military spokesman is silenced after candid comments

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-film2aug02,1,1150164,print.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage

Marine Lands in Film, Collides With Superiors
A military spokesman is silenced after candid comments in a movie on Al Jazeera and Iraq war.

By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer

August 2, 2004

WASHINGTON — For most of the central figures in the documentary film "Control Room," the grisly images that emerged from last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq were no cause for a change of opinion.

Over the length of the film, director Jehane Noujaim's inside look at the war through the eyes and lenses of Al Jazeera's journalists based at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, the chasm only widens between the U.S. military officials who speak about the "liberation" of Iraq and the Al Jazeera reporters skeptical of the invasion.

The exception is a young Marine lieutenant named Josh Rushing.

Rushing, a Central Command spokesman assigned to escort the documentary makers during their time in Qatar, is among the film's most sympathetic characters, portrayed as a thoughtful young man moved over time by the grim reality of war.

At no point is he shown doubting the justness of the U.S. effort in Iraq, yet the film documents a budding friendship between Rushing and Al Jazeera reporter Hassan Ibrahim, and moments on camera when Rushing is wrestling with the film's central themes: war, bias and the Arab world's most powerful media outlet.

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