It's investigative. And that kind of journalism is going away in America, because it's easier to put two people in a studio. I think there's a real problem in America, because of the profit imperative with American television news, that it's already morphed from journalism to media and media to entertainment.
That leads to an electorate that is not well-informed, and to have a democracy, we have to have a well-informed electorate. Let's just start, though, with your original assignment, when you were in the Marine Corps and you were part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is kind of where the book begins, and I'd like to just start at the beginning. Tell us about your job there, which I understand was to sell the war to the American public.
Tell us how that happened. Being hand-selected, because I was a good Marine, for that position-- How I saw it then, I would now call it "casting" without much sense of irony. I was cast for the position. I fit exactly the bill they were looking for, for what ended up being, essentially, a two-pronged approach to sell the war. There was a high approach, and a low approach. The high approach -- they needed someone with the greatest credibility they could find in the Bush administration, which wasn't much at the time, but they had one, one person who had high approval numbers.
And that was Colin Powell. So he was selected to give the speech in February at the UN, and make the argument. That was the high approach. The low approach was, we need someone in the news every day that had unimpeachable character.
And where do you find that? In the U. So they cast a handful of people to be spokespeople for U. Central Command.
And then they took-- there was a colonel named Ray Shepherd, who had been in the Air Force for 28 years. They displaced him with a young White House staffer who had been on the Bush campaign named Jim Wilkinson. He was 32, I think. They gave him the civilian rank of a two star general, and called him the Communications Czar. We'd have a morning meeting, and he would give us what the message of the day was going to be. We would go out to reporters-- reporters would say, "What's your message today?
So they'd say "okay, I'll ask you this, I'll ask you that, and then we'll wrap. Because the truth is, if you ask a young Marine officer "why are you going to invade Iraq? There's literally only one legal answer they can give you. We don't pick and choose our wars. The only reason the Marines would invade anywhere is if the Commander in Chief orders us to.
And if he doesn't, we won't. It doesn't matter if we agree with it or don't agree with it; think it's a good war, a winnable war, a right war-- none of that matters. It's only if he orders it. And if he doesn't, we don't do it. The system's set up that way so that someone that faces accountability with the people has to make that decision, defend that decision, and then be accountable for it via elections.
But they have to round that, because they had such low credibility at the White House at the time, by using those members in the military, namely me. When I would do an interview on MSNBC, with the reporter, the strap on the screen would say, "Our hearts are with you," and a yellow ribbon. Do you think he's going to ask me tough questions about the WMD evidence that I'm saying--that's why we're going to invade, you don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud?
Do you think he's going to grill me on that, or challenge me on that? Of course not. His boss' heart is with me. His audience's heart is with me. I'm the young troop at war, even though I was in Doha, hundreds of miles away from Iraq. I mean, in the sense that controlling the message, making sure that you're spinning stories, propagandizing-- I mean, this is basically what it is.
You don't want to lose control of that message, right? So you want to make sure you're getting at what it is you want to get out. But you also used that opportunity to engage with the local community, with those that were trying to work with, and perhaps even against. And this led to some interesting relationships that you developed, and the creation of Al Jazeera; Al Jazeera English, which of course is quite controversial.
You got in the middle of all that. How did you go from being this spokesperson and delivering the message of the day, to creating some sort of really incredible new institution that still lives on today? I wanted to learn Arabic, because I was in the region. It turns out that on the base, no one spoke Arabic. So I'd go by every day, and ask them for a new word, and they'd teach me a new word. I'd go by the next day and use it, and get a new word.
And I started to sit and eat lunch with them, and there came a point that these few spokespeople were actually overwhelmed by how many media were there. So they kind of broke up some of the major ones into accounts, to kind of make sure they didn't fall through the cracks.
He kept the audience captivated. People were so grateful that we brought him here. He brought a wealth of knowledge on several issues that really spoke to the needs of a broad audience. I think everyone that came walked away with something. You did a tremendous job. You got people there thinking, talking and were certainly rated the top speaker at our event. The audience was on their best behavior and things couldn't have gone better!
Thanks everything worked out great!! Biography Josh Rushing is an award-winning journalist, former Marine officer, documentary movie star, author, blogger and leading voice in international affairs. Army, the U. Marines relied on the skills of a young Texan, Captain Josh Rushing, to explain their point of the view to the Arab press, in particular al-Jazeera, the Gulf-based TV channel often criticized for offering the unfiltered views of terrorists and for sometime harsh coverage of the U.
In the movie, Rushing defends U. In particular, Rushing signed up to work for Al-Jazeera English, which launched in November and is carried on several U. I witnessed during the war how the U. I am proud to be part of a news network that believes in the power of the un-spun truth. Rushing told Time that he looked closely at Al-Jazeera and found nothing to stop him from joining.
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