November 12, 2004

Filmmakers Jehane Noujaim and Hani Salama discuss "Control Room" and Look Inside Al  Jazeera's Coverage of the Unfolding Iraq War

I think that if you talk to people in Al Jazeera, they think that maybe that’s what is threatening—the inability of governments to control the editorial decisions of the channel. There were rumors that the formation of the channel was initially helped along by American think tanks. --  Jehane Noujaim

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

"Control Room," newly released on DVD and a BuzzFlash premium, is a documentary that leaves you both hopeful and despondent. BuzzFlash spoke with filmmakers Jehane Noujaim and Hani Salama about that paradox in August. Harvard educated Jehane Noujaim, the daughter of an American mother and Egyptian father, filmed in Qatar just before the commencement of the Iraq War. The footage at the Al-Jazeera headquarters and vicinity of Central Command is riveting. As both the film itself and our interview explore, even the westernized Al Jazeera journalism professionals, who should be our friends and allies, have been marginalized by a radical, extremist White House and one-party U.S. government.

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BuzzFlash: You did a marvelous documentary on the cusp of and during the Iraq war. One of the first things the viewer learns is that Central Command [CENTCOM] -- the set that was actually designed by people from Hollywood for the Bush administration -- was only 20 kilometers from Al Jazeera.

Jehane Noujaim: Yes, we got there and realized it really wasn’t very far. It was about 15 miles away. Al Jazeera was in the center of the city, and Central Command was on the outskirts, more in the desert outside the city. Doha is the city and Qatar is the country.

BuzzFlash: How would you describe the government? Pro-American? Neutral?

Jehane Noujaim: The government of Qatar is probably considered the most pro-American government in the Middle East. It’s headed by the Emir of Qatar -- quite a progressive thinker. He just worked on developing a constitution for his people, and women are voting, as of last year. He was the instigator behind Jazeera, a channel, which he was hoping would have the most uncensored news and allow for freedom of speech in the Arab world.

Al Jazeera started as a government funded channel, so the journalists see themselves as similar to the government funded CBC or some of the government funded channels of France, Germany, and Italy. But they wanted to be completely independent from the government after five years. Initially they started with a grant from the government of Qatar. The idea was spearheaded by the Emir of Qatar. He was looking for people to start the channel who had a good background in journalism. At the same time, the BBC Arab World Service was shut down, so a number of journalists who had been trained by the BBC and were fluent Arabic speakers were jobless.

It was a pretty perfect fit. A lot of these journalists decided to come work for Al Jazeera, but under the condition that there wouldn’t be the same government restrictions that they had experienced working in their home countries. Much of journalism in the Arab world is state run. They didn’t want to experience that again.

Hani Salama: Now they hoped to be independently run, meaning financing from advertising, and footage sales. But they were still slightly in the red. If you think about big companies across the Arab world that would want to advertise with such a controversial channel, you don’t find very many. Al Jazeera has been ostracized, criticized, and was disliked by many Arab regimes because Al Jazeera has been so heavily critical of them. In the Arab world, if you want to have a successful company, you often have to have a good relationship with your government in order to get permissions and do a lot of business in the country.

For Al Jazeera, most of the income has been footage sales to news outlets like CNN and ABC. They have very good relationships with many of the Western networks and they sell a lot of footage to them.

BuzzFlash: It’s good to get this background because the film jumps right into the center of it and lets the people speak for themselves. So, there’s a pro-Western government that is the home base for this Hollywood movie set CENTCOM with huge plasma TVs and a very orchestrated presentation system for news. And the U.S. government felt comfortable enough that it went to Qatar, but it’s the same country that’s supporting a station that the American government sees as anti-American.

Hani Salama: There is a huge irony there, and it’s part of what attracted us to go make the film there. We were hoping to get even closer to the office of the Emir and watch him fielding phone calls from the U.S. Embassy and talking to the manager of Al Jazeera, because he must be playing a balancing game.

BuzzFlash: Your film reveals some of this from the inside out. It concentrates on the players. A main player in CENTCOM is Josh Rushing, a stereotypical, earnest young American, but nonetheless he’s a P.R. person. Then you focus heavily on the people in Al Jazeera, and it looks like a Western operation. These are very attractive men and women, in Western dress with cable news-style visuals. What is it about Al Jazeera the U.S. finds so threatening?

Jehane Noujaim: Well, I think that the U.S. government has struggled with what kind of relationship they could have with Al Jazeera, because, on the one hand, they know that Al Jazeera is trusted by a huge population in the Arab world. Even though Al Jazeera has been kicked out of many Arab countries (meaning their offices there were closed down), many of the governments cannot control whether the population sees Al Jazeera or not. At one point, one of the translators says, “You know, everybody has access to a satellite dish. A Bedouin in the middle of the desert can put up a satellite dish.” So there really isn’t much control that Arab governments or the U.S. government can have over what Al Jazeera shows and whether people get access to the information shown on Al Jazeera.

I think that if you talk to people in Al Jazeera, they think that maybe that’s what is threatening—the inability of governments to control the editorial decisions of the channel. There were rumors that the formation of the channel was initially helped along by American think tanks. The American government felt like it had lost control in a way because Jazeera was showing the results of war. They were showing the civilian casualties. They were trying to get the interviews during the Afghanistan war with Taliban leaders. They were pursuing what we were always taught journalists should pursue--which is to try and get an interview with the “enemy” or the other side if you can, because you should try to understand the perceptions of all those involved. Instead these attempts by Al Jazeera to show another side were labeled as Anti-American.

Hani Salama: What’s threatening? You would hear a number of different answers. You heard: They’re increasing Arab anger against us because they’re showing these images of children who have been wounded by bombs, or they’ve been showing the civilian casualties. They’re making our job more difficult. At Al Jazeera, they felt like the threat was that these images would ultimately get back to the United States, and people would rise up after seeing these images of dead soldiers as well as Iraqi casualties and say, “Look, we don’t want this war fought in our names,” because of the power of the image. Some journalists at Al Jazeera felt like the US government was worried about a similar situation to Vietnam—where images came back and effected public perceptions of the war.

I think a struggle is going on in the U.S. government as to how to deal with the channel. Rumsfeld has appeared on the channel. Condoleezza Rice has appeared on the channel. Powell’s come on the channel. During the war, you had broadcasts directly to the Iraqi people by Bush and by Blair with this red background that I don’t think you saw in the United States. So they were using Al Jazeera in that way. And the information minister, who was considered a joke among the Arab population -- among the Jazeera journalists as well -- soon came out after that and said, “Jazeera keeps broadcasting American propaganda. We’re going to kick them out of the country.” So Al Jazeera’s answer to all this is we’re being slammed and criticized and kicked out by all sides, so we have to be doing something right.

BuzzFlash: You mention the casualties. There are these chilling moments several times in the film where you’re watching the feeds come in that Al Jazeera is airing. There’s a statement by Donald Rumsfeld in which he accuses Al Jazeera of basically faking deaths of women and children and saying that they’re bringing bodies to sites and claiming these people have been killed when they weren’t killed there. Rumsfeld says the truth will ultimately come out. Liars will be caught. And of course, we’re watching that and thinking, well, yes, Mr. Rumsfeld. Speak for yourself.

Jehane Noujaim: There’s such a strong audience reaction now to these parts of the film that didn’t exist a short while ago.

BuzzFlash: He’s making such fraudulent claims that you know he’s lying about the truth. We know, for instance, hundreds of women and children in Fallujah were killed in “collateral damage” and buried in a soccer field. And the United States says this doesn’t happen, but there’s credible proof to the contrary. We know about the wedding massacre in Syria, and Rumsfeld accuses Al-Jazeera of showing something that’s not true when it is true. And he’s the liar.

There’s another ironic moment after the capture of the military unit that included Jessica Lynch. President Bush makes a statement demanding that American prisoners be treated with the same humaneness and consideration that America shows toward the Iraqi prisoners.

Hani Salama: Right. That was during the summer. Many people see it and say that it seems like we edited the yesterday. But we actually finished editing in November of 2003, long before the Abu Ghraib prison photographs came out.

BuzzFlash: You’ve got this on your web site, www.controlroommovie.com. When you click on the site, one of the televisions has an account which for us was one of the most chilling moments in the movie. The producer of Al Jazeera is recounting a day when the Al Jazeera broadcast studio in Baghdad was attacked.

Jehane Noujaim: That’s the senior producer at Al Jazeera.

BuzzFlash: A major figure in your film.

Jehane Noujaim: One of the main figures. He was on duty the day that the call came in for journalists saying that their office was being attacked.

BuzzFlash: As he recounts this, it’s just spine-tingling, because he’s talking about how they became aware this was happening, and a journalist for Al Jazeera went up to the rooftop. The senior producer describes how they asked to turn the camera away from the journalist toward the city. You see the American plane diving toward Al Jazeera. And this journalist that the camera turned away from is killed in the attack.

Hani Salama: It was a very difficult moment to watch. He actually said that the luckiest thing that happened at Al Jazeera that day was that the electricity had gone off in the office, and they turned on the generator on the roof to start the equipment running again. So the missiles went toward the generator rather than to the equipment inside the office. There were about 25 people inside the office. So instead of killing 25 people, it only killed the journalist who was on the roof.

And then there’s the incident at the Arab TV station Abu Dabi. All of their equipment was shot down, but nobody was killed. But their equipment was all gunned down.

BuzzFlash: The third incident that day was the tank attack on the Palestine hotel where many journalists were staying, and some were killed.

Jehane Noujaim: Right. It felt like there was something very strange going on because the reports from the press conference were saying that they received fire from the lobby of the hotel, and then the tank fired around the floor of the hotel. The other thing was that there were 300 journalists in that hotel, and all of those journalists reported that there was no firing coming from the hotel. Then I talked to Lieutenant Rushing who said, “Look, why would we ever fire at the journalists on purpose? Of course that’s going to raise negative media attention on us.” That makes sense as well. And it was after that - a year ago - when an Al-Jazeera reporter looked at my footage recently -the footage of the reporter on the roof of Al-Jazeera before it was attacked. He wondered, “Why did we have to put him in a black helmet? Black is the color of the helmets worn by the Iraqi military. There could have been confusion on the part of the American in the plane.” There definitely could have been confusion, but it just seems important to investigate why all three offices were struck.

I was trying to be as open as possible, trying to hear the different perspectives. But it was definitely very challenging. In five hours, the three main offices housing the unembedded journalists were hit. On the other hand, you always hear that one can never understand the fog of war unless you experience it.

BuzzFlash: There were other incidents of journalists or camera assistants accidentally shot.

Hani Salama: This was a dangerous war for journalists--there were journalists wounded and killed on all sides of the conflict. There was a missile launched in front of the Sheraton hotel where the Sahaf, the Minister of Information, was staying. This was considered to be a warning. A TV crew was shot another time in one of their cars. So they definitely felt a number of warnings were given to them. Samir says at one point: I never thought it would happen again. We’ve been working with the Americans. We’ve had Rumsfeld on our channel. We’ve had Condoleezza Rice and Powell. We’ve been having weekly meetings at the American Embassy. They were just so shocked that it happened. But he said he just didn’t think it would happen again after Kabul because the day before the liberation of Afghanistan, their offices were bombed. I can’t remember the exact wording of the explanation, but it was something like, “Well, Al Jazeera has been known to host enemy combatants, which basically meant that they were interviewing Taliban leaders, so it was a legitimate target.” That’s difficult to hear, as an American, because a journalist should try to get as much information as they can for their public. They should be trying to get information from the people you’re fighting against, as well as your own soldiers--to give the public more of an in-depth understanding of the situation.

BuzzFlash: From our perspective, one could argue it seems like they were sending a message. We would speculate that the Bush administration was putting a damper on journalists going out and getting stories independently and showing men and women and families that were killed, and sort of saying, you know, stay in line because you’re not safe either. They want this to be a war without bodies. So if Al Jazeera, or British or American journalists or whomever go out and record the actual carnage, from the Bush administration’s perspective they’re betraying America because that puts a damper on their message.

Hani Salama: If there’s a point to the film, I think it is to put yourself for a minute in the shoes of these Arab journalists and the people who are watching Al Jazeera. And to hear, for example, that when their journalists were killed, not only did they not receive an investigation or an apology, but they were told that there was shooting coming from the offices of Al Jazeera, of Abu Dabi, of the power site itself. This kind of response, after being shot at, was very upsetting to the people at the channel.

BuzzFlash: You show the emotion of the Al Jazeera staff at the loss of someone who they cared for and were close to. There were people crying. There was a news conference afterwards. It was a very emotional part of the documentary.

Jehane Noujaim: It was a very emotional moment. The other part of it was that while this was happening at Al Jazeera, it wasn’t only Al Jazeera journalists that were outraged by it. It really was the Western journalists as well, although there was a self-consciousness not to cover it as deeply as they could have because they could be quickly blamed for being completely consumed with themselves as journalists. At the two press conferences at Central Command, one in the morning and one the next day at 2 p.m., a lot of questions were asked of Vincent Brooks about what had happened the previous day. People were still in complete confusion and anger over it. Condolence letters lined the walls of Al Jazeera, they had letters from every Western, European, Arab network on their walls. Then at 3 p.m., members of the press conference looked up to the television screens in Central Command, and the troops were moving into the center of Baghdad and to that statue. That was directly in front of Palestine Hotel, where the tank round had just been fired the previous day. Most of the journalists were required to move on to this breaking story, and it was happening directly in front of their hotel windows. From Al Jazeera’s perspective, that was planned -- they had decided to topple the statue in front of the Palestine because it would be this moment of celebration that would be right in front of the hotel room windows of all of the journalists that were in Baghdad at the time.

BuzzFlash: And the senior producer deconstructs that moment, which we’ve pointed out, as have other alternative media sites, that that toppling of the statue was a manufactured moment.

Jehane Noujaim: The LA times also came out with an article about a month ago saying that the toppling of the statue and the cheering around it was orchestrated by a “psychological unit of the Army.” You should look it up to get the exact quote. This is what we have heard outside Al Jazeera about it being orchestrated. However, Saddam Hussein was not a popular figure and I am sure there was dancing in the streets at his statue being toppled. But how do you really know all the details unless you are there? What was striking to me was not whether it was organized or not, but just the differences in the images projected in the Arab world and in the United States. To see the toppling of the statue on US TV, one would think that all of Iraq was celebrating around that statue that day, but to see it on Jazeera and other Arab channels, you saw some of the wide shots which showed about a hundred people around the statue. You just end up with different sides of the world having a very different understanding of what actually took place. And that results in once again, creating huge divides in understanding between people—when it is possible for us all to be broadcasting nuanced reports.

BuzzFlash: When you see a larger photo of the area where the statue of Saddam Hussein was, as the senior producer points out, you don’t see crowds of people in the street or anything. It’s a very isolated crowd. It’s not like suddenly, as the American media reported, Iraqis rushed out in this great burst of freedom, of liberation, to topple the statue. It was a relatively small group there.

Jehane Noujaim: Right. Which is not to say that people weren’t excited that Saddam Hussein was gone, but when you saw the whole back image of the wider shot, it was pretty empty, and it just wasn’t what it seemed to be when you saw the pictures that actually emerged on mainstream network television in the US.

BuzzFlash: There’s a very moving segment -- something Al Jazeera broadcast that you didn’t see on American television at the time -- with an Iraqi man who, in an American raid, lost six members of his family. He’s extremely agitated and he says if this is democracy, I don’t want it. I’ve just lost six members of my family. This isn’t worth it. And I don’t know if it’s at that point or another, but a technician in the control room says, to paraphrase it, I’m a moderate man. I don’t feel strongly about anti-Americanism.

Hani Salama: I think you’re talking about the translator who actually translates Bush mostly. He is an Iraqi who has lived and worked abroad for many years and now works at Al Jazeera. Although he said it was his job to translate Bush and other American figures and he treated the translation professionally, it must have been difficult for him to watch these images of destruction from his home country and then hear Bush talking about bringing democracy. He told us that he felt US occupation would push moderates aside leaving room only for extremists. Soon there will be no more room for people who speak softly and think rationally -- people like him. He felt like the military attack was just working to radicalize people more and more.

BuzzFlash: He says it in sort of a soft way, but it seems such a significant moment, because you realize how counter-productive the Bush strategy has been because these are the people America should want on its side.

Jehane Noujaim: And should be reaching out to.

BuzzFlash: And yet he’s part of a news network that the United States Administration is continually condemning as some arm of Osama bin Laden.

Jehane Noujaim: This is what continually upsets journalists at Al Jazeera like him because they consistently say, look, we don’t have an American audience, we have an Arab audience so if something happens in Iraq or in Palestine and Israel, that will quickly turn into our first story. At the same time they have discussion shows which challenge dominant thinking in the middle east, they have call in shows for people to express their views. Jazeera’s point is that they are providing an outlet to question the status quo in the Arab world, they are encouraging people to question and debate—and this is the first step towards more democratic thinking (even if that thinking may not always be pro-US). So their point is that they are providing the tools which will help the US bring democracy to the region.

BuzzFlash: They do broadcast things that some Americans might find objectionable. They allow commentary from the full spectrum of the Arab world, which means people who are anti-American and maybe some who are anti-Israeli. But that is democracy. The New York Times will allow people who were for the Iraq war, who were against the Iraq war, who are for Bush or against Bush. Al Jazeera is staffed by professionals. You point out more than one incident where the issue of whether a story meets professional standards comes up, including an almost comic scene where the senior producer berates a production assistant for scheduling an interview with someone.

Hani Salama: Many people have come up after that scene and said: Why did he berate him? Everything that he said turned out to be true.

BuzzFlash: He thought his bias against the administration was so strong that it was incredible. And so here’s this senior producer of Al Jazeera saying don’t get me a clown like that. I want someone with more credibility, not someone who’s so over the top.

Jehane Noujaim: Also his point was this is a news show, and we should be able to bring somebody on who’s going to give the reasons why there’s support for the war in the United States and against the war in the United States. Samir felt like there was too much opinion there, and too little analysis.

BuzzFlash: The point is these are serious journalists and they’re trying to do a serious job. Tell me what you think of Rushing's statement - again he’s providing spin, but at the same time, he is somewhat open to alternative perspectives. He says Al Jazeera, as he understands it, is the Fox News of the Arab world.

Jehane Noujaim: He says they appeal to an audience just as Fox News appeals to an audience.

BuzzFlash: What’s your reaction to that comment?

Jehane Noujaim: I think that there is some validity to both of them appealing to an audience. I think that Samir and people in Al Jazeera would say the same thing -- that they have an audience, and that if you don’t in some ways cater to your audience, then you’re out of business. I do think that, because Al Jazeera is the first channel which was really an attempt to be an independent, non-state-run voice in the Arab world, many of the journalists there do feel a personal responsibility to provide information from all sides. The people in the Arab world have been spun to for a long time and have had very controlled press for a very long time. I think Al Jazeera does feel a responsibility to show the Congressional hearings, to show all of Bush and Rumsfeld and Powell’s speeches live, to bring on analysts from the United States.

When I watch Fox, I haven’t seen any Iraqi analysts on. I haven’t seen the other side as much as you’d like, although I have to say they have had us on Fox twice, and they have said that this is a movie that people should see. They have definitely surprised me. The difference in the Arab world is that there’s been only one channel -- now there are a few other channels that have sprouted up, so it’s going to be interesting to see what the competition does. But for quite awhile, you’ve had one channel, whereas there are a number of other channels besides Fox.

BuzzFlash: There is a moment in the film where the senior producer says something about having a family and it being time to earn a higher wage. He says he wouldn’t mind going to work for Fox News. Was he serious?

Jehane Noujaim: Samir can be a cynical guy, and he jokes a lot. After that, he said, “Oh, I’d prefer CNN or maybe ABC. I like very much the coverage of ABC.” So if you asked him now, he would say yes, that that was a joke. But the part afterwards where he says that he would send his children to the United States if he had the chance to is not necessarily a joke, and it’s something that I thought was very important to bring up, because there is a desire in the Arab world to send kids to school in the US. I get those questions all the time-- “what is the US like?” “Do I like it better in Egypt or the US,” People in Egypt ask me, “Your mother’s American?” Yes, she’s originally from Indiana. Her father fought in World War II. My uncle fought in Vietnam. “Your father is Egyptian” Yes he is from Port Said-- “So where do you like better?” It is an impossible question to answer-- I have strong attachments to and feel very much a part of both worlds. But people have a fascination with what the U.S. has to offer. As an American, it is depressing when you go to Al Jazeera and something happens, like the offices get bombed, because that is more negative press for the United States. People look toward the U.S. right now wondering what is a democracy? How can we bring democracy to the Middle East? What are elections about? We’d like to be able to elect our own leaders. We’d like to be able to have freedom of the press. How do you do that? Does it really work?

BuzzFlash: And you went to Harvard -- is that right?

Jehane Noujaim: I went to Harvard-–a great experience. Fantastic teachers--Robb Moss taught me the basics of filmmaking (followed by a wonderful real life course through Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker when we made startup.com). Dusan Makavejev, another wonderful filmmaker and teacher--Chris Killip, and Jack Leuders-Booth, inspiring photographers who gave fantastic classes. Bob Gardiner, another professor who gave me a grant to make a film when I graduated, really gave the final push to stick with this idea of filmmaking.

BuzzFlash: We haven’t much talked about the CENTCOM side, which you also cover a bit, though certainly the heart of the film is the Al Jazeera staff. Lieutenant Rushing tries to be the good American, as much as he can. Some sincerity certainly comes through his spin, and he tries to be polite and show the virtuous side of stereotypes of the American heartland. But he nonetheless represents the American position. Part of the compelling thing to me, as an American watching this film, is how engaging the Al Jazeera staff is. They’re people you would like to have coffee with. They’re extremely bright, extremely professional, thoughtful, conscientious. The Bush government is constantly denigrating Al Jazeera, saying Al Jazeera is basically aligned with the enemy. I was left with the thought that if the people who run Al Jazeera are not the people that we’re going to woo, who is left in the Arab world to woo?

Jehane Noujaim: Exactly. And most of the people who work at Al Jazeera actually were educated in the West.

BuzzFlash: You hear English in the control room, not just because of you, but because it’s a bilingual group.

Hani Salama: Yes. There are many people who’ve been educated in the West that have come to work at Al Jazeera--many of them were trained at the BBC. I always knew this channel as a channel that has been heavily criticized by leaders in the Arab world. So I had always understood this to be a very revolutionary channel that was bringing a very positive element of challenge, and a different kind of thinking to the Arab world. They also had started these debate shows, one of the most popular of which is called Opinion and the Other Opinion.

BuzzFlash: It’s sort of a Point-Counterpoint?

Jehane Noujaim: Yes. They debated issues like the role of religion in the government and the role of women in society, whether women should wear the veil. These were topics that were previously considered taboo and were only talked about behind closed doors. When you see these issues being debated on television, all of sudden it becomes okay to talk about them. I remember coming back from the States in ’97, and Al Jazeera had been denounced in ’96. And it was playing across every coffee shop in Cairo and in very poor areas where I used to volunteer. People were pooling their money together to buy satellite dishes so that they could watch these debates happen. It was very exciting and it was heavily criticized by many of the governments. I think the Egyptian president ended up visiting Al Jazeera at one point and said, “All this noise from this tiny little matchbox?” So it was only much more recently that it ended up being criticized by the U.S. government. And to me, that was such a surprise because I really thought that it was something that the U.S. would support.

BuzzFlash: After watching the film it seems to me Al Jazeera poses a three-pronged threat to the Bush administration. It reveals images that the Bush administration doesn’t want out there of the dead, and it’s not “on message” with the Bush administration. The third thing is, the Bush administration probably regards them as a threat because they’re a threat to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and many of the governments that the U.S. supports. Even though, from an Arab perspective, they’re a news channel in the spirit of Tom Paine and democracy, as much as Bush gives lip service to democracy, the Bush Administration might regard real democracy as a threat.

Hani Salama: Right. And that is really damaging for any attempt at winning over the hearts and minds of the Arab world. If their solution is for Arabs to switch to al-Hurra, which is U.S. funded, it won’t work. People just don’t trust it yet. They turn it on and they feel like the stories that they want to hear are not being aired; they’re not concentrating on the stories that they want to hear. I’ve heard that people do turn it on for the American perspective. There is definitely an interest in the American perspective, the administration’s perspective. But that doesn’t mean people trust it for their main news source. But it is of course a benefit to the people to have another channel, another view, another source of competition to keep the quality high. Josh Rushing would often say that there was a need to engage with the Arabic speaking stations and he was hoping that there would be more translators around to help understand what was being said on the stations.

Jehane Noujaim: Rushing, was somebody who was very genuinely concerned with engaging the other side. He wrote memos to his office at the time saying that his office should figure out a way to work with Al Jazeera. He got flak from it. He gave a couple great interviews after the film came out, but was forbidden to give any more interviews until leaving the marines. At one point he said Al Jazeera shows images that are very difficult to look at, but that these are actually the results of war. He said, “You look at these images, and it makes you sick, and it gives you a stomach ache, but it should give you a stomach ache and make you sick because that is what war does. You should be reminded that war is not really clean. People should know what we’re sending our troops off to do.” I thought that was a very, very valuable statement to make. It is so strange that we do not even see the coffins of our troops being taken off the plane. The Brits do a televised service for their dead—and our journalists are not allowed to even photograph the flag draped coffins, as if it is somehow shameful. I find that disrespectful to the people that have died for our country.

Rushing felt like the images of the dead European soldiers as well as the Iraqi civilians should be shown, because we should all know what we’re sending our troops out to do, and we should be very aware of that. He was somebody that I actually very much looked up to and admired. I am in great admiration that the resistance to his words has not stopped him. He left the marines as of October 8th because he did not feel that he should be silenced. He is now doing interviews and speaking with the public nationwide. He has even spoken of going back on Al Jazeera to discuss the US position in the Middle East. His motivations--to increase understandings on both sides--are in the right place and that is inspiring to see.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

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RESOURCES:

http://www.controlroommovie.com

Get Your Copy of "Control Room" from BuzzFlash.com.

Winner, Grand Jury Prize for Best Film, 2004 Full Frame Documentary Festival!!!

"Important and moving. Should be essential viewing, not just for news junkies but for regular people who want to expand their understanding of how the U.S. is seen in the Arab world." -- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

"Two Thumbs Up!" -- Ebert & Roeper

The critically acclaimed CONTROL ROOM takes a controversial inside look at the Media surrounding the Iraq War. Amidst the ongoing cultural clash between Western and Arab worlds, CONTROL ROOM looks through the prism of satellite television’s impact on how viewers receive information worldwide – from news providers, driven by the patriotism of their audiences, to Army information officers, driven by military objectives. CONTROL ROOM is a seminal documentary that explores how Truth is gathered, presented and ultimately created by those who deliver it.

DVD Special Features: Commentary by Director Jehane Noujaim, Cinematographer/Producer Hani Salama, Central Command Press Officer Josh Rushing and Al Jazeera staffers Hassan Ibrahim and Samir Khader. More than 50 Deleted Scenes, Spanish, French and Arabic subtitles* (subject to change).