Director Errol Morris’s ‘The Unknown Unknown’ shows Rumsfeld as unapologetic.
April 5, 2014
So what do we know now that we didn’t after documentarian Errol Morris’s 100-minute Q&A with Donald “I Don’t Do Quagmires” Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known”? Only that the former U.S. secretary of defense is still a master strategist of evasion, contradiction, misdirection and malapropism.
As a footnote, here’s what we do know to date about that dirty little Iraq War that “Rummy,” the George W. Bush White House and their nincompoop Pentagon neo-cons cooked up and spoon fed to the omnivorous American public: more than 4400 U.S. military deaths and 32,000 wounded, at least 100,000 to as many as 500,000 Iraqi fatalities, millions more displaced, and an estimated price tag of $3 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion.
Yet like most of the questions that Morris tosses—gently—at his subject, any such factual horrors are sidestepped, parried and danced around by a fitfully nimble Rumsfeld. Relaxed, nattily dressed and imperiously self-assured as ever, Morris’ hollow yet overstuffed man does his imitation of “Hogan’s Heroes” Sgt. Schultz (“I know nothing, nothing”) while implausibly denying personal culpability for any stink that blew back from the Iraq War, whether the phony Weapons of Mass Destruction raison d’être, prisoner torture or the fictitious links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.
In his Oscar-winning “The Fog of War,” Morris at least got Lyndon Johnson-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to shoulder some of blame for the Vietnam War quagmire. But Rumsfeld is impishly unapologetic, even as his own words are shot down by Morris’ juxtapositions with TV news footage culled from the run-up and catastrophic letdown to the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent U.S. occupation. Yet it’s clear that Morris’ mission isn’t to catch his subject in a Captain Queeg-style meltdown that would cause Rummy to shout “Good gracious” or “Henny-penny” and storm off the set.
Rather, Morris is chiefly interested in the infernal meta-narrative of how those in the pinnacles of power can delude themselves for so long and so often that—perhaps—they don’t even know what the truth is anymore. This is a man seemingly without an ounce of introspection and one who surely sleeps well at night, confident he did all the right things, from his time as the youngest (44) secretary of defense, during the Gerald Ford presidency, to his Freddy Krueger-like return to the Pentagon as prime architect of the shock-and-awe Iraq and Afghanistan U.S.-led invasions.
Morris goes out of his way to humanize Rumsfeld, including humdrum details of his marriage while tracing his long career as Republican White House insider and go-to warhorse who trumpeted “peace through strength” and other hawkish mantras. We hear Morris’ off-camera questions, but the slippery answers are challenged only indirectly via news footage and period headlines, not by contrary interviews that would offer known arguments to Rumsfeld’s self-serving explanations.
The film’s title is a quote from one of the enormous number of official memos Rumsfeld generated over the decades. In one wacky rumination from 2004 (Subject: What You Know), he writes of the “things that you think you know that it turns out you do not.” For Morris, this is a four-star analogy for his subject, a polarizing public figure who indeed is a riddle wrapped in an enigma—and cloaked in an impenetrable armor of Orwellian double-talk. As running metaphor, Morris cuts back and forth to images of a deep blue sea, significantly more fathomable than Rumsfeld himself.
As to any possible policy misfires during his Washington tenures, Rumsfeld blithely chalks them up to the unintended consequences of war, executive decision-making and the inevitable inability for leaders like him to anticipate everything, for Pete’s sake: i.e., heck, Stuff Happens. This expedient philosophy can rationalize pretty much any horrors stretching from Abu Ghraib to Gitmo. If only Emily Littella were still on active duty, I know she’d just say, “Never mind.”
And so it goes in Rummy-speak, as Morris sends his cameras down the rabbit hole into an upside-down universe where government morality and mea culpas have no standing, yet mad tautologies like “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” do. In the question of those well-known phantom WMDs, such inane statements can justify anything, including interminable wars in which bodies are still piling up, peace is not won, and mass Mideast destruction marches on.
New documentary We Are Legion puts an actual human face on Anonymous, the hacktivist group whose members usually are seen wearing Guy Fawkes masks — if they are seen at all.
Considering Anonymous’ retaliatory acts against websites run by the Department of Justice and the entertainment industry just last week in response to the government takedown of file-sharing site Megaupload, We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists could almost be mistaken for a 93-minute news segment.
But unlike most news segments about the group, the documentary contains genuine moments with actual Anons (some maintain their anonymity in the doc, but others don’t).
“The last two or three days we’ve seen a lot of what Anonymous does,” We Are Legion director Brian Knappenberger said in an interview with Wired.com here Saturday, the morning after the documentary’s premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival. “You know, there was a film about the Weather Underground that came out a few years ago, and that was made 30 years after they were blowing up buildings, and I love that film. But picture making a film like that while they were still blowing up buildings — that’s what I’m talking about.”
We Are Legion might be the first to portray the group’s members as true revolutionaries, and it could serve as a time capsule if the kind of online sit-ins and retaliatory strikes that Anonymous has helped create become the new model for civil disobedience across the globe.
For those who didn’t hear of Anonymous until Occupy Wall Street started up, We Are Legion effectively puts the group’s current incarnation in historical perspective. The documentary traces the roots of early hacker-activist groups like the Cult of the Dead Cow and Electronic Disturbance Theater before jumping into Anonymous’ roots in 4chan.
The documentary goes deep. Speaking with current and former Anonymous participants — as well as Wired writers Ryan Singel and Steven Levy — Knappenberger gives a thorough chronological account of Anonymous’ exploits, up to the group’s current place at the forefront of online disobedience.
Starting with Mercedes Renee Haefer, who was arrested in conjunction with the denial-of-service attacks against online payment service PayPal last July, the documentary talks to Anons and experts about Anonymous’ vendetta against Scientology, defense of WikiLeaks, and support of the actions in Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab Spring.
Slamdance, the underground alternative movie fest that runs during the Sundance Film Festival here each year, seems like the perfect place for We Are Legion’s primer on Anonymous. The film might have seemed out of place at a glitzy Hollywood-in-the-hills screening.
“It feels right,” Knappenberger said of the premiere. “Slamdance has a kind of undercurrent of revolutionary, counterculture, slightly anarchic vibe that just seemed to fit [the film] right away.”
Knappenberger is looking for distribution for his film so it can be seen by a wider audience. It seems possible that Hollywood backers will shy away from a film about Anonymous after the group’s actions against the Motion Picture Association of America and other entertainment industry power players. But Knappenberger said he isn’t worried.
“I just want to tell the story,” he said, adding that considering Anonymous’ various targets over the years, “Who aren’t I offending?”
He could also take advice from his subject Haefer, who in the film says that what Anonymous ultimately hopes to protect is freedom of speech, regardless of a person’s opinions or background.
A BBC documentary film crew has been held at gunpoint for over three hours while trying to sneak into the world’s most famous secret base – Area 51, otherwise known as Groom Lake / Dreamland.
The BBC film crew just before they were arrested
The Groom Lake facility has no perimeter fence to keep out intruders, but instead uses a network of hidden sensors and cameras that can detect when anyone crosses onto the base. Private security guards also patrol in unmarked jeeps.
Documentary maker Darren Perks and his film crew were arrested at gunpoint while filming ”UFO: Conspiracy Road Trip’ documentary, which airs next Monday; the footage will show the incident where they are arrested at gunpoint.
They were forced to lie on the ground for three hours as guards surrounded them armed with M16 assault rifles.
‘At this point I managed to talk to the guards a bit and one told me how they could ‘make you disappear and your body will never be found’. – Darren Perks
Some of the buildings at the Area 51 gate that the team managed to film before their arrest.
UFO enthusiast and documentary film maker Darren perks said: ‘At this point I managed to talk to the guards a bit and one told me how they could ‘make you disappear and your body will never be found’.
Apache Helicopter
‘He also pointed out that an Apache attack helicopter had been scrambled and had been monitoring us from two miles away and that over 20 military guards had driven up from the actual base to deal with the incident. There were quite a few of them there with guns!
UFO enthusiast: Darren Perks
“One guard I quizzed let slip that there are sensors in the ground that can detect approaching vehicles and walkers up in the nearby mountains, so they know if people are getting too close as they cannot put fences up because the area is so big.”
“Then at about 11:30pm we were allowed to leave on the bus and we went back to our hotel at the nearby town of Alamo Nevada.”
Fined
The crew were all facing a potential 6 month jail sentence for crossing onto the restricted area, but after a series of phone calls between Washington and London and the payment of an equivalent £375 fine each they were allowed to go free.
Followed
It didn’t end there for the crew as they had obvioulsy attracted a lot of rather unwanted attention. Perks went on – ‘Because the film equipment had been taken by the FBI we had to wait to get new kit from Vegas so we had a day of rest but we were followed everywhere by unmarked Government vehicles.”
‘They stuck out like a sore thumb to me. It was myself that pointed this out to the others otherwise they would not have been aware of being followed.”
This documentary explains how CIA pioneered, developed, manipulated prisoner abuse, sold drugs, changed regimes and killed millions of people worldwide
Secrets of the CIA documents exactly what the title suggests it would. With $50 Billion budget and over 25,000 people working for it, the CIA has more money and power than most developing countries and uses it to support genocidal dictators, shelter drug trafficking and cause much unnecessary bloodshed. Watch this documentary to get a good idea of what CIA does and supports. The Secrets of the CIA is based solidly on verifiable facts so you can be assured that everything the video reveals is true.
So what do we know now that we didn’t after documentarian Errol Morris’s 100-minute Q&A with Donald “I Don’t Do Quagmires” Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known”? Only that the former U.S. secretary of defense is still a master strategist of evasion, contradiction, misdirection and malapropism.
UFO enthusiast: Darren Perks
