The $2.3 Trillion

9/11 deniers like to point to Rumsfeld's "announcement" that $2.3 trillion was "missing" from the Pentagon on September 10th, 2001 as some sort of motive for the 9/11 attacks, even going as far as claiming that the attack on the Pentagon was to assassinate the accountants who who researching the missing money. Nevermind that this wasn't an announcement, it was a passing remark by Rumsfeld at a convention of logisticians, that the money was not missing, the accounting system was just so screwed up that they could no longer track previous transactions, and it was Rumsfeld who told the accountants to take care of the problem in the first place. Now, however, it turns out that this problem did not even originate under Rumsfeld, it was first discussed in the press nearly a year before he even took office. From the Associated Press, March 3rd, 2000.

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.

No doubt we will still hear David Ray Griffin et al talking about how Rumsfeld stole $2.3 trillion, for years to come, oblivious to reality. H/T 9/11 Myths.