Missing Trillions

Rumsfeld Buries Admission of Missing 2+ Trillion Dollars in 9/10/01 Press Conference

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference to disclose that over $2,000,000,000,000 in Pentagon funds could not be accounted for. Rumsfeld stated: "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." According to a report by the Inspector General, the Pentagon cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends. ^{1   2}  
Such a disclosure normally might have sparked a huge scandal. However, the commencement of the attack on New York City and Washington in the morning would assure that the story remained buried. To the trillions already missing from the coffers, an obedient Congress terrorized by anthrax attacks would add billions more in appropriations to fight the "War on Terror."
The Comptroller of the Pentagon at the time of the attack was Dov Zakheim, who was appointed in May of 2001. Before becoming the Pentagon's money-manager, he was an executive at System Planning Corporation, a defense contractor specializing in electronic warfare technologies including remote-controlled aircraft systems. ^{3   4}   Zakheim is a member of the Project for a New American Century and participated in the creation of its 2000 position paper Rebuilding America's Defenses which called for "a New Pearl Harbor." ⁵  
Estimates of the sums of money missing vary wildly. A 2003 report put the amount missing at "more than a trillion dollars." ⁶  

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References

1. The War On Waste, CBSnews.com, 1/29/02 [cached]
2. Vince Gonzales Investigates The Pentagon's War On Waste, CBSNews,
3. Radar Physics Group, sysplan.com, [cached]
4. Flight Termination System, sysplan.com, [cached]
5. Profile, Dov S. Zakheim, rightweb.irc-online.org, 11/22/03 [cached]
6. Military waste under fire: $1 trillion missing, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, May 18, 2003 [cached]