watching control room in 2007

Today I finally got around to watching the documentary Control Room, which is about Al Jazeera's coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. (I had kicked around the idea of driving down to Fayetteville today, but this was much easier.) In addition to being something that everyone in this country ought to see just because of what it depicts, it's also an exceedingly well-done film, focused like a laser beam and superbly edited. (I think most documentaries falter under the weight of footage the director just can't let go.) I couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry at all the clips of Rumsfeld pontificating about manipulation of the facts to press an agenda.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the film is the arc of Marine Lt. Josh Rushing. You see him early on, sticking to the talking points that it was his job to deliver, even as he awkwardly fields pointed questions from Al Jazeera's Hassan Ibrahim. As the film develops, he continues to do his job like a Marine, but the inner turmoil he experiences about what the U.S. is doing and how the American media in particular are portraying it is written all over his face. The exchanges between him and Ibrahim are both heartening and heartbreaking.

An interesting coda to the film: Rushing left the Marine Corps a few months after the film's release, in part because he had been ordered not to talk about it. He has since been hired by Al Jazeera International, the English-language service that I would happily trade Fox, CNN, and MSNBC for in a heartbeat, if for no other reason than their reporters don't let anyone spout off bullshit unchallenged.

Among the most disturbing parts is the footage of reporter Tareq Ayyoub on the roof of Al Jazeera's Baghdad offices, just before an American A-10 launches air-to-ground missiles at the building, killing Ayyoub. The military has always claimed that they were taking fire from that location, but there really is no evidence of this. If that was happening, it wasn't happening anywhere close to Ayyoub, who for his part looked more like Micheal Dukakis in his flack helmet than anything. Except utterly terrified. Add to that the fact that Al Jazeera had relayed the coordinates of their offices in Iraq to the DoD, that Abu Dabi TV was hit the same day, and it becomes very difficult to think that this was an accident.

(That, and the memo leaked in the UK in 2005 indicating that Bush had discussed the possibility of bombing Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha--the most generous interpretation of which is that the President of the United States made a really, really inappropriate joke about using the military to attack members of the press, especially in light of all the evidence that he had, in fact, used the military to attack members of the press. For those of you keeping score at home, deliberate targeting of civilian non-combatants is a war crime by pretty much any standard you wish to apply.)

I could go on and on--but I just realized that I've now spent more time thinking and writing about the movie, as well as reading up on related topics, than I spent actually watching it. Which is about as good an endorsement of a documentary as I can think of.