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.
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.
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