'There are are also unknown unknowns. . . things we don't know we don't know'. What weird philosopher, performing outrageous mental gymnastics, do you suppose is talking here, asks Fintan O'Toole
"Now what is the message there? The message is that there are no 'knowns'. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know, but there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.
"It sounds like a riddle. It isn't a riddle. It is a very serious, important matter. There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist."
These words do not come from a UCD philosophy seminar on the nature of the human understanding of the real world. They are not free-wheeling imaginative speculations. I have taken them from a transcript on the US Defence Department's website of a press conference given by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, at NATO headquarters in Brussels on June 6th. He was answering a question about the war on terrorism and against what President Bush calls the axis of evil.
The sheer strangeness of a man who is running a war talking like this should not detract from the basic point that can be glimpsed through the jungle of verbiage. The US is now more powerful than any nation in history has ever been. It shapes our world more profoundly, more immediately and more universally than the Roman or British empires ever did. It is engaged in an open-ended global war that is, as Rumsfeld put it in another press conference on July 22nd, "still closer to the beginning than the end". And the conduct of that war is shaped by "unknown unknowns" - things the administration doesn't know it doesn't know.
As we approach the first anniversary of the September 11th massacres, some of the reticence about discussing the US administration's reaction to those horrific crimes is beginning to fade, not just in Europe but in the US itself. In the immediate aftermath, it was not popular to suggest that the reaction might in its own way be almost as dangerous to democracy and civility as the threat from Osama bin Laden.
Those of us who said as much were clobbered with the jibe of anti-Americanism. Slowly, however, it is becoming clearer that the best American values - the rule of law, respect for dissent, a sense of rationality, a concern for human life - need to be defended, not just from terrorism, but from the increasingly bizarre logic of the Bush administration.
A reasonable response to any event, however traumatic, has to start with evidence. If an invasion of Iraq is to be justified by September 11th, there has to be evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks. If the morality of the war in Afghanistan is to be assured, there has to be evidence of the price paid by innocent civilians. If an open-ended war is to be justified, there has to be evidence that it is achieving its ends. If democracy is to be protected, there has to be evidence that the means being used are not in fact undermining it.
The war on terror is meeting none of these criteria. Rumsfeld's bizarre ramblings about unknown unknowns are as close as the administration has come to explaining Iraqi responsibility for September 11th. In response to growing evidence from the US media that the campaign in Afghanistan has resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths, Rumsfeld claims that "the air campaign has had greater precision and less collateral damage probably than any air campaign in history".
Asked how many civilians the administration believes have actually been killed, however, he revealed that it has no official figures at all.
As to whether the war is actually making the US safer, the strongest indications of failure come from the administration itself. Within three days in late May, for example, the Vice President, Dick Cheney, said: "The prospects of a future attack against the US are almost certain." The FBI director, Robert Mueller, said: "There will be another terrorist attack. We will not be able to stop it," and Rumsfeld said another attack was "only a matter of time".
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice will next month launch Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), urging "millions of American truckers, letter-carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees" who, "in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to serve as extra eyes and ears for law enforcement" to gather incriminating information.
Whatever they find will presumably be judged by Rumsfeld's criterion that the absence of evidence that you are a terrorist is not evidence that you are not a terrorist. If the word were not so badly abused that it has lost its meaning, that's what might properly be called anti-American.