9/11 anniversary prompts return of Pentagon conspiracy theory
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on September 14, 2023 at 18:24
- 6 min read
- By Daniel FUNKE, AFP USA
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"Never forget September 10, 2001," says text in a September 10, 2023 Instagram post. "Donald Rumsfield (sic) holds a press conference to state that the Pentagon was missing $2.3 trillion. But the next day something happened and everybody forgot about this."
The post accumulated more than 2,000 likes. Public figures such as mixed martial arts fighter Mitch Aguiar and former Republican congressional candidate Michael White have shared similar claims.
"There was zero plane debris at the pentagon or video footage of a plane hitting the short building directly in the accounting section of the building," Aguiar says in the caption of a September 11 Instagram post sharing a clip from "The Joe Rogan Experience," the most popular podcast on Spotify.
In the December 2019 episode, Rogan alludes to a C-SPAN clip (archived here) in which Rumsfeld mentions the $2.3 trillion figure.
"Our financial systems are decades-old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," he said during a September 10, 2001 press conference at the Pentagon (archived here), which AFP covered at the time. "We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of different technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible."
The next day, 184 people were killed after Al-Qaeda pilots slammed a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon's southwest corner. More than 2,700 died that same day in attacks on New York City's World Trade Center, as well as 40 people aboard a fourth hijacked flight that crashed in the state of Pennsylvania after the passengers and crew fought to try and take back control of the plane.
There is ample evidence of how 9/11 unfolded -- including photos of plane debris at the Pentagon. But conspiracy theorists have long fabricated other explanations; claims about unaccounted money have circulated online since at least 2005.
The most recent posts are also inaccurate.
While Rumsfeld did lament bureaucratic red tape and the lack of audit trails for $2.3 trillion the day before 9/11, it was not the first time -- and he did not say the money was "missing."
"The DOD had been reporting large unsupported adjustments for two decades," said Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University who has researched the Pentagon's accounting gaps.
Old figure
The DOD inspector general first noted in a February 2000 audit report (archived here) that, in accounting entries from the 1999 fiscal year, $2.3 trillion "was not supported by adequate audit trails or sufficient evidence to determine their validity."
The Associated Press covered the report's release, saying the Pentagon "could not show receipts" for those adjustments to its financial ledgers (archived here).
Nearly a year later, then-Senator Robert Byrd mentioned the findings during Rumsfeld's nomination hearing (archived here).
"That audit report found that out of $7.6 trillion in department-level accounting entries, $2.3 trillion in entries either did not contain adequate documentation or were improperly reconciled or were made to force buyer and seller data to agree," the West Virginia Democrat said in January 2001.
Neta Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, told AFP in a September 12 email that the Pentagon "has famously poor accounting."
Since the 1990s, federal law has required all government agencies to prepare financial statements and have them audited -- including the DOD. But the department could not ready its balance sheets until 2017.
One year later, the Pentagon failed the first full-scale audit in its history.
Nor has the DOD passed an audit since, in part due to its bureaucracy, the diversity of its assets and its sheer size. Congress generally allocates more than half of its discretionary budget to national defense.
However, the Pentagon said in May 2019 that its first audit "did not identify instances where DOD does not know where obligated dollars are being spent."
"The audit findings highlight the fact that the department doesn't always record the receipt of goods and services in a timely and accurate manner in the appropriate property management systems," the agency says on its website (archived here).
AFP reached out to the Pentagon for additional comment, but a response was not forthcoming.
No evidence of cover-up
Claims about missing money play into long-debunked theories that the federal government orchestrated 9/11 -- fueled in part by the fact that 34 members of the Pentagon's Program and Budget and Managerial Accounting divisions were killed (archived here).
The bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report (archived here), is the most comprehensive account of the terrorist attacks.
"The 9/11 attack was driven by Osama Bin Ladin," the executive summary says (archived here).
Based on more than 2.5 million pages of documents and interviews with more than 1,200 people in 10 countries, the report details how the former Al-Qaeda leader and his advisers first agreed on the idea to hijack passenger planes in the late 1990s. By 2000, several young Arabs who would later carry out the 9/11 attacks had arrived in the United States, with some conducting pilot training.
The plot culminated more than a year later when 19 hijackers passed through airport security checkpoints and "took over the four flights, taking advantage of air crews and cockpits that were not prepared for the contingency of suicide hijacking," according to the 9/11 Commission Report.
Within hours, US intelligence officials had linked the ensuing attacks to Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden himself later claimed responsibility.
"Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them," the report's executive summary says. "What we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the US government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the Al-Qaeda plot."
AFP has fact-checked other false and misleading claims about 9/11 here and here.
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