I don't have specific information on where Saddam Hussein is.
If I did, we would go find him there right now.
- It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since then.
I have really complex feelings about my time in the military.
I think I was used.
I think a lot of people in the military get used.
I was 100% convinced about the mission at the beginning of the war.
After 9/11, America was responding, and I was going to be a part of that response.
But what I didn't know was how much fiction
would be a part of my job.
I would like to think I was
just there to facilitate
the media's interest in the U.S. military and the U.S. government.
But the truth is I was used to sell a war.
I also remember the night before I left,
laying in bed with my wife
and kind of wondering aloud to her,
"I don't know what's going to happen
but I feel like I'm not going to come back the same."
I joined the Marines in 1990.
And in 2003,
I went from representing the Marine Corps
in the entertainment industry in Hollywood
to representing the U.S. government
and the United States Central Command in the invasion of Iraq.
I grew up in a small town in North Texas, north of— north of Dallas,
and I always had a sense
that there was a lot more out there in the world than what I was seeing.
And for me, it seemed like the military was a way
to kind of get out there and see the world.
I knew nothing about the Arabs or the Middle East.
I mean, just nothing. This was before the internet.
And there are three TV channels.
I’m thinking one of the earliest images I have of the Middle East
might be a Goldie Hawn movie.
Highness ...
- Al-Amir Khalid Bin Abdul Majid.
[Repeats his name incoherently]
But what I did know about for sure was the U.S. military.
My family, we have a long line of military tradition,
where my father, my grandfather on both sides,
my grandfather’s grandfather — going all the way back.
The U.S. military, when it was preparing for the invasion —
this was like early 2003 — was sending hundreds of thousands
of military people to Iraq.
Great, great, great majority of those would know very
little about the region, the language or the culture.
I mean, most of them wouldn’t.
Much like Hollywood,
I was cast to play a role, because I had a Texas accent,
I had blue eyes,
I had a son back at home and a wife back in the States.
- U.S. Central Command, which is this military organization,
they oversee all the military operations in the Middle East for the U.S.
They had set up a media center. And so all day long, every day,
I gave interviews.
I was only in Doha for seven months in 2003,
but it was during those months that I spent every day, really,
with Al Jazeera producers and reporters.
While I was there, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld started to say
Al Jazeera showed beheadings, that they were the mouthpiece
of bin Laden and Al Qaeda,
and that they were
anti-American.
Al Jazeera has a pattern
of playing propaganda
over and over and over again.
There wasn't a lot of distinction in the U.S.
between Al Qaeda and Al Jazeera at that time.
What I saw going into their newsroom,
in uniform, was that they weren't buying the line that
the U.S. military seemed to be part and parcel of like packaging and marketing and selling.
"Control Room" is a documentary that came out in 2004
and it showed Al Jazeera Arabic,
which was the only Al Jazeera channel at the time,
and how they covered the invasion of Iraq.
Welcome to my home, Bush!
Can you accept such oppression?
If you had any humanity
then would you have been able to see a child wailing in fear, “Mom! Dad!”
Where is the humanity?
Where is the conscience?
And it just so happened that "Control Room" was filmed kind of right in the middle
when a lot of these issues were, I guess, kind of swirling in my head.
We believe that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,
that they had the will to use them against us.
- When?
What do you mean, when?
- When— when did they use them against you?
That they have the will to use them against us?
- When? I mean, do you think Saddam... - When you say someone has the will...
I mean, Saddam was threatening the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction?
- Yes.
When?
That’s news to me,
I'm sorry.
Obviously, I wish I didn't help sell a war
that went on to cause such destruction and pain
for so, so many. So many.
And the funny thing is, now,
all these years later, my worldview
is so much closer to Hassan's in that conversation
than to whoever that young Marine is he was talking to.
I received a voicemail
at my office and it said,
“Hey, Captain Rushing, you don't know me
but I just saw your movie at Sundance and wanted to say thank you.”
And I had no idea what this person was talking about.
Googled my name and Sundance, and up came this movie, "Control Room."
And I was like, "It's not me. I've never heard of it."
And then I saw the headlines and they were like,
Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times.
The theme of them seemed to be about this Marine who seemed to be sympathetic
to the way Al Jazeera covered the war.
And I knew that had to be me.
The night they showed the [U.S. prisoners of war] and the dead soldiers,
Al Jazeera showed them.
It was powerful because America doesn't show those kind of images.
The Pentagon called and said, “Hey, Rushing,
we're getting a lot of requests for interviews because a movie came out
at Sundance this weekend and you're in it. Like, what's going on?”
The Marine Corps said, "No comment.
He can't talk about it."
But then somehow the universe brought me a platform and said,
“Here, tell us what you saw.”
But I couldn't do it as a Marine.
I got a call from a guy at the BBC
who said he was helping to launch Al Jazeera English.
He thought I should come to DC and meet him.
And that was in 2004.
Fox News, the No. 1 news channel in America,
when they would promote me coming on their channel
to give interviews, they would show me in uniform.
And then it would say, “Traitor?”
When I went on the Today Show, it was “Josh Rushing, anti-American?”
People in forums online would say I should be taken out.
I should be killed before I give away too many secrets.
That I was treasonous.
And, yeah, there were definitely
a lot of threats against me.
Before I took the job at Al Jazeera,
people that I know and respected said,
“You may never work again.”
For a Marine to go over [to Al Jazeera],
I think a lot of people really felt like I was ...
I was a traitor.
I could have never imagined
when I was sitting in that chair talking to Hassan Ibrahim
that one day,
I would be the journalist at Al Jazeera.
If you would have told me
this Marine officer and this Al Jazeera reporter, years from now,
only one of them is going to be an Al Jazeera reporter,
and it's not Hassan?
That would have made no sense in my mind.
I’ve kind of shed that identity and
getting rid of the uniforms, and the medals, and all those kind of things.
And it's hard for me to watch that film,
because it is like seeing
a different life that I once lived.
But that person is no longer around anymore.
They're gone.