Help analyze Donald Rumsfeld’s memos and win MuckRock requests and swag by Michael Morisy.
From the post:
In January, thanks to a five-year fight by the National Security Archive, the Pentagon began releasing massive troves of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s memos. The memos were so copious that they developed their own legendary status within the Armed Forces.
Rumsfeld himself describes them:
When I returned to the Pentagon in 2001, I continued writing the short memos that had been nicknamed “snowflakes” some years ago. They quickly became a system of communication with the many employees of DoD, as I would initiate a topic with a short memo to the relevant person, who would in turn provide research, background, or a course of action as necessary. In the digital age it was much easier to keep the originals on file so I could track their progress. They quickly grew in number from mere flurries to a veritable blizzard.
The term “snowflake” covers a range of communications, from notes to myself on topics I found interesting, to extended instructions to my associates, to simple requests for a haircut. There was no set template; some are several pages and some just a few words. They were all conceived individually and I had never considered them as a set until I started work on the memoir. I then found that when reviewed together, they give a remarkable sense of the variety of topics that are confronted by a secretary of defense.
Now you can explore the early days of the War on Terror – and potentially earn free MuckRock requests and even swag – by helping analyze what was in them, surfacing the most interesting and historically important memos and sharing the results with everyone.
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MuckRock is offering prizes so jump to Morisy’s post and get started.
Enjoy!