jokes". He also pointed to the alleged leaker's "25 years' experience of tough postings in place such as Islamabad and Khartoum, ... often involved in intelligence work" and concluded that he "must have felt exceptionally troubled by what he was seeing." According to a report in The Daily Telegraph: "People who have seen the document say the real reason that it is being suppressed by the Government is because it contains a potentially damaging private discussion between the two leaders about the controversial United States attack