Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld was interviewed on 12 October 2001 by Lyric Wallwork Winik (yes, that's her real name), a columnist for Parade, the magazine that comes in many Sunday newspapers across the US. Although Parade is one of the most mainstream magazines imaginable (think People meets the Saturday Evening Post), Winik blindsided Rumsfeld with a question that few reporters/interviewers have the guts to ask:

"This is a question that's been asked by many Americans, but especially by the widows of September 11th. How were we so asleep at the switch? How did a war targeting civilians arrive on our homeland with seemingly no warning?"

Rumsfeld is apparently shaken by this young reporter's forthrightness. First, he admits what few else dare:

"There were lots of warnings."

Immediately after this sentence, though, the Secretary starts to qualify it. He subtly plays the "we didn't connect the dots" card:

"The intelligence information that we get, it sometimes runs into the hundreds of alerts or pieces of intelligence a week. One looks at the world-wide, it's thousands. And the task is to sort through it and see what you can find."

Although he doesn't directly say it, it would seem that Rumsfeld is insinuating that the poor, understaffed, shoestring intelligence and defence establishments can't put together intelligence in a timely manner.

Now things get really bizarre. After admitting that there were plenty of warnings, he says it was up to the FBI and especially state and local law enforcement to deal with the imminent terrorist attack:

"And as you find things, the law enforcement officials who have the responsibility to deal with that type of thing - the FBI at the federal level, and although it is not, it's an investigative service as opposed to a police force, it's not a federal police force, as you know. But the state and local law enforcement officials have the responsibility for dealing with those kinds of issues."

To sum up Rumsfeld's explanation: 1) The warnings were there; 2) the Defence Department and the intelligence community couldn't figure them out; but anyway 3) it was up to the FBI, state law enforcement, and local police to uncover and prevent the worst terrorist attack in US history.

And here's something to kick around. Still answering this question, Rumsfeld goes on to make a strange statement:

"It is a truth that a terrorist can attack any time, any place, using any technique and it's physically impossible to defend at every time and every place against every conceivable technique. Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filled with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Centre. The only way to deal with this problem is by taking the battle to the terrorists, wherever they are, and dealing with them."

"Missile"? What missile would that be? Did he let something slip? Or was this just a gaffe? A bad choice of words? A transcription error? Until we know for sure, it deserves scrutiny...