DONALD RUMSFELD TENSION ON COBERT SHOW.
This is how Travis Gettys reports it:
He brought up Rumsfeld’s most famous saying, about uncertainty in the world: “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.”
Colbert suggested a fourth option: “the unknown knowns — which (are) the things that we know, and then we choose not to know them or not let other people know we know.”
The audience laughed — but they began to applaud as Rumsfeld seemed to realize he was not about to be let off the hook, after all.
“I’m going to save you embarrassment,” Rumsfeld said, as Colbert briefly paused to formulate a simple question from a complex set of facts.
“You don’t have to do that,” Colbert quickly countered. “I can’t be embarrassed — I’m a comedian.”
And more
At last, Rumsfeld delivered a straight answer.
“The president had available to him intelligence from all elements of the government, and the National Security Council members had that information,” Rumsfeld said. “It was all shared, it was all supplied, and it’s never certain — if it were a fact, it wouldn’t be called intelligence.”
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