Flight of Capital

They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.
I can't help it if I'm lucky. - Bob Dylan

This may be old news to you, but just a quick note here of something I'd missed about Flight 77, thanks to "Bismillah" and the RI forum, that I hope you won't miss, too.

At least among those with a mind for such things, it's fairly well-remembered that on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld made the shocking announcement that the Pentagon "couldn't track" $2.3 trillion of its transactions. "Iroquois" observes, "What's interesting to me is that he made his press release on a Monday. In DC, I always see bad news given on a Friday, usually late in the afternoon on Friday. The exception, of course, would be when someone happens to know that there is a far bigger story coming out."

And we know that Flight 77, allegedly piloted by an incompetent, made an aerobatic, spiralling descent over Washington, effecting a 270-degree turn to strike the Pentagon from a western approach at ground level. The side struck was the only one with an exterior wall hardened against attack, and was relatively empty while renovation continued.

Relatively. The unfortunate construction workers perished outside, but who were the expendables within?

From The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 20, 2001: "One Army office in the Pentagon lost 34 of its 65 employees in the attack. Most of those killed in the office, called Resource Services Washington, were civilian accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts. They were at their desks when American Airlines Flight 77 struck."

The Arlington County After-Action Report noted that the "impact area included both the Navy operations center and the office complex of the National Guard and Army Reserve. It was also the end of the fiscal year and important budget information was in the damaged area." And Insight Magazine editorialized that "the Department of the Army, headed by former Enron executive Thomas White, had an excuse [for not making a full accounting]. In a shocking appeal to sentiment it says it didn't publish a "stand-alone" financial statement for 2001 because of "the loss of financial-management personnel sustained during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack."

High Crimes of State often come down to the movement of capital, and so the high criminals generally share the gray and black economics of common felons. Money is money; it's the magnitude of the heist that's different, and the means to effect and cover-up the crime. And part of the cover-up of the Pentagon heist has been the no-plane shell game, played smartly by Rumsfeld himself who "misspoke" that a "missile" had struck the Pentagon the same week Thierry Meyssen's original no-plane website was launched.

It's such disinformation that has drilled irrelevance and folly into a once potentially dangerous and angry army of authentic skeptics.