One thing I was looking forward to this year was doing some video updates. But since I got here Thursday morning, I've come down with some weird vocal affliction: I can't talk. The peanut gallery might be chuckling, but it's actually miserable. You get on the shuttle and peers and readers want to know what you've seen or are looking forward to seeing, and you just mouth something. It feels rude. I hate opining on the shuttle, it's true, and it's so nice to have an excuse to demur. But I can't even lean over to my neighbors during a screening and be snide. I can't talk to my friends or to publicists or clerks. It has meant, however, that my text-messaging skills are off the hook.
If I could talk I'd say I found Robb Moss and Peter Galison's documentary, "Secrecy," appropriately disturbing. They've given themselves the unenviable assignment of outlining the complicated history of clandestine activity in government intelligence. The film argues both sides of the secrecy debate - that it's un-American and that it's in America's national security interest.
The film's scope reaches from the Manhattan Project to Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, and Moss and Galison, both of whom teach at Harvard, use footage of atomic mushroom clouds, for example, to illustrate what secrecy hath wrought. They also raise a good question about the media's job of forcing transparency. Do exposés make us less safe? The movie has some great interviews with Charles Swift, the military attorney who represented Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver. This is a strong, probing essay that asks necessary questions.
Its biggest intellectual shortcoming is that, while the movie has no shortage of proof of how secrecy is corrosive, it provides little positive evidence to support the assertion that more transparency is ultimately better for us. Regardless, it's a movie worth talking about. Everybody's talking about it - everybody but me!
