The Unknown Known

Those of you interested in world affairs and the people behind them might enjoy The Unknown Known. It's a rather long interview with Donald Rumsfeld. I watched probably 2 1/2 hours of it last night on the History Channel. I don't know when it started.

I found it fascinating to hear from a guy whose been instrumental in four presidential administrations. The interviewer focuses on various memorandum Rumsfeld wrote during his time in service. Rumsfeld seemed amiable to me and I couldn't help but like him, at least for the first couple of hours. 

When they get into the last half hour or so and start discussing Iraq War 2 I got a bit annoyed. That's when the "..the gobbledygook, the blizzard of words, the misdirections, the evasions...and ultimately at the heart of it all...the disregard and devaluation of evidence", as the film maker put it, seemed most obvious to me:

Rumsfeld said, " Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because 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."

I understand what he's saying, but you can justify anything with that sort of thinking.

This isn't a new film. I see Reason magazine discusses it in an April 6 article of this year. Still, if you haven't seen it and enjoy hearing from major public figures, you might want to keep an eye out for it.