Al Jazeera speech by the leader of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Staff members protested that the speech was not the most important aspect of the debate, and that it was a repetition of previous calls for Arab intervention. "The Guardian" also said in September 2012 that Qatar had taken steps in recent years to consolidate control of Al Jazeera English. A 13 August 2015 article in "The Independent" on poor BBC news reporting also made reference to the political bias in Al Jazeera from the Qatar government. Al Jazeera Al Jazeera (, , literally "The Island", though referring to the
Al Jazeera controversies and criticism motives", as the report was just one of "hundreds of hours of diverse coverage". Some critics have alleged that Al Jazeera has censored criticism of the United States under U.S. pressure. Al Jazeera English's former director, Wadah Khanfar resigned in September 2011 following Wikileaks documents that asserted that he had close ties to the U.S. and agreed to remove content if the United States objected. Some of Al Jazeera's competitors have claimed that Al Jazeera is pro-American. RT, a Russian network sometimes criticized for an alleged Anti-Western bias, asserted that the Wikileaks documents concerning Wadah Khanfar (see above) prove that