Fact Check on Rumsfeld and the "missing" trillions

[Red Steele]

Not for the low info crowd. Just move along...don't clutter those spotless minds with facts.

http://www.911myths.com/html/rumsfeld__9_11_and__2_3_trilli.html

[bruce MN]

Interesting stuff but when coming as "fact" from Mr Steele one does hAve to remember those Italians who wee overrun, as in "kicked", by those better firearm supplied Germans.

[OKdon]

Well I suspect a great deal of it went to no bid contracts for haliburton and other corporate interests along the hired mercenaries that were not subject to congressional over site. We built the most elaborate embassy in the world.  WE spent large sums to buy cooperation from some of our adversaries. What makes you think the surge would have worked without billions of dollars buying neutrality from some of the adversaries. Bush's and mccain's surge was a joke. They didn't win anything. They just bought a postponement of hostilities for a while.

[hardnox]

There is a growth market in "debunking" just like certain forms of punditry.

Neither you of I will ever know if the mssing $2.3 T that Rumsfeld announced on 9/10/2001 was actually "found" or not.

[Red Steele]

not the low info crowd, mind you,

It's not that the money is "missing", then, at least according to Rumsfeld, more that incompatible and aging financial systems don't allow it to be tracked throughout the system. A DoD news document from April 2002 spelled this out even more clearly:

In fiscal 1999, a defense audit found that about $2.3 trillion of balances, transactions and adjustments were inadequately documented. These "unsupported" transactions do not mean the department ultimately cannot account for them, she advised, but that tracking down needed documents would take a long time. Auditors, she said, might have to go to different computer systems, to different locations or access different databases to get information.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Apr2002/n04032002_200204033.html

That's obviously a huge issue, but then Rumsfeld isn't trying to hide that, or other Defence Department problems -- he was broadcasting them, saying that change was essential.

And of course why shouldn't Rumsfeld admit this? How is it going to damage him, or Bush? After all, the $2.3 trillion is almost eight times the 2001 Defence budget ( www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/budget/fy2001/sum/fy2001grbk.pdf ), therefore the problem was presumably ongoing throughout the Clinton administration (the above story references 1999, for instance). This continued into 2001 (CooperativeResearch point out that "auditors won’t even quantify how much money is missing from fiscal year 2001, causing “some [to] fe...), but this still looks to us like an issue for the department, more than the Government, and we really don't see why 9/11 would be required to hide it.

And there's another important point you're not being told. The language used in these claims, that Rumsfeld "announced" the missing $2.3 trllion on 9/10, along with the claim that he was "burying bad news", is designed to make you think that this information was only made public knowledge the day before the attacks. And that is utterly false. The report that uncovered the trillions appeared at the end of February 2000, and Rumsfeld and others had spoken about this before, on more than one occasion, and for months before the attacks:

[hardnox]

That's stuff is of the third tier coninkidinker stuff of which there's a couple dozen. Rumsfeld did speak of the $2.3T of untracked funds the previous day and it was most fortuitous that the side of the Pentagon that was hit was mostly unoccupied.

Of all the stuff surrounding the Pentagon attack that people can argue about,here is the piece that should be enough on its own to force investigation. The fellow who the "mastermind" named as the pilot (under extreme torture), had washed out of flight school because he couldn't land a Cessna. He did not take a 767 into a exceptionally difficult corkscrew descent from high altitude and hit the side of the Pentagon at high speed. I don't know who or what but it wasn't that. It's quite enough.

And who knows, it might have been one of Saddam's crack pilots- and then you'd have a link between 9/11 and Iraq.

[Red Steele]

Nutz was going on about how it was a big deal, that Bush and Cheney had managed to lose or run off with 2.3 Trillion (thats with a T, not a B) and that 9-11 was a cover to blow up the "records", etc.

The facts was that the loose accounting system at the DOD was an ongoing matter of embarassment that had nothing to do with Bush or Cheney but predated their tenure. The link I referenced does a good job of pointing this out and debunking that aspect of the "truthers".

The problem with the low info crowd is their inability to process numbers and come up with their own "bull**bleep**e" indexes. You guys probably still can't grasp that 2.3 trillion was almost ten times the entire Bush/Cheney DOD total budget and that the accounting shortfalls went back to the Clinton administration and before.

Why do you think Rumsfeld was pointing that out...to make his boss look like a fool? The next thing to happen will be that some troll will come back with "yeah, but those ancient Romans weren't Italians....Italy wasn't even a country yet...har har har".

Get a freaking life.

[r3020]

Hey Red, I suppose a good conspiracy theorist could make the case the Clinton administration pulled off the 911 attacks to get the country into a war mood and their minds off of the missing loot.

[bruce MN]

Italians, yes. With guns or facing a foe with guns? No. I'm astonished that you are even attempting to walk that back. But then I guess that "just knowing" trumps recorded info every time.

[Red Steele]

you're toast, bub....along with the Australian loophole. I responded to a post about  "hunters" and "yoga practictioners"  and if you are too obtuse to figure that one out, too bad. Enjoy your life and find a fire hydrant to piss on. You bore me.