Al Jazeera's (Global) Mission

"Given that the global landscape will continue to change with the rise of China, India, and other countries, the United States needs all the friends it can get," says pollster John Zogby. "One simply can't overestimate what our country stands to lose in terms of economic power if American companies find it difficult to trade overseas. There are clear signs that American hegemony is faltering."

Which leaves us to contemplate a sort of "Springtime for Hitler" scenario: Could embracing the new Al Jazeera--even though it may well continue to air opinions and priorities the United States and its corporations find toxic--actually burnish our image abroad? It would be a twist worthy of Sun Tzu. Or Jon Stewart.

Nobody believes in AJI's rehabilitative potential more than Rushing. As part of his mandate to manage the press at CentCom in Doha, Rushing had been assigned Al Jazeera as one of his "accounts" during the Iraq war; as low man on the totem pole, he was also ordered to escort a couple of student filmmakers from the American University in Cairo. It wasn't until he was back in Los Angeles that the telegenic Marine discovered, through a voice mail from a fan, that he'd become an accidental celebrity: The film students had taped his earnest discussions with Al Jazeera reporters about war coverage--and Rushing had become the star of Control Room, a documentary about the network that was screened at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.

"I Googled my name and 'Sundance,' and up comes Control Room," says Rushing over coffee in Washington's posh Mayflower Hotel, near AJI's new offices on K Street. "I started reading Web sites, not about the movie but about me and my role. And I said, 'Oh my gosh, I'm in trouble. They're using me as the anti-Bush poster boy!' "

It got worse. For a supposedly savvy media guy, Rushing made a dumb move: Shortly before the movie was to open nationally, he gave an interview to none other than The Village Voice, commenting on the pictures from Abu Ghraib. "I said, 'If we're Americans, war isn't hell. We don't see blood, we don't see guts, we don't see the human cost. It's like it's brand marketing here.' I said I was really struggling because what I was seeing on the news was not what I saw over there."

Needless to say, the Pentagon wasn't happy with how Captain Rushing exercised his right to free speech. While in New York for the film's premiere, he got a call from his boss at Marine headquarters. "You can't speak to the media," he said, according to Rushing. "If a reporter puts a mike in your face, walk away silently." Rushing, recognizing an order when he heard one, shut up.

But the more Rushing didn't talk, the more famous he got. "When I couldn't speak, it took the story from the E1 section [entertainment news] to A1 [front page]," he says.

In August, he was about to give a keynote address at a military-information symposium in San Diego when his phone rang again. This time it was a buddy from L.A. "Dude," he said to Rushing, "you're screwed." The Los Angeles Times had run a front-page article portraying Rushing as a First Amendment martyr and an op-ed piece calling him "a credit to the Corps." Tired of being muzzled during a national conversation that involved his behavior and reputation, Rushing resigned his commission.

Recounting it now, 16 months later, Rushing still gets emotional. "It was tough economically for my family," he says. By leaving six years short of his 20th anniversary, he gave up his pension and his health insurance; suddenly, he had no job. But for a guy who had been a Marine since graduating from high school, the emotional toll of his decision was even greater. "It was scary to separate myself from that identity," he says softly, "to take the uniform off, to lose the security of the brotherhood, and to know that what I was going to do wasn't going to sit well with the institution I felt so loyal to. I knew I was going out into the world to get on a box and say that in the way America deals with Al Jazeera, there is nothing less than our national security at stake--and we're screwing up."

Although it has been around since 1996, the original Arabic-language Al Jazeera first registered on most Americans' radar after September 11, when the station began beaming up images from inside Taliban-controlled Kabul. Al Jazeera built its reputation by bringing us tapes of a cave-dwelling Osama, as well as clips of Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl shortly before they were beheaded. Its commentators were similarly incendiary, with a penchant for describing suicide bombers as "martyrs" and American forces as "neocolonial occupiers." And while the station's tone is less inflammatory these days--partly as a result of competition from the more moderate Al Arabiya, which is based in Dubai--it's still the world's most dependable source for up-to-the-minute hostage videos. Al Jazeera, which is underwritten by the emir of Qatar, claims some 50 million viewers worldwide, about 200,000 of them here in the United States, where it can be seen on the Dish Network.