October 14, 2008
“Donald Rumsfeld $2.3 trillion” is all anyone needs to search for
on the Internet to discover why the country might really be broke.
Current Green Party presidential candidate and former U. S. Rep. Cynthia Mckinney
had the following questions for former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
in 2005:
“Mr. Secretary: according to the Comptroller General of the United States,
there are serious financial management problems at the Pentagon, to which Mr.
Cooper alluded. Fiscal Year 1999: $2.3 trillion missing. Fiscal Year 2000, $1.1
trillion missing. And DoD is the number one reason why the government can’t
balance its checkbook. The Pentagon has claimed year after year that the reason
it can’t account for the money is because its computers don’t communicate
with each other. My second question, Mr. Secretary, is who has the contracts
today, to make those systems communicate with each other? How long have they
had those contracts, and how much have the taxpayers paid for them?” (March
11, 2005, House hearing on the 2006 budget for the Department of Defense and
Military Services).
America is still waiting for the answers.
If elements within the Pentagon were pillaging trillions of taxpayer dollars
almost a decade ago, what has been lost since?
The amount of $2.3 trillion is more than three times the $700 billion the former
CEO of Goldman Sachs, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, wants to give
out to his pals on Wall Street.
Matthew Wedin
Grover Beach
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/letters-to-the-editor/story/497142.html
