$2.3 trillion missing and counting/The Day Before 9/11
Recall Donald Rumsfeld chose the date of September 10, 2001 to announce that a Pentagon audit, ordered by Undersecretary Dov Zakheim and conducted by a Halliburton subsidiary, had discovered that the Defense Department can no longer account for $2.3 trillion in past transactions. (Note: You are not hallucinating: two point three trillion dollars, or the equivalent of six annual Pentagon budgets.)
This matter was presented by CBS as a question of waste and incompetence, as though it were possible to lose $2.3 trillion under a couch somewhere. (It had earlier been covered on PBS in February 2001. Interestingly, the Bush Administration did not seek to place any blame on the Clinton administration for the missing assets, which should prompt questions about how much of the shortfall was invented in the course of the audit itself.)
One day after Rumsfeld’s admission of Sept. 10, this mother-of-all-scandals in the making disappeared from the corporate media’s vision. For good.
The comptroller who arrived at the figure, Dov Zakheim, was a primary author of the infamous Project for a New American Century manifesto of September 2000, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” This detailed a manic plan for US military domination of the world and re-ordering of the Middle East, observing that this process might require a “new Pearl Harbor” before Americans were willing to pay the costs.
And what was Zakheim’s explanation for the missing 2.3 trillion? His testimony to the House Budget Committee (July 11, 2002) begins as follows:
MR. ZAKHEIM: First of all, I should say that very often, although the numbers seem large, it’s not because we really don’t know what happened with the transactions. The problem has tended to be that we just didn’t record them properly…
Right. Money never disappears off the face of the earth. It always ends up somewhere. It’s just the destinations sometimes are not recorded properly.
The pattern of sweetheart deals and dubious accounting is depressingly familiar, but it is now pushing the entire system to bankruptcy and achieving a scale that would be impossible to hide, were it not for the distraction of permanent crisis. This scale of plunder also cannot function unless the key political front men get their cut.
Moving back down to a more retail level, this 2004 piece reveals how yet another lesser-known member of the Bush clan reaped profits from the “War on Terror” and the lies about “weapons of mass destruction.”
Meet William Bush, uncle to George Jr.