Recherché du trillions perdu

By Jerry Mazza
Jul. 20, 2006

Pardon my bebop French, paraphrasing Marcel Proust’s famous novel, Recherché Du Temps Perdu, which is about his childhood memories flashed to life by a piece of tea-soaked toast whose taste reminds him of a childhood cookie. In my case, Recherché du trillions perdu (Remembrance of trillions lost) was triggered by seeing that tidbit Donald Rumsfeld gave us on September 10, 2001: that the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 trillion dollars. It had vanished in the rabbit hole and the story was buried the next day under the rubble of 911. Merde.

And in fact Rummy lamented that was $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. One Jim Minnery, a former marine turned whistle-blower, risked his job at the Defense Finance And Accounting Service when he asked about the millions missing from one defense agency‘s balance sheets. Minnery attempted to follow the money, criss-crossing the country looking for clues, only to have his boss look at him and say, “Why do you care about this stuff.” He was reassigned and the booboo written off.

And the memory flashes forward to January 31, 2005, and the Pentagon announces that Rabbi Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon Comptroller, has Misplaced a Trillion Dollars. In fact, al Jazeera (of all news outlets) reported a “General Accounting Office report found Defence inventory systems so lax that the US Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.” How could all this have been lost in my memory? Of course, Rabbi Zackheim resigned, complaining that the pressure of keeping track of all that loot was too much trouble.

Yet this conflicts with other reports saying Dov was the Mastermind Behind 911. In fact, the Stephen St. John Article tells us that Dov Zakheim was chief executive officer of System Planning Corporation’s International Division, that is, yes it’s all coming back now, till President George W. Bush made him undersecretary of defense and comptroller of the Pentagon. In fact, he rose like a star over the Pentagon’s labyrinth of marble hallways, boardrooms, inner and innermost offices.

And if memory serves, before that, from 1985 to 1987, he was under secretary of defense for planning and resources, and held various senior Pentagon posts in the Reagan madhouse. Before that with the Congressional Budget Office. Then on to Corporate VP of Systems Planning Corporation, a high-tech research, analysis, and manufacturing firm, then Chief Executive Officer and President of SPC International, Inc. In 1998, Zakheim, expert in ballistic missiles, worked with the Rumsfeld Commission. And more, yes, he is a long-time Bush crony, policy advisor to Governor Bush in the 2000 campaign theft. Yes, it all comes back.

In fact, in addition to his System Planning Corporation stewardship, he co-authored the now infamous article, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, forces and Resources for a New Century,” published, yes, by The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in September 2000, exactly a year before 9/11. In his piece, he gave us that now infamous page 51 on which he wrote that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing even, like a new Pearl Harbor.” Merde.

I’m aware this is old history but it’s flashing back, saying look at me, don’t forget. SPC produced remote control airborne vehicle technologies, and Zakheim had the Pentagon means to pay for them. Also, System Planning Corporation markets the technology to take over the controls of an airborne vehicle already in flight. For example the Flight Termination System technology could literally hijack the hijackers and land the plane safely wherever it wanted.

The Flight Termination System can be used with the CTS technology that can actually control up to eight vehicles at the same time. Just go to SPC’s site..It’s all there, better than United Flight 93 or Oliver Stone’s sleepy World Trade Center. It all comes back now: the technology developed in the late ‘70s after the first terror hijackings that then got into the wrong hands. And Zakheim’s proximity to what Stephen St. John calls the Command Control Communications Network in DC interwoven with a cousin network of Zionic if not bionic neo-cons. Merde. Je ne suis pas fou. I am not crazy. They are.

And so one is left with that aftertaste of acrid smoke, lingering for months, a huge gray cloud hovering over the WTC ruin, the sharp blue sky of September, the white gold sun ennobling it with an eerie beauty even in catastrophe. One remembers, even when one wishes to forget. But remember we must, over and over, and learn the lesson, or be doomed to live it again. Merde.
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Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer who lives in New York, not far from that huge hole in the city’s soul. Reach him at. [email protected].