War Stories
Doha, QATAR: The newsroom at the headquarters of the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel
( Getty Images )
( Getty Images )
Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Lieutenant Josh Rushing was one of many media liaisons for the U.S. Marines during the initial phase of the Iraq invasion. Then he became the unwitting star of the 2004 documentary about the Middle East's leading news channel, Al-Jazeera, called Control Room. Now, he's a correspondent for Al-Jazeera English.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
JOSH RUSHING:
May 3rd, 2004. Baghdad. Aban Elias vanished.
[MUSIC/CROWD SOUNDS/TRAFFIC SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
Elias is one of tens of thousands of Iraqis and one of the dozens of Americans who have gone missing in Iraq.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
His new book, Mission Al-Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World, recounts his unusual career path so far, starting out as a kid in Texas, with a butterfly tattooed on one buttock and a bulldog on the other, who signed up for the Marines at the age of 17 and, against all expectations, became a journalist.
JOSH RUSHING:
I don't know by what process of voodoo they decide what [LAUGHING] job you're actually going to get. They could have made me anything from a cook to an infantry guy, and I thought they would have.
I was actually in infantry school at Camp Pendleton, California, when they called me out and said that you got a new job. You're going to be a 43-21. And I didn't know what that was [BROOKE LAUGHS] and neither did they. I showed up to Indianapolis, where the base was, and they told me, okay, you're down the hall in BJC. And I said, well, what's [LAUGHING] BJC? And they said, basic journalism course. [BROOKE LAUGHS]
I was like, oh, you got to be kidding me. I can't write. I didn't go to college. It wasn't until much later in my career, say, another two years down the road, that it finally clicked in me and I got it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So let's flash forward now to Doha, Qatar, CENTCOM. Describe the scene there.
JOSH RUSHING:
The base is Camp As-Sayliyah. It's in the middle of a brown, brown desert, and all it is is a series of warehouses. It's almost like a laboratory experiment where [LAUGHS] all these reporters are put into this one place and separated from any other influences, and trapped there. And you could extrapolate certain things about certain media by watching the way they interacted in that environment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Give me an example.
JOSH RUSHING:
For example, before I would go on an interview with Fox News - I think NBC did the same thing, others did the same thing but Fox was probably the most blatant about it - they would say, are there any messages you want to get across today?
Now, this was before the invasion, and I was being given my lines to say straight from the White House Iraq Group.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It included the likes of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Andrew Card, Scooter Libby, Mary Matalin.
JOSH RUSHING:
Right. Right. This group had gotten together the year before the war, in the summer, to decide how to sell the war. On any given day, it would be WMD, regime change, ties to terrorism.
I'd go out to do the live interview, and the reporter [LAUGHING] says, are there any messages you want to get across today? And I say, yeah, sure, and he goes, okay.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
Here's the questions I'll ask you then.
And he sets up the whole interview. We do the interview with these, you know, prearranged questions. He pats me on the back at the end of it and thanks me for my service and sends it back to New York.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let's put the most positive gloss on this and say that the media believed the messages that you were offering. Did you?
JOSH RUSHING:
Absolutely, when Colin Powell said it in front of the U.N. in February of 2004, man, that was it. Colin Powell said it. This is the truth. It wasn't my job as a government spokesperson to really be skeptical of it. But that's a reporter's place in this entire institution is to bring a sense of professional skepticism to it, to question everything and to not believe it.
Don't get me wrong. I'm disappointed that I went out and proliferated this message. [LAUGHS] But it wasn't my job to be the professional skeptic there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
How well do you think the American media did in general?
JOSH RUSHING:
I think if you're looking at just an invasion, it's changed over time. But from just an invasion, the American media did a great job of showing the war from the American military perspective. That war looked starkly different than the war that Al-Jazeera was showing. If CNN were to show where the missile took off, Al-Jazeera would try to show where the missile landed.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Tell me about your first encounter with Al-Jazeera.
JOSH RUSHING:
I developed a relationship with Al-Jazeera technical engineers as they were setting up the office there, simply because I wanted to learn Arabic, and they were the only ones on base who spoke Arabic.
There came a point where there weren't enough spokespeople to handle all the media that were there. There were hundreds of reporters and producers and only about a dozen spokespeople on the media desk. And my boss said, hey, Josh, you got a pretty good relationship with those Arab guys. Why don't you take Al-Jazeera? It's like, oh, okay.
But when you look back on it, there I was as a junior officer, I didn't speak Arabic, I had no training in the region. I had read Iraq for Dummies on the plane ride over, and yet I end up being the American face on Al-Jazeera for the invasion.
And you got to ask yourself - someone, you know, long before they were planning where the bombs and shock and awe were going to fall should have said, who’s got Al–Jazeera, because this is important. And in the big global strategic issue that's going on now and the global war on terror, who has Al-Jazeera is really important.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And, you know, it's strange. It seems that you were explaining Al-Jazeera to the U.S. military as much as you were explaining the U.S. military to Al-Jazeera.
JOSH RUSHING:
I was. I mean, it kind of clicked with me after going over to the newsroom enough times to give interviews as to how influential this really was. It's in the barbershops, in the restaurants, in the cafes. It's what people are talking about. It's a phenomenon that there is no English equivalent for. And I thought we've got to get these guys access, access to information and leadership.
And so I would constantly, constantly argue for that behind closed doors to the point that I had an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel tell me I needed to check my uniform to remember which side I was on. And I never won. I never got better access than, you know, Lieutenant Rushing, which just wasn't enough. We should have been on Al-Jazeera all the time.
I mean, if we really believed in what we were doing, we had a moral responsibility to explain it to the people of the region.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So you first came to notice as a press liaison, but you became kind of famous as the unwitting star of a very successful documentary about Al-Jazeera called Control Room.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
[CLIP]:
JOSH RUSHING:
I really think the big thing for my generation is for these two perspectives, my perspective, the Western perspective, and the Arab perspective, to understand each other better, because truly the true worlds are colliding at a rapid rate right now.
[END OF CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So Frank Rich said that you showed what was best in the military. Did your appearance enhance or wreck your military career?
JOSH RUSHING:
[LAUGHS] You would have thought it would have enhanced it, but instead the Pentagon was uncomfortable with me being in a movie about such a controversial subject. And when all the media [LAUGHS] in America, or a lot of it, called to ask for an interview with me, they said, no comment.
And eventually, as the story was growing, I realized, I have a platform here. I have a megaphone. And I also happen to have a message that no one would listen to a year before, that what Americans think they know about Al-Jazeera is wrong; the way the American government is dealing with it or not dealing with Al-Jazeera is not only wrong but dangerous for Americans. But who's going to listen to a junior officer?
Well, fast forward a year later and now a lot of people want to listen to a junior officer. It's just I had to pay a price if I was going to go out and essentially say that on the media, and that price was giving up my career in the military.
And for me, particularly, my self-identity was built around being a United States Marine. I enlisted when I was 17 years old. I've been active duty my entire adult life. And everything about who I was, everything about, you know, how I respected myself was about being a Marine.
And I was giving that up, and not only giving that up, but giving it up to go out and do something publicly that I knew would draw ridicule and fire from those whose respect I desired so much from the Pentagon, my senior leadership.
So for me, it was very difficult personally, but I knew - it was exactly what the Marines had taught me - do the right thing for the right reason. Who else could go on Bill O'Reilly's show and say this about Al-Jazeera - you've got to reconsider it - and have him not be able to dismiss you as some kind of liberal academic? Say, wait a second. My parents live in Lone Star, Texas. I've been a Marine my whole adult life. I've given up everything just so I can say, you got to reconsider Al-Jazeera, and I was there first hand.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So how were you approached by Al-Jazeera for your new job?
JOSH RUSHING:
I was just about to take a P.R. job in Houston, and a guy called me up, and he said that he was from the BBC, been there 26 years, and he was leaving to start an English-language Al-Jazeera. Had just seen my movie, and he thought I was, you know, interesting on screen and had interesting ideas, and he asked me if I wanted to come shoot a show for Al-Jazeera - which, you know, on one hand, you have to take pause, because where are you going to [LAUGHS] work again after you work in Al-Jazeera?
And, on the other hand, I've been out in all the American media saying how important it is to engage Al-Jazeera and why we should be on it all the time. And now I've been given an opportunity. How could I not take that opportunity?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You were recently embedded in Iraq as an Al-Jazeera correspondent. What was it like to go back to report there with a microphone instead of a uniform?
JOSH RUSHING:
I didn't realize how naked I would feel. I mean, it feels like going to prom in your whitey-tighties [BROOKE LAUGHS] you know, not having any clothes on, because I was used to being surrounded by Marines and having a gun and knowing if things got bad I could fight my way back.
And I kept thinking about this one, going, okay, if we get into a firefight and I'm out there, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do or why I'm even here. You know [LAUGHS], I don't have a gun. I don't have a camera. I'm just standing around observing, I guess, which seems like a really bizarre position to be in.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Hey, wait a minute. You went to journalism school. That's mostly what we do.
JOSH RUSHING:
I went to military journalism school. [LAUGHS] And, I mean, they tell you, you have a gun in your right hand and a camera in your left. You're an infantryman first and then if you get a chance, take some pictures.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You say right at the beginning of the book that there are two meanings of Jihad - a greater and a lesser. And you apply that term not just to the Muslim Middle East but also to mainstream America.
JOSH RUSHING:
The Jihad you hear so much about on the news is really about the defense of the faith, that's actually the lesser Jihad in Islam. The greater Jihad is the struggle that we all have in ourselves to overcome the worst of one's self.
And when you think about America, to me it seems that America's going through a battle on both fronts. The lesser Jihad is this military fight that's happening around the world and the greater Jihad is this battle to overcome the worst in itself. And every time that - I mean, you say "America" overseas, and the first thing people think of is torture. We're not overcoming the worst in ourselves.
And for someone who spent their life defending America, that's a real disappointment because you've got to stop and say, wait, what am I really defending anymore?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Josh, thank you very much.
JOSH RUSHING:
Oh, thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Josh Rushing is a correspondent for Al-Jazeera English. His new book, Mission Al-Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World, was published this June by Palgrave Macmillan.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
Coming up, danger in the streets of Laredo, and new proof that there are no secrets on the Net.
BOB GARFIELD:
This is On the Media from NPR.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
Lieutenant Josh Rushing was one of many media liaisons for the U.S. Marines during the initial phase of the Iraq invasion. Then he became the unwitting star of the 2004 documentary about the Middle East's leading news channel, Al-Jazeera, called Control Room. Now, he's a correspondent for Al-Jazeera English.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
JOSH RUSHING:
May 3rd, 2004. Baghdad. Aban Elias vanished.
[MUSIC/CROWD SOUNDS/TRAFFIC SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
Elias is one of tens of thousands of Iraqis and one of the dozens of Americans who have gone missing in Iraq.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
His new book, Mission Al-Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World, recounts his unusual career path so far, starting out as a kid in Texas, with a butterfly tattooed on one buttock and a bulldog on the other, who signed up for the Marines at the age of 17 and, against all expectations, became a journalist.
JOSH RUSHING:
I don't know by what process of voodoo they decide what [LAUGHING] job you're actually going to get. They could have made me anything from a cook to an infantry guy, and I thought they would have.
I was actually in infantry school at Camp Pendleton, California, when they called me out and said that you got a new job. You're going to be a 43-21. And I didn't know what that was [BROOKE LAUGHS] and neither did they. I showed up to Indianapolis, where the base was, and they told me, okay, you're down the hall in BJC. And I said, well, what's [LAUGHING] BJC? And they said, basic journalism course. [BROOKE LAUGHS]
I was like, oh, you got to be kidding me. I can't write. I didn't go to college. It wasn't until much later in my career, say, another two years down the road, that it finally clicked in me and I got it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So let's flash forward now to Doha, Qatar, CENTCOM. Describe the scene there.
JOSH RUSHING:
The base is Camp As-Sayliyah. It's in the middle of a brown, brown desert, and all it is is a series of warehouses. It's almost like a laboratory experiment where [LAUGHS] all these reporters are put into this one place and separated from any other influences, and trapped there. And you could extrapolate certain things about certain media by watching the way they interacted in that environment.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Give me an example.
JOSH RUSHING:
For example, before I would go on an interview with Fox News - I think NBC did the same thing, others did the same thing but Fox was probably the most blatant about it - they would say, are there any messages you want to get across today?
Now, this was before the invasion, and I was being given my lines to say straight from the White House Iraq Group.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It included the likes of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Andrew Card, Scooter Libby, Mary Matalin.
JOSH RUSHING:
Right. Right. This group had gotten together the year before the war, in the summer, to decide how to sell the war. On any given day, it would be WMD, regime change, ties to terrorism.
I'd go out to do the live interview, and the reporter [LAUGHING] says, are there any messages you want to get across today? And I say, yeah, sure, and he goes, okay.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
Here's the questions I'll ask you then.
And he sets up the whole interview. We do the interview with these, you know, prearranged questions. He pats me on the back at the end of it and thanks me for my service and sends it back to New York.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let's put the most positive gloss on this and say that the media believed the messages that you were offering. Did you?
JOSH RUSHING:
Absolutely, when Colin Powell said it in front of the U.N. in February of 2004, man, that was it. Colin Powell said it. This is the truth. It wasn't my job as a government spokesperson to really be skeptical of it. But that's a reporter's place in this entire institution is to bring a sense of professional skepticism to it, to question everything and to not believe it.
Don't get me wrong. I'm disappointed that I went out and proliferated this message. [LAUGHS] But it wasn't my job to be the professional skeptic there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
How well do you think the American media did in general?
JOSH RUSHING:
I think if you're looking at just an invasion, it's changed over time. But from just an invasion, the American media did a great job of showing the war from the American military perspective. That war looked starkly different than the war that Al-Jazeera was showing. If CNN were to show where the missile took off, Al-Jazeera would try to show where the missile landed.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Tell me about your first encounter with Al-Jazeera.
JOSH RUSHING:
I developed a relationship with Al-Jazeera technical engineers as they were setting up the office there, simply because I wanted to learn Arabic, and they were the only ones on base who spoke Arabic.
There came a point where there weren't enough spokespeople to handle all the media that were there. There were hundreds of reporters and producers and only about a dozen spokespeople on the media desk. And my boss said, hey, Josh, you got a pretty good relationship with those Arab guys. Why don't you take Al-Jazeera? It's like, oh, okay.
But when you look back on it, there I was as a junior officer, I didn't speak Arabic, I had no training in the region. I had read Iraq for Dummies on the plane ride over, and yet I end up being the American face on Al-Jazeera for the invasion.
And you got to ask yourself - someone, you know, long before they were planning where the bombs and shock and awe were going to fall should have said, who’s got Al–Jazeera, because this is important. And in the big global strategic issue that's going on now and the global war on terror, who has Al-Jazeera is really important.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And, you know, it's strange. It seems that you were explaining Al-Jazeera to the U.S. military as much as you were explaining the U.S. military to Al-Jazeera.
JOSH RUSHING:
I was. I mean, it kind of clicked with me after going over to the newsroom enough times to give interviews as to how influential this really was. It's in the barbershops, in the restaurants, in the cafes. It's what people are talking about. It's a phenomenon that there is no English equivalent for. And I thought we've got to get these guys access, access to information and leadership.
And so I would constantly, constantly argue for that behind closed doors to the point that I had an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel tell me I needed to check my uniform to remember which side I was on. And I never won. I never got better access than, you know, Lieutenant Rushing, which just wasn't enough. We should have been on Al-Jazeera all the time.
I mean, if we really believed in what we were doing, we had a moral responsibility to explain it to the people of the region.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So you first came to notice as a press liaison, but you became kind of famous as the unwitting star of a very successful documentary about Al-Jazeera called Control Room.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
[CLIP]:
JOSH RUSHING:
I really think the big thing for my generation is for these two perspectives, my perspective, the Western perspective, and the Arab perspective, to understand each other better, because truly the true worlds are colliding at a rapid rate right now.
[END OF CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So Frank Rich said that you showed what was best in the military. Did your appearance enhance or wreck your military career?
JOSH RUSHING:
[LAUGHS] You would have thought it would have enhanced it, but instead the Pentagon was uncomfortable with me being in a movie about such a controversial subject. And when all the media [LAUGHS] in America, or a lot of it, called to ask for an interview with me, they said, no comment.
And eventually, as the story was growing, I realized, I have a platform here. I have a megaphone. And I also happen to have a message that no one would listen to a year before, that what Americans think they know about Al-Jazeera is wrong; the way the American government is dealing with it or not dealing with Al-Jazeera is not only wrong but dangerous for Americans. But who's going to listen to a junior officer?
Well, fast forward a year later and now a lot of people want to listen to a junior officer. It's just I had to pay a price if I was going to go out and essentially say that on the media, and that price was giving up my career in the military.
And for me, particularly, my self-identity was built around being a United States Marine. I enlisted when I was 17 years old. I've been active duty my entire adult life. And everything about who I was, everything about, you know, how I respected myself was about being a Marine.
And I was giving that up, and not only giving that up, but giving it up to go out and do something publicly that I knew would draw ridicule and fire from those whose respect I desired so much from the Pentagon, my senior leadership.
So for me, it was very difficult personally, but I knew - it was exactly what the Marines had taught me - do the right thing for the right reason. Who else could go on Bill O'Reilly's show and say this about Al-Jazeera - you've got to reconsider it - and have him not be able to dismiss you as some kind of liberal academic? Say, wait a second. My parents live in Lone Star, Texas. I've been a Marine my whole adult life. I've given up everything just so I can say, you got to reconsider Al-Jazeera, and I was there first hand.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So how were you approached by Al-Jazeera for your new job?
JOSH RUSHING:
I was just about to take a P.R. job in Houston, and a guy called me up, and he said that he was from the BBC, been there 26 years, and he was leaving to start an English-language Al-Jazeera. Had just seen my movie, and he thought I was, you know, interesting on screen and had interesting ideas, and he asked me if I wanted to come shoot a show for Al-Jazeera - which, you know, on one hand, you have to take pause, because where are you going to [LAUGHS] work again after you work in Al-Jazeera?
And, on the other hand, I've been out in all the American media saying how important it is to engage Al-Jazeera and why we should be on it all the time. And now I've been given an opportunity. How could I not take that opportunity?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You were recently embedded in Iraq as an Al-Jazeera correspondent. What was it like to go back to report there with a microphone instead of a uniform?
JOSH RUSHING:
I didn't realize how naked I would feel. I mean, it feels like going to prom in your whitey-tighties [BROOKE LAUGHS] you know, not having any clothes on, because I was used to being surrounded by Marines and having a gun and knowing if things got bad I could fight my way back.
And I kept thinking about this one, going, okay, if we get into a firefight and I'm out there, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do or why I'm even here. You know [LAUGHS], I don't have a gun. I don't have a camera. I'm just standing around observing, I guess, which seems like a really bizarre position to be in.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Hey, wait a minute. You went to journalism school. That's mostly what we do.
JOSH RUSHING:
I went to military journalism school. [LAUGHS] And, I mean, they tell you, you have a gun in your right hand and a camera in your left. You're an infantryman first and then if you get a chance, take some pictures.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You say right at the beginning of the book that there are two meanings of Jihad - a greater and a lesser. And you apply that term not just to the Muslim Middle East but also to mainstream America.
JOSH RUSHING:
The Jihad you hear so much about on the news is really about the defense of the faith, that's actually the lesser Jihad in Islam. The greater Jihad is the struggle that we all have in ourselves to overcome the worst of one's self.
And when you think about America, to me it seems that America's going through a battle on both fronts. The lesser Jihad is this military fight that's happening around the world and the greater Jihad is this battle to overcome the worst in itself. And every time that - I mean, you say "America" overseas, and the first thing people think of is torture. We're not overcoming the worst in ourselves.
And for someone who spent their life defending America, that's a real disappointment because you've got to stop and say, wait, what am I really defending anymore?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Josh, thank you very much.
JOSH RUSHING:
Oh, thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Josh Rushing is a correspondent for Al-Jazeera English. His new book, Mission Al-Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World, was published this June by Palgrave Macmillan.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
Coming up, danger in the streets of Laredo, and new proof that there are no secrets on the Net.
BOB GARFIELD:
This is On the Media from NPR.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
Produced by WNYC Studios