From page 2:
...Morris asks Rumsfeld about his memos regarding what is permissible and what is not permissible in the interrogation of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. There follows from Rumsfeld an almost jovial listing of the two columns: what is OK and what is not OK. Meanwhile, images of beaten and hooded Abu Ghraib prisoners flood the screen, and we see key words from Rumsfeld’s memos—“water-boarding,” “sleep deprivation,” “torture”—sliding and spinning almost ballet-like into a deep black pit, where they disappear.
(...)
There is one supremely appropriate English-language term for the Rumsfeld who emerges in
The Unknown Known—a term that has recently been imported into serious philosophical discussion, possibly for the first time, in an influential 2005 monograph by the Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. The term is “bullshit,” and practitioners of this dark art are bullshit artists (or bullshitters). According to Frankfurt, “The bullshitter is neither on the side of the true or the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all. ...He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Regrettably, McNamara lied at times when he was in office. But he was not a bullshitter, not like Rumsfeld.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/donald-rumsfeld-hasnt-learned-a-damn-thing-105394_Page2.html#.U0C8gmePJjoFrom page 4:
Rumsfeld fails to appreciate what McNamara in
The Fog of War calls Lesson 1: “Empathize with your enemy.” Decades after he was secretary of defense, McNamara learned that “we must try to put ourselves in their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.” Then, it might be possible to see the chasm that too often separates our estimate of what they were up to from their description of what they were up to.
To his credit, Rumsfeld says in his interview with Morris that he would like to talk with Tariq Aziz, the former foreign minister and former deputy prime minister of Iraq who is now in an Iraqi prison. He says he would like to ask Aziz “what the U.S. might have done to reach out and get them (the Iraqis) to behave rationally.” But what he seems to mean is: How might we have gotten the Iraqis to think as we thought, sitting in our offices in the Pentagon and White House? Rumsfeld implies that Iraq, in not behaving rationally, was at fault. This is a common starting point for former decision-makers reflecting on their experiences of war and crises: I am rational and you are not; I only reacted to what you did, whereas you acted aggressively, without the slightest provocation from us. This point, in fact, is where McNamara began the various phases of his historical boot camp. But this is where Rumsfeld still is now.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/donald-rumsfeld-hasnt-learned-a-damn-thing-105394_Page4.html#.U0DBXWePJjo
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