In Brussels wednesday, our oh so brilliant secretary of war, er, defense, attempted to defend the Bushie administration's position that we cannot wait for proof before acting against other countries and groups who are suspected of copying our own posession and employment of weapons of mass destruction. I don't think he made himself quite clear however:

"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 we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- things we do not 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."