Stupid is as stupid does | Scanners

February 15, 2024

In actuality, however, Rumsfeld was employing the notion of "unknown unknowns" to claim that he had a reasonable certainty about WMDs -- something, in fact, he did not have evidence to support. (This would later become an infamous justification for the invasion of Iraq in the form of the talking point: "We can't afford to wait for the smoking gun, which could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.") In response to the very next question at the above press conference, Rumsfeld said:

"I think that if reasonable people, publics, if publics look at the world and look at the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which is pervasive -- people who want those weapons can get them. The terrorist states have them -- one or more of the various types of weapons of mass destruction. The terrorist states have intimate relationships with terrorist networks -- global networks. We all know that. They're all public. You know this. It does not take a genius to figure out that global terrorist networks are going to have their hands on weapons of mass destruction in the period ahead. No one can say if it's a week, or a month, or a year, or two years. All we do know of certain knowledge is that they are aggressively trying to get them."

So, while invoking the idea of "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns," Rumsfeld was actually twisting them into "known knowns": Because we don't know, we know. A year later (March 30, 2003), Rumsfeld's uncertainty about WMDs in Iraq had become a certainty -- all without the appearance of any actual evidence: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." Amazing.

Rumsfeld, of course, was not being stupid -- just devious and disingenuous. (Well, maybe he was kind of stupid to think that nobody was noticing -- but he got away with it for a while, until reality eclipsed his rhetoric.) Morris, however, begins his series with the story of a bank robber who, when easily apprehended, protested that his image could not possibly have appeared on security cameras because, "I wore the juice."

Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler's arrest. Commander Ronald Freeman assured Fuoco that Wheeler had not gone into "this thing" blindly but had performed a variety of tests prior to the robbery. Sergeant Wally Long provided additional details -- "although Wheeler reported the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint, he had tested the theory, and it seemed to work." He had snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and wasn't anywhere to be found in the image. It was like a version of Where's Waldo with no Waldo. Long tried to come up with an explanation of why there was no image on the Polaroid. He came up with three possibilities:

(a) the film was bad;

(b) Wheeler hadn't adjusted the camera correctly; or

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