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...or...<br><br>BOB SIMON, CBS NEWS "60 MINUTES II": Larry, I can't believe that it was deliberate. I refuse to believe it. But I would hasten to add that, in many parts of the world, it will be totally believed. I've just spent more than a month in the Middle East and Europe, and just coming back to the States, you feel that you're watching a different war on television, not only compared to the Middle East, where, of course, anger against the United States is rising by the day, but also in Europe, where television, even British television, is far more skeptical about what's going on, far more skeptical about American war aims, far more skeptical about the number of civilian casualties, about exactly what's happening. Here you see advancing American troops, mainly from embedded reporters. You see retired American generals. These are the dominant themes on American television. It's an entirely different picture overseas, and I'm sure that the way this war is being portrayed overseas, the idea that the Americans targeted journalists will appear far more credible than it does here.<br><br>KING: Martha Brant in Qatar for "Newsweek," would you agree with what Bob just said?<br><br>MARTHA BRANT, "NEWSWEEK": Bob is absolutely right. When I talk to my friends at home about what they're seeing on TV, it's very different from what we're seeing here, lots of images of civilians dead. And people are going to take this, conspiracy-minded as it may sound, as a direct target on Al Jazeera. Remember that Al Jazeera's offices got hit in Afghanistan, Larry, and people are going to put those two together.<br><br>It's not lost on the people here at CENTCOM. For the first time ever, they finally have some Arabic speakers that they've brought in, and they brought them out a couple hours after we got news of the attack to express condolences on Al Jazeera in Arabic. I don't know how far that went in mending things. I really -- I guess we'll have to see. But here -- it's very perplexing. Not only have they not confirmed that it was, indeed, an air strike, but every day at briefings, Larry -- behind me, I don't know if you can see these expensive plasma screens -- we have images of mosques that were avoided, schools that were avoided, in fact, a case where they were receiving fire from within a mosque and they didn't hit the mosque, to preserve this historic structure.<br><br>So it's confusing why, if they can do it in those instances, they weren't able to do it at the Palestine Hotel or, indeed, Al Jazeera, which as Omar says, was well marked.<br><br>KING: Christiane Amanpour will be leaving us in a couple minutes, at the bottom of the hour, so I want to check on the point that Bob Simon made because you hopscotch the region. Is he right? Is there -- do you see it differently -- do they see it differently in Europe and the Middle East than they see it in the United States?<br><br>AMANPOUR: Well, I think, absolutely, and he pretty much summed it up perfectly. It is like two different wars. And you've heard Martha talk about it, as well. Watching it and seeing the television coverage from this region is just a completely different story. And I was also in Europe last week, and again the same thing.<br><br>You know, it's a different situation because in America, as you know, you're watching our air in the United States, it is almost entirely, if not entirely, from the perspective of the embedded reporters. And there's very little civilian damage shown. There's very little -- where are all these Iraqis who have been killed or surrendered or whatever? In other words, there's very little of the other side that comes across on the current American coverage.<br><br>
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"Winning the war on jihadist extremism is the Democratic Party's first priority this year and every year until the danger recedes" Open letter from the (Clintonite) Democratic Leadershp Council
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[/center][/quote]<br><br>Here's a follow-up from our local morning newspaper:<br><br>FAIRLY UNBALANCED<br>That's how to describe Fox News Channel's goofy lawsuit against Al Franken for using its "fair and balanced" slogan to subtitle his upcoming book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."<br><br>That is, unless this whole case is just a publicity stunt.<br><br>More evidence of the bogus nature of the silly lawsuit comes from the words "unstable," "shrill," "intoxicated" and "deranged" used in the suit to describe Franken.<br><br>All that does is feed lines to the left-wing funnyman.<br><br>"As far as the personal attacks go, when I read 'intoxicated or deranged' and 'shrill and unstable' in their complaint, I thought for a moment I was a Fox commentator," he said in a statement.<br><br>Meanwhile, Franken is reaping free publicity for his new book, which doesn't even come out until next month. It hit No. 1 at 
