The Unknown Known – DVD review

Errol Morris, 2013

Dogwoof

Sounds so endearingly muddled, doesn’t it, Donald Rumsfeld’s line about “unknown knowns”? Yet Errol Morris’s documentary leaves you feeling that it’s all part of a talent for obfuscation. Grilled about Saddam and 9/11, Bush Jr’s defence secretary (a wily veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan White Houses) talks to camera as if to the audience – not that we are any the wiser. Tough questions about the “war on terror” are simply shrugged off, and you can’t help wishing there were more talking heads, not just Rummy, slippery and ever-smiling.