Did President Bush tell Prime Minister Blair that he would like to bomb Al Jazeera? According to leaked document, allegedly a secret minute of a conversation between the president and the prime minister in April 2004, Mr. Bush seriously considered taking out the Al Jazeera studios in Qatar.

The president was reportedly angered by the Arab TV network’s broadcasting of Al Qaeda propaganda, including messages from Osama bin Laden, and its coverage of Iraq, particularly the American assault on Fallujah, was slanted against the American led coalition.

Extracts from the transcript were published on Tuesday in a Left-wing tabloid that has been highly critical of Mr. Bush, the London Daily Mirror. The White House dismissed the report, in terms that carefully avoided claiming the document was a forgery: “We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response.”

Downing Street initially refused to comment, then on Tuesday threatened to prosecute newspaper editors who published details of the conversation. The British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned editors that they could be in breach of the Official Secrets Act. It later emerged that two officials are to be charged under the Act, apparently for leaking the document to the Mirror. Their trial may be held in camera.

The vehemence of the British government’s response alone suggests that this matter is being taken seriously both in London and in Washington. While it is not unusual for Downing Street to seek an injunction to forestall publication of a leaked document, it is unusual, if not unprecedented, to intimidate editors in this manner.

It could also prove counterproductive. For if, as seems more than likely, the conversation did indeed take place, then a public interest defence might well persuade a court that publication was justified. Prosecution of an editor could backfire badly.

Whitehall officials say that if the president made such a remark, it was merely in jest. That seems to me the most plausible interpretation. It is also suggested by the same officials that Mr. Blair talked Mr. Bush out of mounting such an attack. That claim, besides being incompatible with the first (you don’t talk somebody out of a joke), sounds to me like spin, intended to limit the collateral damage to Mr. Blair.

The press reaction has, of course, been one of outrage, not only on the predictably anti-American Left, but also on the supposedly Atlanticist Right. Yesterday, for example, a Tory member of Parliament and the editor of the Spectator magazine, Boris Johnson, fulminated against the attorney general’s publication ban in a Daily Telegraph column headlined, “I’ll Go to Jail To Print the Truth About Bush and Al Jazeera.” “We all hope and pray,” Mr. Johnson wrote, “that the American president was engaging in nothing more than neo-con Tourette-style babble about blowing things up.”

What interests me about the conversation in dispute is why anybody, let alone a worldly-wise politician and journalist like Mr. Johnson, should be surprised by it. Indeed, I would be surprised if Messrs. Bush and Blair had not discussed ways of limiting the damage done by Islamist propaganda, whose main conduit is indeed Al Jazeera TV. It may well be that the thought of silencing the Arab network crossed their minds, only to be dismissed as too risky. If so, were the two leaders wrong to consider that option?

I don’t think so. That shutting down Al Jazeera would be desirable from the Anglo-American point of view is obviously true. And if Qatar, a Gulf state that is nominally an ally of America (on which it relies for its independence), has allowed its capital to become Al Qaeda’s principal propaganda base, it has no right to expect America automatically to refrain from punitive action on its territory.

The wider issues raised by the Bush-Blair Al Jazeera exchange are two. First, how far can the West tolerate the dissemination of Islamist propaganda intended to poison the minds of Muslims against Jews and “Crusaders”? Second, how much information are Western governments obliged to give about their internal decision-making process, and are they justified in suppressing sensitive information, even if this means penalizing the press, to protect Western interests?

Islamist Web sites and other means of communication are constantly monitored by security services and in some cases those responsible for propagating incendiary material have been prosecuted. I mentioned last week the case of an Islamist Webmaster who now faces extradition from Britain to America to face terrorism charges, Barbar Ahmad. The fact that it is the major Arab global network does not give Al Jazeera the right to disseminate material that directly threatens American or British national security.

Just as jamming devices were deployed during the Cold War against hostile propaganda, so more modern technologies can now be used to bring pressure to bear on the likes of Al Jazeera. While judgements about program balance are notoriously subjective, there should be no argument about our right to interdict broadcasts of Al Qaeda videos that incite terrorism or wild claims of atrocities by Western troops. Other methods could include financial sanctions and denial of access or facilities to Al Jazeera journalists.

Mr. Johnson argued that “if there is an ounce of truth in the notion that George Bush seriously proposed the destruction of Al Jazeera, and was only dissuaded by the prime minister, then we need to know, and we need to know urgently.”

Actually, we have no right to know the contents of secret conversations between presidents and prime ministers. Now that this particular cat is out of the bag, it may make sense for British authorities to put the record straight. But, in general, no government is obliged to reveal anything at all about operational decisions in wartime.

Wartime? Aye, there’s the rub. Most Americans believe they are fighting a war against terror. Most Europeans don’t. Most Americans are determined to win this war. Most Europeans have already given up.

Do you want proof? It was reported yesterday that a successful production of Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine the Great” at the Barbican Theater in London deliberately censored the play in order not to offend Muslims. Passages in which Shakespeare’s rival depicts his hero burning the Koran and insulting the Prophet Mohammed were cut because “it would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions.”

So it is okay to bowdlerise our literature to protect putative Islamic sensibilities but scandalous to suggest, even frivolously, that broadcasts inciting Muslims in our midst to become suicide bombers should be silenced. Marlowe made his Tamburlaine declare that Nature “doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.” It seems his countrymen of today prefer appeasing minds.