By Kathleen Kern

“It benefits Al-Jazeera to play to Arab nationalism, just like Fox plays to American patriotism for the exact same reason — because that’s their audience.”

These are not the words of an expert in Middle Eastern affairs or international media. They belong to Lt. Josh Rushing, from the U.S. Marine Corps, who served as the Central Command Press Officer for the U.S. military during the invasion of Iraq. He speaks them in a remarkable new documentary, Control Room, which “covers the coverage” of the invasion.

In November 2001, I wrote a column expressing my bemusement at the way the Bush administration and U.S. media were portraying Al-Jazeera as a network of “raving Arab polemicists” for their coverage of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Having watched Al-Jazeera while visiting Palestinian families in Hebron, I knew the network had a commitment to promoting a free press in the Arabic-speaking world. I knew the rulers of several Arab countries had demanded Al-Jazeera stop interviewing dissidents who challenge these regimes. The film shows Saddam Hussein calling Al-Jazeera a tool of U.S. propaganda.

I was thus prepared for the film to be a defense of Al-Jazeera and a comparison between how it covered the war and how American media covered the war. But in many ways the film surprised me.

Remember the outrage expressed by the U.S. administration and its American media mouthpieces over Al-Jazeera showing photos of dead American soldiers and captured POWs? Lt. Rushing (whom the Pentagon has ordered not to comment on the documentary) had the following to say: “The night they showed the POWs and dead soldiers . . . it was powerful, because Americans won’t show those kinds of images.”

Rushing then refers to a bombing in Basra that Al-Jazeera had covered the previous night. He realized the footage from Basra of dead bombing victims had not horrified him as much as the footage of dead and captured U.S. soldiers.

“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.”

I was also surprised by the camaraderie between some Western journalists and the Al-Jazeera journalists, even though they were putting different spins on the war. I was even more surprised to hear the positive comments by Al-Jazeera personnel about the United States. Hassan Ibrahim, when asked what would stop U.S. imperialism said, “I have absolute faith in the American Constitution. The American people are going to stop the American empire.”

Senior producer Sameer Khader tells the interviewer that he is planning to educate his children in the United States and would even work for Fox News if asked.

Khader responds to criticism that Al-Jazeera was emphasizing the deaths of Iraqi civilians by saying, “We want to show that any war has a human cost.”

That comment summarizes why Control Room is well worth seeing. It’s showing in selected theaters this summer.

When governments try to censor journalists revealing the human cost of war, they are implying that the soldiers and civilian men, women and children who are killed, maimed and tortured in the course of the war are disposable. “Disposable” people are the “least of these” to whom Jesus referred. Their stories deserve to be told.