WKMA remembers 10 years ago today when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference saying "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." (full text)

The next day's events overshadowed the urgency of his concerns, and on the 15th of September, President Bush made his "trifecta" joke for the first time at a White House meeting, later recounted at a GOP luncheon: "You know, I was campaigning in Chicago and somebody asked me, is there ever any time where the budget might have to go into deficit? I said only if we were at war or had a national emergency or were in recession. Little did I realize we'd get the trifecta. (Laughter.)"

Last June, the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University estimated the cost of the War on Terror since that date to be between $2.3-2.7 trillion, soon to exceed $4 trillion factoring in disability payments and further military engagements.

Former HUD Assistant Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts mused on this topic in 2006: "Those who are saying that the Bush Administration has failed in Iraq or that we are not winning the war apparently do not understand that a policy must be judged according to its goals... A successful war policy is one that pours money into the private pockets that promoted it. So to whom is the (money) going? It appears that the Pentagon may not have to say because they are still allowed to hide behind the ruse that they and the most powerful corporate contractors and banks in the world who run their systems are not capable of maintaining a basic accounting system." (Her links to more information on the topic)

What do you know, turns out we needed that money. As you may have heard somewhere, $1.5 trillion is the figure the Super Congress has been asked to cut over the next ten years to prevent a US sovereign debt default.