“Control Room”: Freedom and Democracy, the Al Jazeera Way

By Ahmed Nassef

Control Room, Directed by Jehane Noujaim. Opening nationwide June 11th.

“If there is somebody captured, I expect those people to be treated humanely… Just like we’re treating the prisoners that we have captured humanely.” – President George W. Bush

It’s impossible to watch the President’s declaration, made in the early days of the Iraq invasion—long before the Abu Ghraib revelations—and replayed in Jehane Noujaim’s “Control Room,” without an overwhelming sense of irony. Bush uttered those words in the wake of the capture of several US soldiers by Iraq. Several other American servicemen had been killed in action at the same time.

Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arab satellite news network that has changed the face of news reporting in the Middle East, was being roundly condemned by the Bush administration for broadcasting graphic images of the dead Americans along with Iraqi television’s interviews with the visibly frightened POWs. American television networks refused to air the same images—opting instead to broadcast heavily edited snippets of the POW interviews, and that only after long hours of soul-searching agony. (Our own site, having decided to run screenshots of the Al Jazeera images, was inundated with thousands of hits from Americans desperate to find out what all the fuss was about.)

In those first couple of weeks before the official conquest of Baghdad, US broadcasters played a strange, somewhat hypocritical, game. In one breath, Al Jazeera was portrayed as a propaganda tool for anti-Americanism in the Arab world, while at the same time, Al Jazeera’s live feeds of the shock and awe in Baghdad—complete with an “Al Jazeera Exclusive” tag on the screen—were ubiquitous on Fox and CNN.

This reluctantly symbiotic relationship—a little-love/little-more-hate kind of thing—between America’s image-makers (both in the media and government) and Al Jazeera is a constant thread running through Noujaim’s brilliant documentary, which was filmed during the weeks just before and after the invasion at Al-Jazeera’s Qatar offices and US Central Command just 20 miles away.

The complicated feelings are certainly mutual. As Samir Khader, the Iraqi-born Al Jazeera senior producer and one of the film’s most memorable participants, says about why he’d take a job with Fox News if it were ever offered, “I would exchange the Arab nightmare for the American dream.” Khader strikes you as the most cynical of Arab cynics, yet even he has some admiration for the United States.

The same goes for Hassan Ibrahim, a Sudanese reporter who strongly opposes the war and is sickened by the US administration’s half-truths. In the middle of a discussion with one of the station’s anchors, who appears hopeless that anything will ever change in US designs for the region, Ibrahim counters, “I have absolute confidence in the United States Consitution. I have absolute confidence in the US people. The US people are going to stop the United States.”

Which leads us to another irony: this kind of cherished American idealism about the power of the people to prompt positive social change, and the duty of journalists to deliver the information that people need, is perhaps more alive at Al Jazeera than at the US networks.

“[We] try to shake up these rigid societies… to tell them to wake up… wake up… there is a world around you, and you are still sleeping—this is the message of Al Jazeera,” says Khader.

In “Control Room,” Noujaim succeeds in getting beyond typical characterizations of good and evil without trivializing the tragic human cost of the war.

The images of Al Jazeera reporter Tarek Ayoub huddled on the roof of his station’s Baghdad office, motionless and terrified, just moments before he was killed by a US attack on the building; the subsequent disbelief and shock of his colleagues back in Qatar; and his wife’s plea in a press conference for the Western media to tell the truth to the world about what happened to her husband will stay with you long after you watch this film.

But you also see moments that give you a little more cause for optimism, like CNN’s veteran reporter Tom Mintier and another Western reporter questioning a US military spokesman’s story about the attack on Al Jazeera’s office.

Perhaps the most hopeful portrayal is that of Lt. Josh Rushing, the US Army press officer who undergoes a noticeable transformation and begins to understand Al Jazeera’s point of view. He realizes that he didn’t have the same gut-wrenching feeling watching Iraqi dead and wounded on TV as he did seeing casualties among his fellow soldiers, and that becomes an eye-opener for him.

In a very concrete way, Al Jazeera is one of the Arab world’s best hopes for democratic change. This is why it is constantly attacked by most Arab regimes (a common claim is that it is a “Zionist tool,” since it often features Israeli government officials as guests).

Al Jazeera’s formula for democratization of the Middle East makes a lot more sense—and costs a lot less money and lives—than the road chosen by President Bush.

As Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim reminds us in the film, “Democratize or I’ll shoot you. It just doesn’t work.”

Ahmed Nassef is editor-in-chief of Muslim WakeUp! He may be reached at anassef@muslimwakeup.com