The Fog of War

He confirmed that the second attack had been imaginary while acknowledging the genuine engagement on August 2nd.

McNamara later admitted in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War that the August 4th attack didn't occur.

The most damning revelations came in 2005 when the National Security Agency declassified hundreds of documents related to the incident.

An internal historical study conducted revealed that intelligence had been deliberately manipulated to support the conclusion that an attack had occurred.

Oh, S- Sloss is, uh, I feel like one of the truly the, um, key architects.

Starting with The Fog of War, he's been a, a, a central figure in, in film financing.

I think he's, he's, you know, one of those rare guys who ...

I think he is a l- a lawyer, uh, uh, by background, by training, but also, um, got into film finance and became o- one of the, the heroes of the sort of, um, you know, uh, Telluride, um, you know, l- level, uh, film festival, um, and, uh, swooped up a lot of projects.

Well, yeah, no, no, just to, just to list some of them, I mean, a lot of titles here familiar to indie lovers.

Uh, you got The Fog of War, yeah.

Boys Don't Cry, Boyhood, uh, Bernie, uh, Far From Heaven, Before Sunrise, Napoleon Dynamite, uh, Little Miss Sunshine.

So he's got his stamp on a lot of, uh, films that got a lot of credibility, uh, in the arts world-

I like...

Fog of War.

Yeah, I love Fog of War.

Famously

played Robert McNamara.

Okay.

The one that I'm familiar with, the one that I've watched, is Fog of War with Robert McNamara.

But what I'm saying is the reason I'm bringing him up is because he wrote a book about photo history and photojournalism and about how... easy it is to fake something that a lot of people would consider like the gold standard of show me pictures, pictures.

So yeah,

But there's just something to that idea of being understood, of you can get your perspective out there and have it stated back to you that is healing in its own way.

I remember also, remember the documentary The Fog of War about Robert McNamara?

Yes.

Yeah.

Wonderful.

And with me in studio is Robert May, an award-winning independent filmmaker known for his work on documentaries like Lust for Gold, The Fog of War, and for features like The Station Agent.

Robert is also a Pennsylvania native himself and was the driving force behind Kids for Cash, a documentary about judicial kickbacks in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

We wanted to understand whether or not this was a much broader problem.

And also, I was a young person when, for instance, the subsequent war in Iraq happened.

But what I do know is that it's hard for people to imagine that are even younger to what degree this war was popularized and mainstreamed and part of just... a general agreement that this is apparently what has to happen for instance your program also includes you know a film like the fog of war which i think very handsomely shows how these constructions of consent happened right so if the war was somewhat popular and there was uh a general consent for it um it also explains that a lot of filmmakers are then interested in the emotional workings of the war, the reverberations on the emotional scale.

Bigelow has always been a very ambiguous director when it comes to saying overt things about the American presses in the Middle East.

Her interest lies in what does it do with America.

But at some point you can also start to see these films as ways of, again, what I call the Weltanschauung, to illustrate... how America has perceived itself or wants to be perceived on this global stage.

And then they serve a completely different and, for me, more productive purpose.

And I think it's interesting that you mentioned here The Fog of War and also we have Fahrenheit 9-11 by Michael Moore.

But these two are both documentaries.