The Pentagon Papers and Rumsfeldian song

A very sobering article titled The Pentagon Papers. An insiders view of the war planning and unprecedented overhauling of institutional knowledge within the intelligence and defense parts of the administration. By Karen Kwiatkowski on Salon.com

To balance off that outrageousness, there was lighter news recently on NPR, last year’s book The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, which my mother bought me, but enjoyed so much never gave to me, has been set to music. Any you must hear it!

One of the classic Rumdfeldianisms below. Jon Stewart had fun with it when it happened. And BBC-4’s great collection of Rumsfeld Soundbites of course has the original quote.

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

Department of Defense news briefing
Feb. 12, 2002

the theme to both: we don’t know,
-b

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