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Iraq was a tenuous link to the larger “war on terror.” The so-called “torture memos” authorized “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects held without trial in the jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Did these notions also find their way into the Abu Ghraib prison on the edge of Baghdad where suspected enemies were held? Rumsfield says no, not this kind of “unbelievably bad, illegal, improper behavior.”

A formal report of the Red Cross said that the interrogation techniques in Abu Ghraib were “tantamount to torture.” The report was leaked to the Wall Street Journal, which posted it online, in full.⁷² But the world took no notice. So long as these meanings were in words, they remained largely unknown.

Only later did what was already known to the Red Cross become more widely known through a series of digital photos taken by US military personnel. The word “tantamount” was not as real, not as indisputably material, as these images.

Here is Rumsfield again, working around the now-indisputably known, trying to find his way about in Meinong’s jungle:^§MS3.1.1b

Well, we know that in every war there are things that evolve that hadn’t been planned for or fully anticipated and that things occur which shouldn’t occur …

If you take those words and try to connect them in each way that is possible … There was at least one more combination that wasn’t there: The unknown knowns. Things that you possibly may know that you don’t know you know …

Yeah, I think that memo is backwards. I think that it’s closer to what I said here than that. Unknown knowns. …

Oh, my goodness, … I can’t believe some of the things I wrote. I don’t know where all those words came from.⁷³

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⁷¹ Errol Morris (Director), 2013, The Unknown Known www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=the-unknown-known

⁷² The American Journal of International Law, 2004, “U.S. Abuse of Iraqi Detainees at Abu Ghraib Prison,” 98(3):591–96, p. 594.

⁷³ Errol Morris (Director), 2013, The Unknown Known www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=the-unknown-known

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 281–282. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Errol Morris’ “Unknown Known” §MS3.1.2a