Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Jasmine El-Gamal
Produced by Finbar Anderson, Mindi Roscoe and Mikey Andreasson
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Jasmine El-Gamal remembers her deployment as a translator to Iraq in 2003 as a microcosm of everything that was wrong with the war. El-Gamal was in her early 20s at the time and recalls the translation test she was required to take as being woefully inadequate.
“We had no idea what we were doing, no idea what we were getting into, we didn’t even have the level of respect to sit and, not only learn these things, but teach them to people who are actually going to be going in there on the ground,” she tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede.
From Iraq, El-Gamal signed up to work as an interpreter at the notorious American military base at Guantanamo Bay which, she says, made perfect sense for someone with her interests. “I’ve always been really, really fascinated with what makes people do bad things, because I don’t believe that we are born with the capacity to hate or to be racist or to torture or to do any of those things. Everyone’s born with a clean slate.”
Those combined experiences changed her perception of her home country, El-Gamal says. “I had seen the full impact and the full picture of the policy choices that we had made as a country and how they affected so many people’s lives, their families, the region, our moral standing in the world.”
After seeing some of the worst of American foreign policy, El-Gamal decided to try to change things from the inside. “I went into the Pentagon, my idea was: I’ve been to Iraq, I’ve been to Gitmo, I’m going to bring in this perspective that is not prevalent in the Pentagon and Middle East policy will change for the better.”
That experience, El-Gamal says, changed her understanding of the people in the halls of power. “We make them into our heroes because we think that they will do something for us or they will speak for us or represent us. And then at the end of the day, you realize they’re actually just human beings. They have their own faults. They have their own weaknesses,” she says.
Her time in the Pentagon was valuable, but not an experience that El-Gamal would choose to repeat. “I learned how U.S. policy works. I met some nice people. I met some great public servants, some of whom are in the administration today and are trying to do what they can from the inside because sometimes you just make the choice to try to make a bad situation better,” she says. “But my biggest lesson was, I don’t want to work in government anymore.”
Outside of policy, she now runs Mind/Work Strategies, a policy and strategic communications advisory firm, and commentates regularly on foreign policy issues, focusing most recently on the war on Gaza. Informed by her background, she has publicly criticized the Biden administration’s approach to that conflict. “When I criticize the Biden administration, I’m doing so from the perspective of someone who has worked in government, who knows what our options are, who knows what it means to have a president who is not so completely one-sided in a conflict,” she says.
El-Gamal believes it was past time for President Joe Biden to step aside in the upcoming presidential election in favor of Kamala Harris. “There are some people who don’t want to leave because — and I do think Joe Biden had a little of this — where you believe in your heart that you are the only person that can fix this.”
Further reading: Lost and Found in Guantanamo Bay