doc111
Well-Known Member
lol! I don't buy all of the NIST's report and I'm definitely no conspiracy theorist. That highlighted sentence is actually a link. It's not my words. And I'm not really sure what $2.3 trillion missing has to do with 9/11 or WTC 7. It was the Pentagon that supposedly "couldn't track" the money. Here is a link that puts the $2.3 trillion claim into perspective.
http://www.911myths.com/html/rumsfeld__9_11_and__2_3_trilli.html
The claim that Rumsfeld was "burying bad news" by announcing this $2.3 trillion was missing the day before 9/11 is utterly false. This issue with the missing funds at the DOD had been reported as early as the end of Feb. of 2000, well before Bush and co. took office or were even elected for that matter. Here is a link dated 3/03/00 which talks about this missing $2.3 trillion, which is likely due to huge problems with inefficent bureaucracies, accounting errors and antiquated computer systems which weren't networked and didn't share data, not Jewish landlords colluding with the govt. to commit one of the largest mass murders in history, doing this whole elaborate cover up, only to supposedly expose the whole thing by saying he ordered FDNY to "pull it", ALL so he could steal a big chunk of cash? Come one now!
http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002hxm
http://www.911myths.com/html/rumsfeld__9_11_and__2_3_trilli.htmlAnd 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:
Pentagon's finances in disarray
By JOHN M. DONNELLY The Associated Press 03/03/00 5:44 PM Eastern
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The military's money managers last year made almost $7 trillion in adjustments to their financial ledgers in an attempt to make them add up, the Pentagon's inspector general said in a report released Friday.
The Pentagon could not show receipts for $2.3 trillion of those changes, and half a trillion dollars of it was just corrections of mistakes made in earlier adjustments.
Each adjustment represents a Defense Department accountant's attempt to correct a discrepancy. The military has hundreds of computer systems to run accounts as diverse as health care, payroll and inventory. But they are not integrated, don't produce numbers up to accounting standards and fail to keep running totals of what's coming in and what's going out, Pentagon and congressional officials said.
http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002hxm
January 7, 2001
The Defense Department's inspector general recently identified $6.9 trillion in accounting entries, but $2.3 trillion was not supported by adequate audit trails or sufficient evidence to determine its validity.
Another $2 trillion worth of entries were not examined because of time constraints, and therefore, the inspector general was able to audit only $2.6 trillion of accounting entries in a $6.9 trillion pot.
Contra Costa Times (California)
January 11, 2001
Senator Byrd: A recent article in the Los Angeles Times, written by a retired vice admiral and a civilian employee in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, accused the Department of Defense of being unable to account for the funds that Congress appropriates to it. The authors wrote, and I quote in part, quote, "The Pentagon's books are in such utter disarray that no one knows what America's military actually owns or spends." ...
That audit report found that out of $7.6 trillion in department-level accounting interest, 2.3 trillion in entries either did not contain adequate documentation or were improperly reconciled or were made to force buyer and seller data to agree. This DoD-IG report is very disturbing....
SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING
HEADLINE: AFTERNOON SESSION OF A HEARING OF THE SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
SUBJECT: THE NOMINATION OF DONALD RUMSFELD TO BE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
February 12th 2001
The inspector general of the Pentagon said there are 2.3 trillion dollars in items that they can't quite account for. That's not billion. That's trillion dollars. $2.3 trillion -- and the General Accounting Office said there are about $27 billion in inventory items that they can't find.
John Isaacs
PBS Online NewsHour
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june01/dollars_2-12.html
June 3rd 2001
Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability en route to Turkey
But something must be wrong or broken, if you can have terrific people in the armed forces and the defense establishment who care deeply about our country, are dedicated and patriotic, and are invested in doing it right, and an equally dedicated and patriotic group of people in the Congress who dedicated to doing it right -- and for whatever reason, there is a high degree of distrust, which everyone told me when I arrived here in January. There is no other reason why there would be all those reports required, all the amendments, and the size of the bill and the concerns and the letters and the phone calls.
If there weren't some glitch, something going on where we aren't working right, why would there be 128 studies saying our acquisition system is broken? Why would the GAO and Senator Byrd announce that we can't locate $2.6 trillion worth of transactions and documents if things were good?
What we need are incentives at every level of that department to be respectful of the taxpayers dollars. We simply must care. People all across this country have worked their heads off, paid taxes and want to be defended and protected, but they want to be done as efficiently and as cost-effectively as possible and big government can't seem to do that. It's very difficult. The incentives aren't there for people and we need to find ways to do put them there.
http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=1198
June 28, 2001 Thursday
DOBBS: Well, let me, if I may, go to a management by objective. We know what you want to do. How many months are you giving yourself to get it done?
RUMSFELD: Oh, it's years. It's years. This department didn't get like this in five minutes, and it's not going to get out of this in five minutes. It is an enormous task. It's like turning a battleship. It doesn't turn on a dime. And we'll have to work with the Congress and find a way inside this institution to fix our acquisition system, which is broken.
It takes 20 years to produce a weapon system, at a time where technology is turning over every 24 months. Our financial management systems can't account for $2.6. trillion worth of transactions, simply because the way they're arranged and organized...
CNN
SHOW: LOU DOBBS MONEYLINE 18:30
July 11th 2001
Testimony before the House Budget Committee on the FY 2002 Defense Budget
REP. PETER HOEKSTRA (R-MI): ... I find it interesting, and we've done a lot of work on another committee that I sit on, taking a look at the Department of Education, which, for the last three years hasn't been able to get a clean audit. Then I understand that the Department of Defense shares many of the same problems that we have with the Department of Education. I think the IG just notes that in one of the audits that you went through of the 1999 financial statements included adjustments of $7.6 trillion -- that's trillion -- in account adjustments, of which 2.3 trillion were supported by un -- by reliable documents -- were unsupported by reliable documentation.
http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2001/s20010711-depsecdef2.html
July 16th 2001:
Testimony before the House Appropriations Committee: Fiscal Year 2002 Defense Budget Request
Sec. Rumsfeld: ...As you know, the Department of Defense really is not in charge of its civilian workforce, in a certain sense. It's the OPM, or Office of Personnel management, I guess. There are all kinds of long- standing rules and regulations about what you can do and what you can't do. I know Dr. Zakheim's been trying to hire CPAs because the financial systems of the department are so snarled up that we can't account for some $2.6 trillion in transactions that exist, if that's believable. And yet we're told that we can't hire CPAs to help untangle it in many respects...
REP. LEWIS: Thank you, Mr. Moran.
Mr. Secretary, the first time and the last time that Dov Zackheim and I broke bread together, he told me he would have a handle on that 2.6 trillion by now. (Laughter.) But we'll discuss that a little --
http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2001/s20010716-secdef2.html
As there were multiple reports of this issue prior to the attacks, then, it's hard to see any significance to Rumsfeld mentioning it again on 9/10. The news wasn’t concealed by what happened the next day, in any event: it was already firmly in the public domain.
We still have the supposed motive of "destroying information" and "killing personnel" with the Pentagon attack, though. As we were told above, "the impact area included both the Navy operations center and the office complex of the National Guard and Army Reserve. It was also the end of the fiscal year and important budget information was in the damaged area." CooperativeResearch report on the consequences of this:
The Department of the Army will state that it won’t publish a stand-alone financial statement for 2001 because of “the loss of financial-management personnel sustained during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.” [Insight, 4/29/2002]
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a091001defensebudget
What does the lack of "a stand-alone financial statement for 2001" mean?
The “Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990,” Public Law 101-576, November 15, 1990, as amended by the “Federal Financial Management Act of 1994,” Public Law 103-356, October 13, 1994, requires the annual preparation and audit of financial statements. The Army did not publish stand-alone financial statements for
FY 2001 due to the loss of financial management personnel sustained during the September 11 terrorist attack. Therefore, we did not audit Army financial information for FY 2001 financial statements. However, Army financial statement information was included in the DoD FY 2001 Agency-Wide Financial Statements.
http://www.dodig.mil/audit/reports/fy02/02-073.pdf
This, then, is the "benefit" of the Pentagon attack: Army financial statements for 2001 were only provided in an overall Department of Defence document, not stand-alone, and therefore they could not be audited. No reported impact on the $2.3 trillion, nothing more at all. We don't even know for sure if this information was released later, because the document only talks about a loss of personnel, not data: if so, the most effect (on the budget issue) the attacks had was to partially delay the production of one particular document from one part of the Department of Defence.
The conclusion of the above report is interesting, too. It raises the issue of "large, unsupported adjustments to correct discrepancies between status of appropriations data and general ledger data": that is, corrections they must make because money cannot be accounted for. And then they explain where they believe most of the problems lie:
Since 1991, DFAS IN-SF has made large, unsupported adjustments to correct discrepancies between status of appropriations data and general ledger data. The Inspector General, DoD has addressed issues relating to these unsupported ending balance adjustments in every audit of the Army General Fund financial statements since 1996. We stated that the use of status of appropriations data and expenditure data was an unacceptable interim method for compiling the FYs 1997 through 2000 Army General Fund Financial Statements. We made
recommendations to DFAS IN-SF to identify and eliminate the causes for the ending balance adjustments and develop a plan of action with specific target dates to implement an integrated accounting system based on general ledger accounting. DFAS IN-SF actions have not been effective in correcting the deficiencies in the accounting system.
The ending balance adjustments almost doubled from FY 1999 to FY 2000. By correcting the accumulated error in GLAC 3310 and controlling all equity transactions, including recording appropriations used at the departmental level, we believe that up to 92 percent of the FY 2000 ending balance adjustment of $237 billion could have been eliminated. The need for ending balance adjustments will continue until general ledger accounting is correctly implemented throughout the Army’s accounting system. Unless DFAS IN-SF makes a concerted and sustained effort to identify and correct all the deficiencies in the implementation of general ledger accounting, the Army General Fund financial statements will continue to be unreliable. Ending balance adjustments should be eliminated after FY 2001.
http://www.dodig.mil/audit/reports/fy02/02-073.pdf
General ledger accounting hasn't been implemented properly, then, but if it was than "up to 92%" of this example year balance adjustment would be unnecessary (that would leave an adjustment of $19 billion, still a big chunk of cash, but a significant improvement on $237 billion). We've no idea how this relates to the overall $2.3 trillion, but it does seem to fit with the overall talk of accounting issues.
And there's another point that you might consider relevant. While most people act like the talk of an unaccounted-for $2.3 trillion is still accurate, that's not actually true. A February 2002 story reported that more than two thirds of that expenditure had now been reconciled:
Zakheim Seeks To Corral, Reconcile 'Lost' Spending
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2002 -- As part of military transformation efforts, DoD Comptroller Dov S. Zakheim and his posse of accountants are riding the Pentagon's financial paper trail, seeking to corral billions of dollars in so-called "lost" expenditures.
For years, DoD and congressional officials have sought to reconcile defense financial documents to determine where billions in expenditures have gone. That money didn't fall down a hole, but is simply waiting to be accounted for, Zakheim said in a Feb. 14 interview with the American Forces Information Service. Complicating matters, he said, is that DoD has 674 different computerized accounting, logistics and personnel systems.
Most of the 674 systems "don't talk to one another unless somebody 'translates,'" he remarked. This situation, he added, makes it hard to reconcile financial data.
Billions of dollars of DoD taxpayer-provided money haven't disappeared, Zakheim said. "Missing" expenditures are often reconciled a bit later in the same way people balance their checkbooks every month. The bank closes out a month and sends its bank statement, he said. In the meanwhile, people write more checks, and so they have to reconcile their checkbook register and the statement.
DoD financial experts, Zakheim said, are making good progress reconciling the department's "lost" expenditures, trimming them from a prior estimated total of $2.3 trillion to $700 billion. And, he added, the amount continues to drop.
"We're getting it down and we are redesigning our systems so we'll go down from 600-odd systems to maybe 50," he explained.
"That way, we will give people not so much more money, but a comfort factor, to be sure that every last taxpayer penny is accounted for," he concluded.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2002/n02202002_200202201.html
Now plainly the US Government saying this doesn't make it true, and we don't know what the real or current situation is. But equally, it's clear that the efforts to tie this in to 9/11 have major shortcomings. There's no clear reason given why the Bush adminstration would need to go to such efforts to conceal the problem, for instance. They didn't, either, and it was covered on several occasions before 9/11, so the fact that Rumsfeld mentioned the $2.3 trillion again on 9/10 seems to have no special importance. While the Pentagon attack did have an effect on the production of some DoD financial statements, it's not clear how significant this was, and another report suggests the DoD is reducing the “missing” amounts by taking steps to improve its accounting procedures. They still don't look too impressive to us -- $700 billion without proper documentation is a lot of money -- but it's hard to see how any of this constitutes a motive for the 9/11 attacks.
NOTE: Kudos to a Screw Loose Change piece, and particularly some well-researched comments by manny, which revealed most of the links referenced here and so persuaded us that this topic deserved a page.
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