You don't actually think all those CIA interrogation black sites were offered up by foreign countries on goodwill, do you?

This is the correct answer. That missing money went to fund black budgets of all sorts, including the extraordinary rendition sites and a variety of other intelligence/security activities.

The modern way to get untraceable money (according to [1]) is to set up (legitimate) small companies, then wildly overcharge the government for services.

Looks like your standard government incompetence and passing cash to well connected friends, and doesn't show up in any sort of government black budgets accounting.

The author estimates that one Western intelligence agency has over 2,000 such companies.

Fun fact: should one of these companies actually end up profitable in the course of its legitimate activities, it then gets overcharged by the unprofitable ones.

[1] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-...

A tactic particularly well-loved by those with small government tendencies for everything except the military. Not only do you get to hide exactly how that money you keep giving to the military is being spent, but you then get to use the same budget as an argument when claiming how inefficient government is...

Is this true because there is evidence to suggest it or is it true because it's a really compelling narrative?

Because: the USG, particularly under the previous administration, being so incompetent that it could "lose" (or: lose track of) a percentage of an enormous allocation of money is also a pretty compelling narrative.

It may well be true, but there is plenty of evidence as to some of the other places the pallet loads of cash[1] ended up[2][3].

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/45031100

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/investigation-into-m...

>Is this true because there is evidence to suggest it or is it true because it's a really compelling narrative?

It's in all likelihood true because of a long history of exposed similar BS going on, in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe in the past 5-8 decades.

If you have 20 similar cases, you don't really need particular case-specific evidence for the 21st you encounter. You can take a (not so) wild guess.

The same way that people who witnessed the western support for Pinochet or the Contras in the 70/80s would not really be surprised to find out another regime was also supported with similar means where it was strategically favorable.

It's not like there are not millions of people who live on the other side, location wise, of those deals, and get to know these stories better than what the official US mainstream media would ever cover them.

Someone that just reads the mainstream news and the occasional history book from his comfortable sofa in California or NY or Utah is not really more informed compared to someone who had relatives gone missing by some dictatorship or himself beaten up in their own country and followed such stories as live history over several decades.

I would estimate (guess) that half the money ended up in contractors' pockets, and the other half never existed outside the accounting of the USG.

You are hoping that tax dollars were appropriately directed toward honest black site work. I suspect a significant portion found a more prosaic destiny, theft.

From a rather underrated film... "You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?"

That's from Independence Day(1996)[0] for anyone curious.

[0] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629/quotes?item=qt1534129

Yeah, 6.9 on imdb is a little low for that film.

Uh... excuse me, Mr. President? That's not entirely accurate.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629/quotes?item=qt0388832]

In anycase, I doubt the money was stolen in a "hiest" of the kind contemplated by the article. Rather the people who were managing projects funnelled it to themselves or their friends, and some of it was probably just "legitimacy" lost, in the sense that tracking spending in a recent war-zone with a weak central government and a host of overlapping international organizations and domestic factions is going to be a chaotic mess.

Some of it certainly was. A large quantity of cash in dollar bills was stolen from the central bank in Mosul when ISIS conquered it. That was a major source of ISIS funds in the early days.

That's still not exactly a heist.

Next you're going to tell me Oceans 5,362 does not depict an accurate heist.

Or far more likely, it was "stolen", as in given for bribes and other under the table operations that can't be put in a accounting sheet.

I'm guessing a sizable amount of Saddam's various treasures might have gone missing as well. Not on anyone's balance sheet that was in a position to complain. Other than maybe anything Kuwait never recovered.

Much of those treasures were total fiction. A "gold bathroom sink" sounds like something, until you find that the gold plate is only a few atoms thick and worth a couple bucks at most.

Sure. Some of it was real though...

$780M USD in cash for example, was found. The soldiers didn't grab all of it, but skimmed a significant amount.

"In all, 50 steel boxes were found by the five soldiers ...but only 47 were declared. It was a heist completed in an afternoon and worth $12.3 million." [1]

[1]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/14...