Donald Rumsfeld, twice US Secretary of Defense during the course of four decades, is both the youngest and oldest individual to have held that post – for Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, respectively. In the latter term he was in office for 9/11 and for US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq; he defended detainment and interrogation centres such as Abu Ghraib where it was later established prisoners had been abused; he resigned in 2006 following criticism from retired senior military officers. Donald Rumsfeld also attracted a derogatory award from the Plain English Campaign in which he referred to intelligence reports in terms of “known knowns”, “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” and other elaborations. It was not the first time he was consider