Pericles continues playing games with the meanings of words:

"Your explanation of the difference between funds being missing, and accounts unable to be reconciled, deserves special mention under the heading 'wtf?'"

The term used, I thought was not "accounts unable to be reconciled". Rumsfeld's words were:

"... we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions."

As I said that means to me precisely the same as "$2.3 trillion in transactions went missing".

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If anyone else here can point out the relevance of anything else in Pericles' latest 'contribution' to the discussion at hand, then please let me know and I will have another look at it.

I think we discussed this earlier, daggett.

>>Rumsfeld's words were: "... we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." As I said that means to me precisely the same as "$2.3 trillion in transactions went missing".<<

And as I pointed out to you, they do not mean the same thing. At all.

Incidentally, you quote Rumsfeld out of context.

The full sentence from which you extracted your phrase was "According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions."

Let's do him justice, and quote the entire paragraph.

"The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible."

Go back to my credit card slip analogy, and you will see - if you care to look, that is - that the inability to reconcile an account does not, at all, indicate that an amount of money is missing.

>>If anyone else here can point out the relevance of anything else in Pericles' latest 'contribution' to the discussion at hand, then please let me know and I will have another look at it.<<

You don't honestly think that anyone else can be bothered to follow our ramblings, do you?

Nope. It's just you and me.

But I quite understand that you wouldn't want to answer the "how much would it take" question.

After all, the most difficult part of the operational aspects of your theory, is to imagine that there are people who would willingly accept money to kill their fellow Americans in cold blood.

Personalizing it by trying to quantify the pricing mechanism at the level of the individual, simply allows us to assess better whether it could ever have happened that way.

I doubt a million would be enough, would it?

Ten, perhaps?

Fifty?

It's an uncomfortable thought, isn't it?

Pericles, you have yet to explain the difference between the Pentagon not being able to keep track of the missing $2.3 trillion on the one hand and those $2.3 trillion having gone missing on the other.

It's clear to me, as well as to whistleblowers John Minnery and Frank C. Spinney, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and, I expect, all thinking Americans who have no wish to cover up this scandal, that the two mean exactly the same thing.

Until we know what happened to that $300 million that John Minnery could not find, then as far as I am concerned it has gone missing and could well have found its way towards paying whoever were the saboteurs were who planted the explosives in WTC 7 and the twin towers as well as the material used.

The same goes for any the remaining $2.3 trillion unaccounted for.

The only 'discuss[ion]' we had 'earlier' was your repeated attempts to weasel out concede that by playing games with the meanings of words and my countering those attempts. One example was substituting the word "embezzled" for "gone missing" and then telling us that the meaning of the Pentagon not being able to keep track of $2.3 trillion has a different meaning from that money having gone missing, which it obviously does (at least until we learn what did happen to that money).

Your explanation of how credit card statements are reconciled or not reconciled with receipts is no more than that and tells us nothing about what happened to a quarter of the Pentagon's budget.

It doesn't matter a jot whether the words are taken in or out of the context of Rumsfeld's encompassing spin, the fact remains, the money has gone missing.

Many organisations around the world have functioned perfectly well with or without legacy software systems as long as the managers of those organisations have had the will to properly account for all the funds used by those organisations.

(tobecontinued)

The fact remains, that Rumsfeld himself was warned of these problems during his first term as Defence Secretary by Frank C. Spinney. The fact also remains, judging from that encounter in Congress between McKinney and Rumsfeld that five years after Rumsfeld, acknowledged the problem of the missing $2.3 trillion, nothing had been done to fix the computer system that Rumsfeld held responsible for the problems.

Anyone with a healthy scepticism of established authority would have concluded from that that the reason that the 'problem' was not fixed was that it suited Rumsfeld's purposes perfectly not to have the 'problem' fixed.

But Pericles, apparently, would have us believe differently.

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Pericles' childish attempt to grill me on how much I would ask to be paid for to blow up the Sydney Opera House and whoever was inside at the time, is no more than an attempt to obscure the obvious reality that in the US and the rest of the world there would have obviously been thousands of professional killers with the skills necessary to perform the required work for the right price.

As always, daggett, gotta love your logic.

>>Until we know what happened to that $300 million that John Minnery could not find, then as far as I am concerned it has gone missing and could well have found its way towards paying whoever were the saboteurs were who planted the explosives in WTC 7 and the twin towers as well as the material used. The same goes for any the remaining $2.3 trillion unaccounted for.<<

By the same token, the estimated "losses" of $65 billion from the Madoff fraud would have ended up in the same place. Here's one of those maps that you like so much - haven't picked a Rothschild yet, but there's bound to be one in there somewhere

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123685693449906551.html?mod=djemalertNEWS#project%3DMADOFF-TREE-0902%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive

Go on, prove me wrong.

>>Pericles' childish attempt to grill me on how much I would ask to be paid for to blow up the Sydney Opera House and whoever was inside at the time, is no more than an attempt to obscure the obvious reality that in the US and the rest of the world there would have obviously been thousands of professional killers with the skills necessary to perform the required work for the right price.<<

And you know this, how?

From Die Hard movies, perhaps?

Tell me more about these "thousands of professional killers". Are they American? If not, how do you prevent them from selling their story, once they are safe in their home land again? After all, they are merely mercenaries. Anything for money, eh?

But if they are American, what is their price?

Il prezzo.

The problem you have, daggett, is that you don't think things through. If you did, you would realize that your theories are chock-full of holes. You cannot simply dismiss the reality that real people - not actors in a movie script - actually have to take part in your scheme at some point.

And that's where boring old real life comes into play.

Yet another example of blatant dishonesty on Pericles's part:

Pericles quotes me:

"Until we know what happened to that $300 million that John Minnery could not find, then as far as I am concerned it has gone missing and could well have found its way towards paying whoever were the saboteurs were who planted the explosives in WTC 7 and the twin towers as well as the material used. The same goes for any the remaining $2.3 trillion unaccounted for."

Then Pericles 'responds':

"By the same token, the estimated 'losses' of $65 billion from the Madoff fraud would have ended up in the same place. ..."

I thought 'could' (my words) and 'would' (your words) had two different meanings.

When are you going to cease resorting to these dishonest debating tactics, Pericles?

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The rest of Pericles rant is his attempt to deny what I assumed to be the well understood reality that there are thousands of professional killers in the US perfectly capable of murdering fellow US citizens if they were paid to do so.

Whilst Pericles appears touchingly confident that professional killers in the US would never stoop to murdering fellow US citizens, whatever they may be capable of doing to the citizens of other countries, I won't be satisfied until the matter is properly investigated and all outstanding questions related to the 'collapses' of the WTC towers as well as 9/11, in General have been answered.