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with Donald Rumsfeld! http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200408101635.asp
EN ROUTE TO OMAN, JORDAN — Don Rumsfeld is standing at the head of a small cabin of severely jet-lagged journalists, who crowd around him with tape recorders, notebooks, and the occasional boom mike. I have never been around him in person before. He is a little shorter than you might think watching him on TV. But otherwise he's all Rummy, including the obsession with precise language and the passion for discussing the intricacies of policy issues. He's wearing a gray Airborne windbreaker emblazoned with "SEC DEF RUMSFELD," gray corduroy slacks, and casual brown shoes. Often he talks with his hands in his pockets, shrugging his shoulders for emphasis. When he talks with his hands or points a finger a camera clicks as a photographer tries to catch him in an animated shot.
<snip>
When the questions turn to creating a national director of intelligence, Rumsfeld gives us all some of his famous Rumsfeldian analytic rigor. He says creating a NDI is fine, but how will it create better intelligence? That's the question. He quotes Mencken to the effect that to every problem "there's a solution that's simple, neat, and wrong." Improving our intelligence will take work that doesn't lend itself to a "bumper sticker."
Then you see the wheels really start to turn. He's obviously really interested in this question. He discusses the ins and outs, throwing out a few profound questions — Is it sill possible to keep a secret in our society; Is there a difference anymore between domestic and foreign intelligence? — before stopping and ending the briefing. Then he can't help himself and starts talking again, returning to the question of whether there's a distinction between domestic and foreign intelligence (which had been raised only by Rumsfeld's own inquisitiveness). "That's a humungous issue," he exclaims, to himself as much as anyone else. "Think about it," he urges us. No doubt no one will be thinking about it more than Don Rumsfeld himself, a thinking man's secretary of Defense.
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