Though it will never convince the wide-eyed conspiracy nuts, I must point out that the fairy tales about the Pentagon plane attack (or missile, as the really confused ones claim) being done to destroy records of "missing money" are completely absurd. Not only are DoD financial transactions filed in many different computer (and paper file) systems, the main agency for controlling and auditing these transactions has NEVER been located inside the Pentagon building. Back when I worked there it was located in the Navy Annex (then known as the Defense Audit Service), several miles away, and now it is located in Texas. I spent 7 years in the Pentagon, and well know that the massive duplication of EVERTHING connected with spending makes it difficult to even embezzle except in small amounts -- and those are usually caught eventually. Every year each agency gets X amount of spending authority, to basically write checks upon, and usually spends almost all of it. Same thing next year, and the next. You can't just write massive checks to some shell company your brother-in-law owns, and hope it'll never get caught. Some subordinate unit is going to howl like hell that their funds for (pick something) are gone & they didn't get whatever it was (carpeting, new jets, tank shells, belt buckles).



The basic explanation of this "missing money" is just as described by Mick West, above, and the amount was never really 2.3 trillion anyhow. As someone else mentioned, amounts often get counted several times, since DoD gets money for a Joint Fighter (for example), which goes to both the Air Force, Navy & Marines, each of which then pays their share to the contractor(s). Since most of the computers back then couldn't track among themselves (over 600 different systems), you knew that the right amount of Defense Department money got paid out compared to what came in, but until the hand-auditing was done (often much, much later), you couldn't track each dollar all the way through multiple computer systems. Five or six months after Rumsfeld's announcement of the audit-tracking mess (and resulting request for massive computer upgrades, the real point of his speech), that 2.3 trillion was down to 700 billion, and continued to drop.



Anyone who knows anything about the government understood all this quite well, but when you inject a pack of [conspiracy theorists] into the discussion, it's hardly surprising they are confused, and foster [misconceptions] about huge amounts "going missing." They apparently think that several years' worth of the entire Defense Department budget can get magically "stolen," yet everything goes on as usual and nobody notices.

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