The great filmmaker Errol Morris has a new film, to be released April 4,
The Unknown Known, on former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, contrasting I guess his sublime psychopathy with the confused guilt of Robert McNamara captured in
The Fog of War. His s
eries of articles on Rumsfeld and the film, "The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld", is just starting in the Times, and I wanted to single out this bit from an interview with NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, the reporter who asked Rumsfeld the question that led to the famous "unknown unknowns" remark:
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: Well, not just [Rumsfeld] but the entire building was in denial. Doug Feith — don’t get me started on Doug Feith — told me that they had a Marshall Plan all set to go in terms of rebuilding Iraq. And he pointed to this stack of huge three-ringed binders, all of them black. There must have been about 10 of them stacked up on top of a cabinet. And I asked to see them, and he said, “No, you can’t. It’s classified.” And I said, “Well, O.K., I understand that, I guess.” But I raised it to somebody else within the next couple of weeks. I said, “Well, Doug Feith showed me the Marshall Plan for Iraq.” And this person laughed, and he said, “Mik, that was the Marshall Plan.” It was a copy of the original Marshall Plan, not a plan for Iraq.
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| "Dumbest fucking guy on the planet" according to General Tommy Franks (no slouch in the dumb department himself). But as with Rumsfeld—and George W. Bush himself—the stupidity is a kind of act, masking the operative feature of total pathological irresponsibility.Via HuffingtonPost. |
Fellow dirt miner Driftglass has been visiting the same places as me again, and has
more to say, essential as usual.
