Muzzling a Marine

The Pentagon orders the military spokesman featured in the acclaimed documentary "Control Room" not to talk -- and now he plans to walk.

By Scott Lamb

June 4, 2004 | There's a moment a half-hour into "Control Room," Jehane Noujaim's widely acclaimed new documentary about the Arab news channel Al Jazeera and media coverage of the war with Iraq, when U.S. press officer Lt. Josh Rushing discusses his reaction to the brutal images of captured and killed American soldiers that Al Jazeera chose to broadcast in March 2003 -- to the condemnation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"The night they showed the POWs and dead soldiers ... it was powerful, because Americans won't show those kinds of images," Rushing says. "It made me sick to my stomach." The viewer then expects him to proceed in the same vein of patriotic rhetoric he's been using up to this point in the film -- he is, after all, a Marine -- but instead what follows is an unexpected, and profoundly moving, observation.

The previous night, Al Jazeera had shown similarly graphic images of Iraqis killed during a bombing in Basra, and Rushing calls them "equally if not more horrifying." At the time, though, he admits they hadn't bothered him as much. "I just saw people on the other side," Rushing says, "and those people in the Al Jazeera offices must have felt the way I was feeling that night, and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war."

Rushing comes across as a sympathetic character in the movie -- earnest and thoughtful, a patriot and a skeptic -- with shrewd observations about partisan media coverage (Al Jazeera and Fox) and the failure of U.S. media to fully explain what is happening in the Middle East. But now the Pentagon has silenced Rushing, 31, ordering him not to comment on the movie. And as a result, the 14-year career military man, recently promoted to captain, plans to leave the Marines, his wife told Salon in an interview Thursday.

When first contacted by Salon about Rushing on Thursday, the Pentagon denied even being aware of the film, much less any order regarding Rushing. Lt. Col. Jim Cassella at the Pentagon press office said, "I can't remember us ever telling people not to speak to the press. We have the principles of information that the secretary of defense has signed which mandates that we are forthcoming and honest with the American people. As a matter of policy, we don't go around telling people they can or can't talk to the press."

He referred Salon to the Marine Corps, but there, too, the first response was denial that this sort of thing even happens. Capt. Dan McSweeney, commenting on whether Marines are typically asked not to talk to reporters, said, "I haven't heard of that going on except under extreme circumstances; in the middle of an operation, I can see that being the case."

Later in the day, however, McSweeney confirmed that "Captain Rushing is not available for interview on this topic." And on Friday, the Pentagon released the following statement to Salon about Rushing: "The reason why he's no longer able to talk to the media is that he is no longer in the billet that he was at the time, so he is no longer the appropriate person to speak to regarding this documentary."

Next page: An unexpectedly thoughtful media critic