On Friday, CNN broadcast a clip of Rumsfeld talking to the troops on his recent trip to Baghdad. As he indulged in his usual rambling hyperbole, he made the following gaffe:

And I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples’ heads on television to intimidate, to frighten — indeed the word “terrorized” is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be. And that is exactly what we cannot allow to happen.

Now, we all remember the official Todd Beamer “let’s roll” story that ostensibly led to the crash of United Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. Many have speculated that it was, in fact, US fighter planes that shot down the plane. While it doesn’t prove anything one way or another about the crash, it is — at the very least — proof that the Secretary of Defense is no longer capable of speaking in complete sentences.

Tin foil hat, anyone?