Room with a view
Control Room pulls back the curtain on the Iraq war.

By Camille T. Taiara

ON A DREARY day early during the Iraq war, while U.S. networks reported on the local weather and screened fuzzy outtakes of fatigued newscasters riding in U.S. tanks and distant footage of a lifeless Baghdad horizon pierced by night vision-green missile streaks, al-Jazeera reporters were busy interviewing a brand-new victim of a U.S. bombing campaign. "Is this Bush's idea of freedom?" asked a man with a fresh, makeshift eye patch and torn, blood-spattered clothing. It was the kind of footage we never saw in the United States – the kind of footage that put the lie to the Bush administration's war of "liberation" in the Middle East.

Al-Jazeera – a fledgling and embattled network established in 1996 in Qatar that has since grown to serve 40 million Arab viewers – had already earned a rep for breaking stories and taboos about covering political corruption, religion, and the role of women in society. The network has been banned from operating in 10 Arab countries. But after Sept. 11, 2001, al-Jazeera found itself the target of a new and ever more powerful enemy.

"To me, al-Jazeera was this revolutionary voice which was everything the United States wanted for the region," Egyptian American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, director of Control Room, told me over the phone from New York City. She was explaining her decision to make al-Jazeera the main focus of her documentary on media coverage during the first month of the Iraq war. "And now it was becoming, in the U.S., 'Taliban TV' and 'the voice of bin Laden' and 'anti-American.' "

Both President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have harshly criticized the network, and al-Jazeera's offices in Kabul and Baghdad were among the early victims of U.S. bombing campaigns in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively – in spite of the fact that the network had provided the Pentagon with the exact coordinates of its offices during the buildup to the war in Iraq.

Ironically, as Control Room shows, it's been al-Jazeera's loyalty to the values the United States claims to support (democracy, freedom of expression), as well as journalistic standards rightly or wrongly associated with the West (independence, balance), that's defined the network as such a threat to the neocons. (A substantial number of its staff was trained in the West, and many previously worked for the BBC.) The film finds that it's actually U.S. media that were, in the words of al-Jazeera senior producer Samir Khader, one of the main characters in the film, "hijacked" by the Bush administration.

"The whole war actually is like an American movie," Deema Khatib, a Syrian al-Jazeera producer, says in the film. "You know the end. You know who's the hero. You know the bad guys – they're going to die. But you still watch, because you want to know how it's going to happen."

It's an effect that only works when media outlets follow the script.

Observing the U.S. media at Central Command in Qatar, where Noujaim filmed the documentary, she noted that U.S. television coverage tended to alternate between footage from reporters embedded with the U.S. troops; official statements received at the State Department, Pentagon, and Centcom press briefings; and analyses by high-ranking military personnel – unlike al-Jazeera, which had numerous correspondents on the ground, all of whom were knowledgeable in the local language and culture, and some of whom had lived in Iraq for 20 or 30 years.

"When you're a news outlet and you [cover] only one side of the story, you're promoting that side," Khader told me by phone during his recent visit to NYC.

To Noujaim, the problem with the U.S. media is largely systemic: 20-second sound bites and intense pressure to scoop the competition leave little room for investigation and analysis. "There's an inability to go into real depth and ask 'why' questions."

But Control Room shows that the problem is also one of journalists internalizing official rhetoric and common stereotypes – and failing (miserably) to dig for the truth: in the film al-Jazeera journalist Hassan Ibrahim recounts a BBC broadcast in which the newscaster, standing among a group of smiling, shouting Iraqi kids, told his audience that the children were cheering President Bush. The children were actually chanting, "God damn Bush!" – not quite the exalting reception reported in the United States.

Perhaps most disturbing was the infamous tearing down of the Saddam Hussein statue in central Baghdad, which came to be associated the world over with the official end to the war. "It was a show meant for the international media," Khader says in the film. According to Khader, the entire event was prefabricated: the men who tore down the statue weren't even Iraqis. "I lived in Iraq," he says. "I was born there. I was raised there. I can recognize an Iraqi accent." Indeed, Control Room shows footage of the media frenzy at the scene – TV camerapeople filming the event as if on a Hollywood stage, the surrounding streets eerily empty.

Shortly thereafter, U.S. TV sets showed President Bush on an Air Force carrier off the coast of San Diego, declaring Iraq "liberated." More than one year later, the war rages on.

'Control Room' opens Fri/11 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for shows and times.