From Jarhead to Talking Head

Ex-Marine Josh Rushing discusses his evoloution from Iraq war spin doctor to Al Jazeera correspondent. He wants to build a bridge to the Arab world -- but has America already burned it down?

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Marine Captain Josh Rushing was sent into the action, but not actual combat. He was posted at the U.S. media center in Doha, Qatar, to take on the world's press corps. Strangely, as a relatively junior officer, he was made point person for arguably the Middle East's most influential Arab news channel: Al Jazeera.

Though he was charged with providing the Bush Administration's spin on the war, his exposure to Arab culture and identity through Al Jazeera's reporters broadened his perspective.

Rushing even unwittingly became a star in a critically acclaimed documentary about Al Jazeera called "Control Room," much to the dismay of his superior officers who eventually pulled the plug on the relationship, leading to his resignation from the Marine Corps.

How quickly things change. Rushing is now a correspondent for Al Jazeera International, the English language version of the news channel. He is based in Washington, D.C., and has a new book called "Mission Al Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World."

He recently spoke to me from Washington. The transcript follows below.

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KEVIN SITES: First let's talk about your evolution from Marine to Al Jazeera correspondent. You believed the Bush Administration's spin about the war at first, didn't you?

JOSH RUSHING: I did. When Colin Powell sat in front of the U.N. Security Council in February of 2003, I believed it. I believed it so much that I actually printed Colin Powell's speech and passed it out to all the news spokespeople as they arrived at Camp Asalaya (the U.S. Central Command media center in Doha, Qatar). So you're right, I bought into it.

How I ended up going from the Marine's spokesperson to the face of Al Jazeera, or at least in America — I was the face of America on Al Jazeera during the invasion. And essentially before I started working with Al Jazeera, I thought all the same things everyone else did. I thought they were terrorist TV, I thought they showed beheadings. I thought they were connected al-Qaida, but what I saw by being inside their newsroom was that that wasn't really true. As a matter of fact, they've never shown a beheading and they won't. It's in their code of ethics.

And al-Qaida has actually called for a tax on what they called a pro-western and pro-Zionist Al Jazeera. So it was a complete paradigm shift for me.

And then I realized that what I thought I knew about it is essentially what the U.S. government thought it knew about Al Jazeera, and that influenced the way the U.S. government dealt with Al Jazeera or felt to, and that created a dangerous situation for the United States' own strategic interest.

SITES: Was that preconception something that was really premeditated by the administration — they want the American public and the world to think this about Al Jazeera — or are there some valid aspects to the way that they're portrayed?

RUSHING: No. It was completely wrong the way they're portrayed by the U.S. government. And I'm not sure why they portray it that way. When (former Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld would go out in the press and say they show beheadings, I'm not sure if he was misinformed or he was lying.

SITES: Was it an outright lie?

RUSHING: It's not for me to say. It's hard to believe he could be so misinformed for such a long period of time because he did it over and over and over again. He did it after I informed some of his senior aides that that wasn't the case — and that every time he said that in the press and they played that clip in the Arab press, that not only did he lose credibility, because everyone in the Arab world who watches Al Jazeera all the time and they all do, they know they've never seen a beheading on Al Jazeera.

So every time they see Rumsfeld on the news saying that Al Jazeera shows beheadings, they don't give him the benefit of the doubt and think, "Oh, maybe he's just misinformed." They think he's lying. And in this mind, the American government is lying. And if they're lying about that, what else?

Responsibility is kind of bathwater. You pull the plug and it all goes out one small hole. You've got Rumsfeld out there saying something that's easily proven to not be true. An entire American government loses their credibility in that region.

SITES: Well, and this was just one of many misjudgments. First of all, you're a junior level officer and you're responsible for perhaps the most important Arab news network in the region. How did that happen?

RUSHING: Yeah, you're right. I developed a bit of a rapport with the Al Jazeera guys because I wanted to learn Arabic. So in the mornings, I could go by their media office on our base and ask them to teach me a few words. I would go back at lunch and try those words out in conversation. So I had this kind of ongoing rapport with these guys.

"There is no equivalent in the English language to how Al Jazeera drives the debate in the Arab world."— Josh Rushing

Well, there came a point where we decided to break up all the media networks in the world into these accounts so that they would have one officer to call. My accounts ended up being ABC, Xinhua (from China) and EBU from Europe. And then my boss said, "Hey, Josh, you've got a pretty good relationship with those Arab guys. Why don't you take Al Jazeera?" Which is startling because I wasn't an expert on the region, I didn't speak the language. I was one of the junior guys on the desk there.

SITES: It wasn't very well thought out.

RUSHING: And you have to ask yourself, they should have been saying long before they were planning where the bombs, the shock and awe would fall, someone should have been saying, "Who's got Al Jazeera? Who's gonna be our point guy with the Arab media?" But no one did. There was a complete lack of strategic foresight.

SITES: And tell me how things started to change for you in terms of your belief in the war. When you went in there, as you said, you were a true believer. But things evolved for you, not just about Arab identity and Al Jazeera in particular, but about the war itself. Tell me how that changed.

RUSHING: Well, when I was there, I didn't see Arabs as the enemy because we were there to liberate Iraqis. So I went over with the mindset of having kind of a sympathetic dynamic with the people there, which may have made me more open to understanding how Al Jazeera could see the war the way they were seeing it.

SITES: That's a dynamic that wasn't necessarily shared by your colleagues, though.

RUSHING: Oh, no. That's true. I think a number of my colleagues had bought into the idealism of the "us" and "them."

SITES: Clash of civilizations.

RUSHING: But after spending six months there and leaving, I still believed we were gonna find weapons of mass destruction. I still believed we were gonna turn Iraq into a better place. It was what happened over the next year or so — I mean, a lot of people like to debate whether it as right or wrong to invade Iraq. To me, the much more important debate isn't whether we should've invaded, it was what happened afterward. I mean, it was a complete mess. They weren't prepared. It wasn't planned for what came next. To me, that's the much bigger crime here.

Had the U.S. government gone into Iraq, prepared to provide security and economic hope as they have promised, then I think you might see a very different situation there today.

SITES: Let's shift to "Control Room" for a second. "Control Room" made you a star in America as well. This is a documentary about Al Jazeera during that time period of the war. And you didn't even know that was really going to be a documentary. Tell me about that.

RUSHING: I was giving an interview to a professor at the American University of Cairo, Abdullah Schleifer. And Abdullah had asked my bosses if it was okay to bring a grad student who was working on a graduate project at the University about Al Jazeera. And my bosses said, "Yeah, sure, they can come hang out at the media center and film what's going on here with Al Jazeera."

So these two filmmakers introduced to me as graduate students taped my interview with Abdullah Schleifer. And then a couple of days later they said, "Will you do an interview with one of our producers?" And I was, like, "Yeah, yeah, sure." They were filming for their project. So they brought him in, set him down. We taped the conversation.

And I never thought anything about it until someone called me a year later when I was back working in Los Angeles at my office and left a voice mail that said, "Hey, Josh, you don't know me. I just saw your movie at Sundance Film Festival. I wanted to say great job."

And I had no idea what he was talking about. I literally had to Google my name and Sundance, and up came "Control Room," and I had no idea about the movie. I had never heard of it. So I started having to read about it and I found who made it and I called them up. And I said, "Hey, my name is Josh. I think maybe you made a movie about me." And then so on and so forth, but that's how you get ambushed by a movie.

SITES: And this documentary, in some ways, soured your relationship with the Marines.

RUSHING: Well, when this movie came out a year later, the Pentagon was uncomfortable with me being in a movie about such a controversial subject. So they said, "No comment" to all the press that wanted to talk to me. And we're talking about the Today Show, Terry Gross's Fresh Air, other NPR programs. I mean, you name it, tons of media called the Pentagon to request an interview with me. And the Pentagon said, "No comment. He's not gonna talk about the film."

SITES: They silenced you.

RUSHING: So it really fueled all the coverage about me. It then moved from the entertainment section to the front page of the L.A. Times. "Marine Lands in Film and Collides With Superiors." And then to the editorial pages where the paper literally took an editorial stance on me and my role in this film. And it was called "The Credit to the Corps," and why I should be able to speak.

And what I realized was I suddenly had a platform. I had a megaphone to go out with this message. And I actually had a message. It was about understanding Al Jazeera. But in order to get that message to the people who needed to hear it, I couldn't do it in uniform. So I had to resign. I wasn't forced to resign, I wasn't kicked out. But I had to leave the Corps so I gave up my commission, I turned in my uniform and I went out to the media with this message about Al Jazeera and how we have to understand it and engage with it differently.

SITES: Why did you feel that was so critically important that you would give up your commission and a 14-year career in the Marines at that point?

RUSHING: Yeah, it wasn't easy to do. I mean, I didn't have any other jobs lined up. When you leave the military with less than 20 years, it's not like a regular job where you roll your 401(k) over. You leave with nothing. You have to stay 20 years to get any part of your retirement, so I was walking away from 14 years worth of retirement built up. And I had no health care for my family, no savings account. There's a second mortgage on my house in California.

But what led me out of the Marine Corps is the same thing that led me into the Marine Corps, and that's a sense of civic responsibility. No one could say what needed to be said the way I could say it. In other words, no one could go on O'Reilly's show on Fox News and tell them, "You've got to reconsider Al Jazeera," without being dismissed as a liberal from Berkley or an academic professor.

You know how O'Reilly does. He goes after the person rather than the argument. Well, in my case, when I went on and he would try to go after me, I said, "Wait. I'm from Lone Star, Texas. I've been in the Marines my entire adult life. I joined when I was 17 years old. It's been 14 straight years and I've just given up everything so I can say, ‘You need to reconsider Al Jazeera,' and I'm only saying it because I witnessed first-hand what's really going on there and what's really at stake."

SITES: How successful have you been in trying to convince the American public that Al Jazeera is a viable media identity, that it's actually trying to cover things in a critical way rather than in an approach of advocacy?

RUSHING: Probably not very successful. We aren't distributed very much in America right now. It's Burlington, Vermont; Toledo, Ohio; I think we're about to sign a deal in New York maybe. The Pentagon gets us on channel 36. The audience I do think I'm gaining traction with, though, is senior leadership at the Pentagon. I get invited to speak almost monthly to general officers about Al Jazeera, what it is, what it isn't and how they would be best to engage with it in a more open manner. So I think I'm gaining traction in what might be a small audience, but an important and influential audience.

SITES: Is there an analogy that you can make about Al Jazeera to help American viewers to understand where are they coming from exactly? When they see messages from Osama bin Laden broadcast and they see the Al Jazeera logo, they tend to think, "Hey, this is a mouthpiece for al-Qaida."

RUSHING: There is no English equivalent for what Al Jazeera is to the Arab world. Before Al Jazeera, there was no free press in the Arab world. All the media there was owned by the government, so the people only saw what the government wanted them to see.

For example, if the government doesn't recognize Israel existing, then the people of that nation would have never seen an Israeli until Al Jazeera came along. Al Jazeera broke down boundaries because it's on satellite, so the government couldn't stop it from coming in if the people had a satellite dish. And then it showed Israelis. Most Arabs saw their first Israeli by watching Al Jazeera news. And not only did they put Israelis on, they actually gave the interviews in Hebrew. There is no equivalent in the English language to how Al Jazeera drives the debate in the Arab world.

SITES: In terms of Al Jazeera at least providing a critical perspective, tell me how they're operating differently from the American media. Because you're very critical of the American media especially in the run-up to the war itself.

RUSHING: Well, I am. I'm very critical. Back in '03... as the government spokesperson who was selling the government line, I realized how important the media's position is in being the professional skeptics in a situation. They should never believe what anyone in power is saying without digging for the truth behind that.

But instead, the way I saw reporters approach interviews — I would come out having just been given the lines of the day from Republican operative(s) that ran our military information office at central command. He would give me the lines saying, "Regime Change, WMD, Ties to Terrorism." I would go out, and the American reporter might say, "Are there any lines you want to get across today or any messages you want to get across?'"

SITES: They were asking you for the talking points?

RUSHING: Exactly. And I would give them these talking points and then they would script their interview around those talking points. And then we would go on live air; they would ask me their preplanned softball questions. I would get out the reason that America was going to invade a sovereign nation without a critical question, without a critical follow-up. And then they would pat me on the back, thank me for my service and "Back to you, John, in New York." Some of that, on MSNBC even. There was a banner underneath and it said, "Our hearts are with you." This is the way they were packaging their coverage from the Middle East. Is a reporter gonna ask me a critical question when the banner says their hearts are with me? No. That's not professional.

SITES: And it's advocacy journalism...

RUSHING: And democracy requires it. I mean, when I was looking back on the media center, thinking "How did America go to war on information that ended up being so far from the truth?" what I realized was there was no one in this dynamic who was playing the role of the skeptic. There was no one that had power that was saying, "Wait a second. We've gotta ask the right questions." Dan Rather at times said that there were questions that needed to be asked, but now was not the time. Oh, my gosh, I can't imagine how he must regret that now. Is there ever a better time than before the war to ask the questions rather than after the war?

* In the spirit of full disclosure, I want to note that I have contracted with Paige Rushing, Josh Rushing's spouse, for web design services. I independently solicited and paid for these services. My decision to interview Josh Rushing was based only on the merits of his book — which is typical of Hot Zone special features coverage.

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