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Comment by cpr | Hacker News Reader

Remember when Rumsfeld announced that 2.3T USD were missing from the military? https://www.city-journal.org/html/americas-missing-money-157...

Yeah, nor do most people.

The date he announced that? September 10, 2001. The section of the Pentagon hit? The accounting wing with all the records.

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It’s a lot easier on your sanity to just accept that (insanely) crazy coincidences happen. If it helps, that number jumped to 6.5T a few years later and now stands at 21T and the military and Pentagon have simply stalled all attempts at enforcing audits. They have the gall to simply refuse to account for the discrepancies and believe they cannot be taken to task for misappropriated funds; they don’t need to blow up records when no one does anything if they simply refuse to make them available.

I do not doubt that the waste and accountability are a huge problem in the DoD, but $21T sounds extreme. The FY19 total military budget, according to Wikipedia, is a bit under $700B and you need to misappropriate 30 years of that to embezzle $21T. And that assumes everything is misappropriated (no salaries, no fuel to fly planes, etc.) and does not account for growth (30 years ago the budget was a lot smaller than it is today). My 2c.

It’s not really $21T in cash but rather $21T worth of book-cooking “adjustments” to make the numbers align. This article gives a good overview: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/us/politics/fact-check-pe...

The NYT article claims that’s the absolute value of cooked assets and liabilities rather than the net amount but in truth it’s misappropriation so many levels deep (and recursive in parts) that you can’t even tell whether dollars are being made or lost. Purposely, I can only presume.

> It’s a lot easier on your sanity to just accept that (insanely) crazy coincidences happen.

Perhaps if your goal is peace of mind rather than correctness. All crazy things are not necessarily coincidences.

What would you think about the whole thing if the missing money announcement came on the 9th of September ("can you believe it came less than 48 hours after Rumsfeld came public with this info!?)? The 8th? The 4th? The 1st?

The 10th of September, 2001 was a Monday. What percentage of announcements are delayed until the start of the business week? How close did this particular announcement come to being delayed to Tuesday (in which case it wouldn't have even happened)? There are so many factors that pivot on the most tenuous or whimsical of things that it actually is borderline ridiculous to read too much into any one single aspect of it.

Perhaps you didn't notice the word necessarily in my sentence.

Yes, Rumsfeld did make this speech on the day before the attacks. It's actually a great speech too! He talks about the cumulative bureaucratic waste of the previous few years of the Department of Defense, and poor auditing.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4623026/donald-rumsfeld-speec...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/

https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-missing-3-trillion-dolla...

But the section of the Pentagon that was hit was not the "accounting wing". There is (and was) no "accounting wing". The specific areas that were hit were mostly "Naval Command Center" and "Defense Intelligence Agency", but even then, the area was relatively unoccupied due to renovations that started in 1998.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FirstFloor_Pentagon_Bodie...

https://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/images/pent...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_77#Cr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon#September_11,_200...

Forgot to note that, the money wasn't "missing" in the sense that it disappeared. It was definitely spent, over many projects, over many years. The problem he was trying to point out was that the auditing and tracking is poor and it is difficult to retroactively see where it was spent. I'm not trying to downplay it too much, because it obviously was (and IS) a huge problem. But there wasn't any implication of nefariousness or intentional fraud. (Caveat: There may have been smaller cases of fraud to make up that number, but the $2.3trillion itself wasn't implied to be all fraud).

It wasn't "wait, wtf happened to all this money? >:( ".

It was more "ah crap, we didn't do a good job tracking all this money... :*("

The nuance is subtle and easily hand-waved away by truthers, but such is politics.

If they were going to fly a plane into the pentagon to cover up 2.3T in missing funds, why would they bother to announce the shortfall beforehand?

You don't orchestrate an elaborate cover-up, and also publicly announce the thing you're trying to cover up.

Because that's, like, what they want you to think man. :)

Rofl! I needed that today. Thanks!

I don't buy into this particular conspiracy theory, but the answer to your question is really simple. Try to imagine the US government as a mob. "Helpful" services it runs are like fronts. So when the government builds a library, it's like the mob running a garbage collection company. The helpful services are fronts for complex murderous organizations with many factions. Once you see it that way, it's easy to see why one faction might tattle or fight against another faction within the mob, even though they are still all kind of in on the game together.

As though the US government would have to orchestrate several terrorist attacks just to obscure some bad finances which are basically meaningless anyway.

Yeah, that's the funny thing, we're supposed to trust that the Rumsfield thing is 100% legit but then they'd turn around and run a plane into the records to "hide" it.

They could have just like not said shit.

It's amazing how often conspiracy theories rely on the Illuminati DMV

Conspiracy theories are always so impractical. It would’ve been way easier to just ship all of the documents to an incinerator and yeah, just not say anything.

Alternatively, the terrorist attack didn't actual hit the records in question (or at least not as many as are implied) and is unrelated, but was used as a convenient cover for bad finances that are basically meaningless anyway.

I do recall that, and recall discussion of it after 9/11.

As for what I infer is an implication of the 9/11 attack being motivated by a desire to cover this up, I can't find any reference to the outer ring of the west wing of the Pentagon being "the accounting wing". Even if it were, I can't imagine that we're doing our federal accounting in the 21st Century on paper that's stored only in one central location.

That said, the military is in fact missing a ton of money and is not in compliance with laws that require annual audits of all federal departments. That's a huge problem that should be addressed, but I see no evidence whatsoever that it's in any way related to 9/11.

> I can't imagine that we're doing our federal accounting in the 21st Century on paper that's stored only in one central location. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, nor do I even remotely believe the idea that there's some sort of cover-up. But I will say one should _never_ assume the federal government doesn't do almost everything in the most backward, ancient way possible. Certainly they have tons of meetings, task-forces and plans to update things. Yet mostly they just flounder and keep on using ancient technology... like paper.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2002/09/11/hard...

I'm trying to deduct what you're implying, and as an armchair conspiracy theory fan¹, I love all of the options! This stuff is so nuts, it's lovely.

¹ I mean that I don't believe in the average conspiracy, but I love reading about them for the entertainment value

ummm, are you making an oblique "9/11 truther" claim?

What is wrong with those facts? Did they keep copies of those files in other locations? Did they explain the unaccounted money later on?

EDIT: According to other comments who explained what's wrong, the "facts" are wrong and belong into the realm of "911truther" propaganda.

Money continued to disappear and in fact keeps disappearing and the Pentagon just says “oops, e we don’t know where it went, we’ll just permanently offset the books to balance them,” with no further accountability than that (across three administrations). They are basically untouchable even with records physically around; they do not need to resort to destruction of physical evidence so long as the military industrial complex is alive and well.

as mentioned elsewhere, the part of the pentagon that was destroyed was not "the accounting wing" which is also not even a concept that makes sense.

Pretty much every 9/11 truther cites "facts" but then has trouble when the facts turn out to be not true or are willful, limited misinterpretations of reality.

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