The budget of it all

Hourglassmemory

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I've been speaking with a truther who has recently brought up the "more money was spent on the clinton/Lewinsky case than on 9/11" argument.

I've asked him tons of questions on where he got the information and, he...well....it's very clear that he just parrots it from other sources and those sources don't source...
And I myself simply do not have the knowledge of everything involved to make an educated and informed estimate and give it to him.

I realise that the budget that they often talk about is the Commission Report alone.
But then of course, you have the NIST and FEMA.
Has someone worked this through? Or does someone have any idea of how much money would have to be spent?
Or at least on what money would have to be spent on?
We have to count things like DNA analysis and the indenependent investigations, but are you going to count the petrol used to drive cars (which took the investigators from one place to another) around as well or the quantity of coffe that some might have drank to keep themselves awake during long nights trying to work through the data :eye-poppi ?

And this might sound a bit picky and demanding but answers like "the most expensive in history" is simply is not going to give this truther a clear and sober take on the data.
I've wandered around Gravy's wtc7lies website and I can't find anything.
Point out the page to me if it's indeed there. Or something that could help me.
If not, I would really like people to at least throw out the things involved and which had to be paid for.

Thanks in advance to anyone who bothers. :)
 
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That is misleading on several levels. First of all it does not take into account the cost of all the underlying criminal investigations, such as the 7,000+ FBI agents involved. Also, while Ken Starr's investigation which started with Whitewater may have cost around $40 million, the Lewinsky part of it was actually fairly minor, involving only a handful of interviews with Linda Tripp and a couple of DNA tests. It is doubtful that any significant additional money was spent on that.

The original NIST investigation alone cost $16 million. I am not sure if that included the additional WTC7 report.

http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs.htm

ETA: Incidentally the DNA analysis in New York alone involved over 12,000 bone fragments. I don't know how much that cost, but it would have to be in the tens of millions.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/177724/output/print
 
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Thank you for that.

The thing that I'm not able to get across is how we're dealing with different levels or branches of boh investigations, where they simply are not equivalent and cannot be compared.
It is my lack of deep knowledge, on both cases really, that doesn't allow me to picture why it's an innacurate comparison.
In other words, I want to understand why it isn't a good comparison.

Thank you, JameB for covering a small part of my problem.
 
The FBI mentions this briefly on their website. No budget of course, this is part of their regular job.

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/penttbom/penttbomb.htm

Our ensuing investigation of the attacks of 9/11/01—code-named “PENTTBOM”—was our largest investigation ever. At the peak of the case, more than half our agents worked to identify the hijackers and their sponsors and, with other agencies, to head off any possible future attacks. We followed more than half-a-million investigative leads, including several hundred thousand tips from the public. The attack and crash sites also represented the largest crime scenes in FBI history.
Click to expand...
 
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Disentangling the investigation budget will be very difficult -- a lot of existing agencies were "retasked" rather than created out of thin air and given a specific work order. For example, the NIST effort was closer to $25 M (again, excluding WTC 7), made up of $16 M dedicated funds plus about $9 M in redirects of original budget.

For another example, as a rough order of magnitude, 7,000 FBI agents have a combined burn rate of approximately $7 M per day.

I have no idea the total investigation cost. It'll be scattered all over the place. I would speculate it's in the range of $1-5 G, but we may never have a good estimate.
 
Hourglassmemory said:
I want to understand why it isn't a good comparison.
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He's minimising the Starr investigation. As James said, it was about much more than Lewinsky.

He's ignoring the fact that the Ken Starr figures included costs for the assistance of other agencies. For example (pre-Lewinsky):

Starr's report to the GAO listed $1.5 million in personnel costs and benefits for the six-month reporting period. It also listed nearly $800,000 in travel expenses. And it estimated his office received $486,000 worth of help from the FBI from April through September last year, and an additional $67,000 worth of assistance from the Internal Revenue Service.
http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/04/01/starr.costs/
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So the Starr figures were quite a complete record of what was spent.

Most people who compare this to 9/11 then only look at a small part of the funding there, usually just the commission (and sometimes only the initial amount they received). They ignore NIST. And in particular they don't count the cost of the investigations carried out by other agencies like the FBI, SEC, CIA and so on. These were included with Starr, but excluded here, so it cannot be a fair comparison.
 
Beyond the fact that like most truthers, he is grossly misrepresenting the facts, WHO CARES.

I mean if you are going to look at budgets in terms of merit, then by god there are a lot of investigations out there that never should have been.

TAM:)
 
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