Known Unknown: A Documentary of Historical Significance

It's very rare that a movie is something of historical significance, but one that does fall into that category played last night at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Errol Morris' Known Unknown is a two hour documentary that the director pared down from over thirty hours of interviews he filmed with former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Those who remember him from the press conferences he held for the Defense Department during the second Iraq War will recall Rumsfeld's acerbic wit. That wit is on full display in Morris' film, but we get much more. The audience also gets to witness the thoughtfulness and the keen awareness of history Rumsfeld possesses, as well as valuable insights into the ways by which decisions that shaped tumultuous world events were formed.

Like in his earlier film The Fog of War, Morris wisely lets his subject to almost all the talking. We only hear Morris a handful of times in the film. Much of what we hear in Known Unknown is Rumsfeld reading from among the countless memos, which he called his "snowflakes," that he sent during his tenure as a senior official in the administrations of US presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George W. Bush.

Known Unknown should be compulsory viewing for anyone who believes the insane conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2011 terror attacks. Conspiracy theorists operate under the misconception that government and its leaders are all-knowing and powerful. Hearing just how much that is not the case from someone like Rumsfeld could be an enlightening revelation for them.

One of the times we hear from Morris in the film, he accuses Rumsfeld of having a particular obsession with Iraq, which the former Defense Secretary convincingly refutes. However it's Morris' own obsession with the contradictions that he believes Rumsfeld embodies that drives the tone of his movie.

Rumsfeld has been vilified by many who detest the last President he served, George W. Bush and in the talk Morris gave following the Toronto screening of his movie, it was easy to get the sense the director shared at least some disdain for his subject. But Morris the filmmaker is too honest and too fine a craftsman to have let those feelings interfere with his compelling finished product, which is dramatically enhanced by Danny Elfman's brilliantly eerie score.

As a matter of due disclosure, I should note that I worked for Participant Media, one of the companies responsible for producing Known Unknown. I was the person who first introduced the idea of attaching specific social action campaigns and goals to the organization's movies; an approach that worked most notably for their documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

There are convincing arguments to be made on both sides about whether Al Gore is a visionary genius who spurred the world into staving off environmental suicide or a narcissistic dilettante pushing junk science. But in either case, there is no dispute that An Inconvenient Truth has been enormously influential. It is used as a teaching tool in schools all over the world and has been instrumental in shaping the perceptions about Global Warming.

But it's actually Participant's new movie, Known Unknown, which will be of lasting historical significance and is of indisputable educational value. The contradictions that bothered Morris so much are part of an unavoidable dilemma faced by those in positions of power faced with making momentous decisions. They are inundated with innumerable reports and prognostications where much of the information they receive is filled with conflicting data.

At the end of the day, the people who made decisions like those in the White House who chose to pursue the war in Iraq are fallible human beings. There is no certainty to any choice until it can be viewed in retrospect, and sometimes not even then. So while it may be easy for some to condemn Rumsfeld or George W. Bush for the course they steered, they chose what they thought was the best course of action in Iraq based on the information they had.

Known Unknown will be a satisfying experience for anyone who sees it, since people on either side of the divide over the Iraq war will not only gain insight but will be able to find ways of having their own prejudices confirmed. However, regardless of one's ideological outlook, witnessing that people with the humanity and cognisance of a Rumsfeld have to grapple with the difficulties he faced in the ways he did is something everyone should see. Morris and Rumsfeld make that predicament abundantly clear in Unknown Known.

Morris may be critical of the way his subject chose to act. But we can see from the current Middle East crisis and the ineptitude with which the current American President has handled it, that failing to act is in itself a decision. And as we are observing in real time from Barack Obama, not acting decisively can often do more damage than a flawed decision.

Yesterday's man introduced by song "Don't Stop (thinking about tomorrow)"

One of the ironies of Bill Clinton's rousing oratory to the Democratic convention last night was the song played as he waved to the crowd before his speech kept repeating the strains, "yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone" from Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop.

The song was used as the theme song of Clinton's first presidential campaign, but is now a reminder of the relevance of his presidency to Obama's.

Yesterday is gone and Bill Clinton is yesterday's man. Clinton is a great speaker and a President fondly remembered as governing during one of America's strongest economies in a period that reaped the benefits of Ronald Reagan's victory but had not yet suffered the travails of 9-11. It's sometimes thought that one of the reasons Al Gore lost to George W Bush was because Clinton was kept under wraps during the Gore presidential campaign. Whether it was because the former Vice President did not want to be outshone by his old boss, or the wounds from the Monica Lewinsky scandal were too fresh, it turned out to be a big mistake.  Al Gore's stiff personality, without the boost from the personable, warm Clinton kept him from getting into the big chair in the Oval Office.

Barack Obama knows better and Clinton turned in a typical Clinton performance, eloquent, intelligent, emotionally stirring, and about twenty-five minutes too long to hold everyone's complete attention.

|The former President's heart seemed strangely not entirely in his performance. Probably because he didn't believe all of his finely crafted speech. At one point, Clinton said, "though I often disagreed with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far-right, that now controls their party, seems to hate our President."

If that level of anger is mystifying to Clinton, perhaps we wan't paying any attention to what Democrats were saying in the eight years after he left office. The hatred and invective by them, that still continues, against George W. Bush is staggering by any standard. Leftist Democrats continue to utter Bush's name as if it were a swear word.

But one doesn't listen to Slick Willie for 100% accuracy, one listens to him to hear a good talk. He may have re-written the history of his own presidency through the lens of nostalgia and Obama's through salesmanship, but in the speechifying department, he certainly delivered the goods.

Comedian Steve Bridges dies at age 48

The annual White House Correspondents' Dinner has a tradition of being an opportunity for the President, whomever it is at the time, to let his hair down and show that he has a sense of humor.

The funniest speech ever was more of a performance of George W. Bush along with impersonator Steve Bridges, providing Bush's 'secret thoughts'. Sadly, Bridges died Saturday at the age of 48.

Cyber Dissent - from The George W Bush Center

You can also check out the Bush Center Home Page


h/t Kamangir

Christopher Hitchens on Chomsky's Follies

Christopher Hitchens can't speak with his mouth right now due to esophageal cancer, but he still speaks loudly and forcefully with his pen.

His column on the stupidity of Noam Chomsky's moral relativism and misrepresentation appears in the current issue of Slate:

The professor's pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.

Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida's martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the "operation." As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

I can't immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton's earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven't been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida's work to begin with.) He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the Abbottabad, Pakistan, strike would justify a contingency whereby "Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, "uncontroversially, [Bush's] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's.")

Read the rest here at Slate

UPDATE : Alan Dershowitz on bin Laden's defender

9-11 Conspiracy Crackpot compares questions about public funding for his marginal theories to Salman Rushdie's death sentence

Blogger Blazing Cat Fur alerted us to the latest nuttiness from the always-crazy Canadian Charger.

Jonathan Kay over at The National Post wrote a column about a grant to a British graduate student,  Joshua Blakeney, to pursue his crackpot 9-11 conspiracy theories. Blakeney is also a sometime correspondent for Mohamed Elmasry's Canadian Charger, as shown in a post from this blog back in August. (Check out the video in the link where Blakeney says that Michael Moore, of all people, is complicit in the 9-11 cover up!)

Kay wrote that:

the University of Lethbridge has awarded Blakeney a $7,714 Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship to pursue his research. (The scholarship is listed as being funded through the “ongoing financial commitment of the Province of Alberta.”) ..  

In other words, the University of Lethbridge — and, through the province of Alberta’s funding arrangements, the taxpayers of Alberta — are paying a British graduate student $7,714 to pursue his conspiracy theory that the 9/11 attacks were staged by Washington.   

Does anyone else see a problem with that?

Well, Mohamed "Elmo" Elmasry's Charger not only doesn't see a problem with that, but is outraged; outraged to the point of grammatical and syntax errors, that Kay would challenge the academic freedom of having tax dollars subsidize theories put forward by people whose sanity could be questioned.

My favorite bit from the editorial in Elmo's Charger is the following, where he quotes Blakeney's thesis supervisor, University of Lethbridge Professor Anthony Hall, about Kay:

It seems to me that The National Post and Maclean’s are essentially trying to put a fatwa on higher level university studies on 9/11. Such a fatwa would clear aside empirically-based research so Jonathan can engage in his own spinning of public mythology posing as the psychoanthropologist who has penetrated the deepest cultural mores of the... ta daaaa... the conspiracy theorists. How pathetic!”   

Dr. Hall said the website advertising the book lauds Mr. Kay's success in “infiltrating” the “Truthers”, language Dr. Halls said is probably an accurate characterization of “Mr. Kay's mode of doing journalistic business as an agent of espionage and counterintelligence for those above him in the chain of command. He and the promoters at Maclean's of a privatized higher education system for Canada are good embodiments of the unfolding operations of the privatized terror economy.”

You know you have a credible, highly regarded academic when he uses phrases like "ta daaaa" in his interviews. But that's not nearly as fascinating as Hall's allegation that Kay is "doing journalistic business as an agent of espionage and counterintelligence for those above him in the chain of command."

This is what I'm having trouble understanding: Hall seems to be mocking Kay for characterizing him and his fellow travellers as 'conspiracy theorists'. And then in his next sentence, he alleges a conspiracy involving Jonathan Kay.

The extent to which a person making those remarks is completely unhinged is something people will have to determine for themselves.

But to give you another indication of the lack of intellectual rigour, or just plain lack of intelligence on the part of these people, Blakeney is quoted as saying, "Where are the Salman Rushdie defenders now? Or do such individuals only like free speech if it criticizes Islam rather than helps exculpate framed Muslims who probably didn’t plan or execute 9/11?"

Let's put this in terms that perhaps, just perhaps, Mr. Blakeney and Elmasry might be able to understand.

No one is denying Blakeney his right to speak his theories or to publish them. What is being questioned is whether crackpot theories should receive public funding. That is significantly different than Salman Rushdie being threatened with death for having written a satirical allegory about the founder of Islam.

In my opinion, only a person with a profound lack of intelligence and/or insight would seriously make that comparison.

And what is truly ironic is that the Canadian Charger's pretend defense of free speech is coming from someone who is so closely tied to attempts to repress free speech through the Canadian Human Rights Commission's notorious thought crimes provisions.
 
Of course, if it isn't yet apparent, irony is completely lost on the people at The Canadian Charger.

Obama’s Mad Message: Don’t go back to the failed policies of the Bush-Obama Era

Yes, President Bush, America does miss you

From England's The Telegraph:

Several months ago a huge billboard appeared near Wyoming, Minnesota, with a beaming photo of George W. Bush with the caption “Miss me yet?” The answer to that question is clearly yes, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, which shows the former president staging a remarkable political recovery despite having largely disappeared from public life since leaving office:

By 47 to 45 percent, Americans say Obama is a better president than George W. Bush. But that two point margin is down from a 23 point advantage one year ago.

“Democrats may want to think twice about bringing up former President George W. Bush’s name while campaigning this year,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

This has to be one of the most extraordinary political comebacks in decades.And as this week’s Washington Post/ABC News poll showed, nearly 25 percent of Democrats now believe “a return to Bush’s policies would be good,” a staggeringly high figure

 Read the rest here

What a guy!

Former President George W Bush surprised returning troops yesterday at Dallas/Fort Worth

Pictures here