{"id":1256921,"date":"2023-10-10T00:45:07","date_gmt":"2023-10-10T00:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=144729"},"modified":"2023-10-10T00:45:07","modified_gmt":"2023-10-10T00:45:07","slug":"a-message-to-donald-rumsfelds-ghost-about-my-known-knowns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/10\/10\/a-message-to-donald-rumsfelds-ghost-about-my-known-knowns\/","title":{"rendered":"A Message to Donald Rumsfeld\u2019s Ghost About My Known Knowns"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence<\/strong> that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists.\u00a0 Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:<\/p>\n

Reports that say that something hasn\u2019t 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 \u2014 the ones we don\u2019t know we don\u2019t know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN\u2019s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, \u201cI could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.\u201d<\/p>\n

He never said he had evidence, because he didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state.\u00a0 This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on \u201cterror\u201d that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.<\/p>\n

A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had \u201cweapons of mass destruction,\u201d repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point.\u00a0 He said, \u201cMy colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources \u2014 solid sources. These are not assertions. What we\u2019re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.\u201d\u00a0 He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an \u201cintelligence failure,\u201d a typical deceitful excuse along with \u201cit was a mistake.\u201d \u00a0Of course, Iraq did not have \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.<\/p>\n

Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector, \u00a0made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is.\u00a0 See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:<\/p>\n