Former US Marine captain Josh Rushing has taken a job reporting for Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based TV network, a news report said Thursday.

Rushing, a captain in the Marine Corps until October last year, would appear on a global, English-language news channel the network hoped to start by spring next year, the USA Today newspaper reported.

While Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the network of "perfectly willing to lie to the world" and having "a pattern of playing propaganda" for its 50 million viewers, most of them in the Arab world, Rushing said he had been trained by the Marines "to represent the best of what America stands for to a foreign audience."

Rushing, 33, who was enlisted in 1990, was made liaison to Al-Jazeera at the US Central Command media center in Doha, Qatar, during the Iraq war.

Al-Jazeera approached him earlier this year about joining the new channel, the report quoted Rushing as saying.

Al-Jazeera had hired reporters and producers from several Western news organizations, including the Associated Press, the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., CNN and Fox News, and the new channel was "over half-way there" in hiring the hundreds of people it would need, Katie Bergius, a spokeswoman for the TV network, told the newspaper.

The channel would have broadcast centers in Doha, Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington, where Rushing now lives, according to the report.

Rushing said he was "glad (former Iraqi leader) Saddam Hussein isn't there anymore," but sometimes thought "maybe we did the right thing for the wrong reasons" because it was "clear" there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the report said.

Source: Xinhua