by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Author Michael Shermer wrote a book that Amazon.com now says is out of print. The title is intriguing: Why People Believe Weird Things. Though Shermer deals with UFO's, allegations that NASA faked the moon landing, and the flat earth, reviewers have said his best chapter was about Holocaust Denial.
More recently and sadly, though, Shermer has ceased to be a skeptic. Last time I checked, Shermer was still touting the weirdest of many 'weird things' --the official conspiracy of 911! It is as if when the numbers nine, one and one are mentioned switches are turned 'off' inside the brains of millions: skeptics become devout followers of officialdom; scientists subscribe to voodoo; hard-nose lawyers forget the meaning of 'probable cause'! These people, and Shermer the one-time skeptic, have this much in common: they are victims of trauma and official blackmail! In a phrase: millions 'believe' the official conspiracy for the same reason Christians believe the scriptures: there is hell to pay if they don't!
The Official Conspiracy Theory is Weird
It is weird and completely unbelievable on its face, unsupported by physics and happenstance. The only explanation is that Shermer fell for it because it was official. Perhaps Shermer succumbed to the blackmail that was put on all of us! Perhaps the official conspiracy theory just made him 'feel good about himself' just as Ronald Reagan's 'economic policies' made Republicans feel good about being greedy, untruthful and self-absorbed. Indeed, it was at the GOP national convention in Houston in the earlly 90s that a Republican was recorded swooning of Reagan: "He made us feel good about ourselves!" But republicans ought never to feel good about themselves. And we have a responsibility to make sure they never do!
A mixed bag, Shermer managed to explore dark psychological reasons that people adhere to claptrap: prejudice. Holocaust Deniers are comparatively easy to spot. David Irving, a British Holocaust denier, sued American professor Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in a 2000 London trial that made headlines around the world. A reading of the transcript of the court proceedings is clear enough it would seem: Irving was completely discredited.
Irving's long running campaign to exonerate Hitler and the Nazi regime consisted of fabrications, misrepresentations of fact, convenient omissions of evidence, and a consistent and convenient pattern of discounting as liars any eyewitness to any atrocity associated with the Holocaust. I predict that apologists for George W. Bush and the GOP as a whole will continue to wage a similar campaign of lies and propaganda on behalf of the utterly failed and wrong GOP!
Allow me to add a personal note. I have spoken in depth with a survivor of Auschwitz. There is no room to doubt this moving, personal history confirmed as it is by reams of documentary evidence, available independently of my source and in no way influenced by it.
What is conveniently forgotten is that Hitler's theory about Jews was, likewise, 'official'. The conclusion is inescapable: like Hitler's 'theory' re: the Jews of Europe, the official version of 911 is still widely believed because it makes people feel good about being prejudiced against Muslims. It makes people 'feel good' about being ignorant and/or stupid. Like Hitler's racial claptrap and GOP economic crap, the official theory of 911 makes people feel good about being rich and self-absorbed.
'Terrorists' just hate us, it is believed, because we are 'free'. Are we? Are we free when we are lied to? Are we free when we are so easily manipulated into 'believing' a load of clap trap for which there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever? Are we free when we are clearly trained not to question authority? Are we free when lies become the basis for foreign and domestic policies? Are we free when as a result of right wing policy just one percent of the U.S. populations own more than the rest of us combined? No!
We are not free until we accept responsibility for our own beliefs!
There is, for example, absolutely no credible or verifiable evidence to support any part of the official conspiracy theory of 911. It is not my purpose here to repeat the numerous refutations of every part of the official theory. It has been refuted and debunked and ridiculed and only idiots have not gotten the message: no part of it is true, no part of it is supported by either fact, logic, or admissible evidence. It is thoroughly refuted. Most recently the very existence of the alleged flights had been debunked with the government's own data! There is no wreckage traceable to Flights 93 or 77; the government's own data --BTS --indicates that Flights 11 and 77 had been mothballed! There was no wreckage traceable to any airliner found at the Pentagon. No hijackers appeared on the official autopsy report of Pentagon victims. There were no airline passengers or 'hijackers' buried at Arlington National Cemetery. There is absolutely nothing to support anything said by Bush, the 911 Report or the many media minions who have parroted this outrageous conspiracy theory.
Yet --it is believed because it was 'official' and espoused by a sitting 'President'. We believed it because we were blackmailed. Bush's 'warning' was an overt threat! We were told that 'outrageous conspiracy theories' would not be tolerated! We were told that anyone daring to question the official conspiracy theory was a traitor, was un-American, or, less belligerently, they were just stupid!
It was the common 'argument from authority' fallacy turned into a decree. Anyone daring to question the Bush version of events was called a 'traitor'. Bush himself said: “If you are not with us you are for the terrorists” --a fallacy and a threat! Skepticism was made a crime by decree. I believe this to be a defining characteristic of a police state.
As the trial of David Irving makes abundantly clear: people are prepared to believe anything that makes them "feel good about themselves," and the illogic that this leads to is not confined to the poorly educated. Consider the following from a distinguished economist, Milton Friedman, who became the "conservative's" intellectual when that movement was desperately in need of one: “The 1980s have been no kinder to the earlier Keynesian models. In the U.S., inflation was brought down drastically, accompanied by a temporary increase in unemployment to a peak of nearly 11 percent—-a short-term reaction to unanticipated disinflation along Phillips curve lines.”
--Milton Friedman
Has Friedman forgotten that Reagan's policies were not premised on Keynesian principles? Moreover, Keynesian economics worked just fine for Kennedy and Carter when job and economic growth is clearly documented to have exceeded the same figures under Reagan, Bush and Bush. The truth is that any Democratic president since World War II has presided over greater growth of both GDP and jobs than has any Republican president! There must be a psychological explanation for the fact that millions will look at the documented statistics and refuse to believe them.
The rising unemployment rate throughout the 1980's is a good example. It is similarly documented at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is puzzling to me that an esteemed economist would cite this as evidence refuting the Keynesian model. That job creation fell and unemployment rose during the Reagan years does not indict Keynes--but Friedman.
Reagan's policies were not based upon the Keynesian model; they were based rather on Friedman himself and Arthur Laffer of "trickle down" fame. It was Laffer who, legend has it, drew a curve on a napkin and called it 'economics'. It was, rather, a convenient but plausible rationalization for the GOPs desire to enrich its base with tax cuts, a payoff for their support. It was not only the nation's tax revenues which paid them --it was the jobs and futures of everyone else not benefiting.
In fact, unemployment began to rise almost immediately upon Reagan's tax cut--not a "Keynesian" expenditure aimed at stimulating the economy but, rather, a "Laffer-curve tax-cut" premised upon the discredited notion that by cutting taxes for the upper classes, the wealth would "trickle down." It never has but GOP-types would feel good about it! It was intended to make GOP-types feel good about being greedy and dishonest with themselves. Friedman's passage glosses over the realities of that period:
The rising unemployment rate throughout the 1980's is a good example. It is similarly documented at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is puzzling to me that an esteemed economist would cite this as evidence refuting the Keynesian model. That job creation fell and unemployment rose during the Reagan years does not indict Keynes--but Friedman.
Reagan's policies were not based upon the Keynesian model; they were based rather on Friedman himself and Arthur Laffer of "trickle down" fame. It was Laffer who, legend has it, drew a curve on a napkin and called it 'economics'. It was, rather, a convenient but plausible rationalization for the GOPs desire to enrich its base with tax cuts, a payoff for their support. It was not only the nation's tax revenues which paid them --it was the jobs and futures of everyone else not benefiting.
In fact, unemployment began to rise almost immediately upon Reagan's tax cut--not a "Keynesian" expenditure aimed at stimulating the economy but, rather, a "Laffer-curve tax-cut" premised upon the discredited notion that by cutting taxes for the upper classes, the wealth would "trickle down." It never has but GOP-types would feel good about it! It was intended to make GOP-types feel good about being greedy and dishonest with themselves. Friedman's passage glosses over the realities of that period:
- First, Laffer's supply-side ideas are premised upon the idea that tax revenues at various tax rates may be graphed as a "curve." At some point on that curve, a lower tax rate may actually increase tax revenues. The problem with that is simply this: no one knows what that point is. The curve--on paper--is theoretical and depends on how you draw the curve. What, in fact, happened is that Reagan ran up huge deficits and tripled the national debt by budgeting monies that the theoretical curve predicted but never materialized. I hardly call this "conservative." The Bush budget has done the same thing.
- Secondly, Laffer's tax curve was cited to justify supply-side economics--a goose that never laid the golden egg. It was Reagan and the supply-siders who laid an egg and it was not golden. As with the projected increased tax revenues, the new jobs that were to be the mechanism by which wealth would trickle down didn't happen.
- Finally, even if the tax base had increased, it does not follow from that wealth would in any way be redistributed downward; the public record clearly shows that it did not. One does not need an MBA or a PhD in economics in order to understand Census Bureau Statistics which clearly indicate that throughout the Reagan years, the upper 20 percent of income earners grew richer by a yearly average of some 20% while the lower 20 percent lost wealth at a similar rate. Friedman makes absolutely no mention of any of those facts in his paper on John Maynard Keynes. Several issues not addressed by Laffer's curve include how much wealth trickled, to whom, how, and when? The questions are moot, however. Nothing trickled down.
It is not merely that Friedman cites the 80's as an indictment of the wrong economists; it is his off-hand characterization as "temporary" the unemployment rate of some 11 percent that he calls a peak. Unemployment was high throughout the Reagan administration as was homelessness. In fact, half of the total number of jobs created under Reagan were in the public sector. Otherwise, his record--poor compared to any Democratic president and especially those who practiced Keynesian economics--would have been even worse. Finally, I submit to Mr. Friedman that a diminishing inflation rate is of similarly diminishing interest to someone who doesn't have a job.
How are we to account for the fact that Republicans still adhere to a policy that even a cursory reading of real world stats thoroughly discredits? Shermer posits that false beliefs are based on prejudice, but this merely puts a label on it; it does not explain prejudice itself. More to the point, I think, is a common refrain heard among preppies throughout the Reagan years: He (Reagan) made us feel good about ourselves. The same could have been said of Hitler who is indicted by his own words: "Against the Jews I fought open-eyed and in view of the whole world...I made it plain that they, this parasitic vermin in Europe, will be finally exterminated."
Thanks to Herr Hitler, millions began to 'feel better' about being bigots, psychopaths, i.e. Nazi and/or right wingers! Thanks to Ronald Reagan millions began to 'feel better' about being bigots, self-absorbed elites, and psychopaths! Under Hitler, millions felt felt better about themselves because they could blame Jews for their miserable, desperate lives in pre-war Germany. Under Reagan, millions felt better about living in suburbs that destroy the spirit of urban life, deplete the inner cities of revenues and consign all but the very, very rich to poor and declining schools and educational opportunities. Reagan made them feel good! He jerked off the right wing and screwed everyone else!
Bush and Perry have more recently jerked-off Texas. Millions of Texans clearly feel good enough about their state that they re-elected Bush Jr's successor --Rick Perry. Millions of Texans got hooked on the jerks who jerked them. As a result, Texas now trails the nation in high school graduations even as corporate owned prisons swell to over-flowing! But millions in Texas feel good about it! The corporate prisons are located where their presence is not obvious. The rich can pretend they don't exist. Likewise, the ultra-posh neighborhoods where the increasingly rich elite are housed are hidden away among pines, behind the moats, behind the security guards' little houses, behind the walls, the trees, and, symbolically, the 'bushes'. Under Bush/Perry, they could escape responsibility for the hell-hole Texas has become. They could escape a real world. They need never see it and Texas need never see them!
Hitler told the German people, in effect, you no longer have to be responsible for your own idiocy, your own prejudices! That message was repeated by Herrs Reagan, Bush and Bush and the entire GOP. In fact, there are no excuses for believing a lie and no reason to believe that good will come of it. It was Jacob Bronowski, a logical positivist, a scientist, a philosopher, who said: 'Behave in such a way that what is true may be verified to be so!” It was Jean-Paul Sartere, an existentialist who said: "A man is nothing else but what he makes of himself!" It was Bertolt Brecht who said: "A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!" And it was a fashion photographer, Richard Avedon, who said: "you cannot expect another man to carry your shit!" He was right and in my opinion all of us have carried the GOP/right wing shit for too long now! Enough is enough!
How are we to account for the fact that Republicans still adhere to a policy that even a cursory reading of real world stats thoroughly discredits? Shermer posits that false beliefs are based on prejudice, but this merely puts a label on it; it does not explain prejudice itself. More to the point, I think, is a common refrain heard among preppies throughout the Reagan years: He (Reagan) made us feel good about ourselves. The same could have been said of Hitler who is indicted by his own words: "Against the Jews I fought open-eyed and in view of the whole world...I made it plain that they, this parasitic vermin in Europe, will be finally exterminated."
Thanks to Herr Hitler, millions began to 'feel better' about being bigots, psychopaths, i.e. Nazi and/or right wingers! Thanks to Ronald Reagan millions began to 'feel better' about being bigots, self-absorbed elites, and psychopaths! Under Hitler, millions felt felt better about themselves because they could blame Jews for their miserable, desperate lives in pre-war Germany. Under Reagan, millions felt better about living in suburbs that destroy the spirit of urban life, deplete the inner cities of revenues and consign all but the very, very rich to poor and declining schools and educational opportunities. Reagan made them feel good! He jerked off the right wing and screwed everyone else!
Bush and Perry have more recently jerked-off Texas. Millions of Texans clearly feel good enough about their state that they re-elected Bush Jr's successor --Rick Perry. Millions of Texans got hooked on the jerks who jerked them. As a result, Texas now trails the nation in high school graduations even as corporate owned prisons swell to over-flowing! But millions in Texas feel good about it! The corporate prisons are located where their presence is not obvious. The rich can pretend they don't exist. Likewise, the ultra-posh neighborhoods where the increasingly rich elite are housed are hidden away among pines, behind the moats, behind the security guards' little houses, behind the walls, the trees, and, symbolically, the 'bushes'. Under Bush/Perry, they could escape responsibility for the hell-hole Texas has become. They could escape a real world. They need never see it and Texas need never see them!
Hitler told the German people, in effect, you no longer have to be responsible for your own idiocy, your own prejudices! That message was repeated by Herrs Reagan, Bush and Bush and the entire GOP. In fact, there are no excuses for believing a lie and no reason to believe that good will come of it. It was Jacob Bronowski, a logical positivist, a scientist, a philosopher, who said: 'Behave in such a way that what is true may be verified to be so!” It was Jean-Paul Sartere, an existentialist who said: "A man is nothing else but what he makes of himself!" It was Bertolt Brecht who said: "A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!" And it was a fashion photographer, Richard Avedon, who said: "you cannot expect another man to carry your shit!" He was right and in my opinion all of us have carried the GOP/right wing shit for too long now! Enough is enough!
Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11
by Kevin Ryan November 18, 2010
Just after September 11th 2001, many governments began investigations into possible insider trading related to the terrorist attacks of that day. Such investigations were initiated by the governments of Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, and others. Although the investigators were clearly concerned about insider trading, and considerable evidence did exist, none of the investigations resulted in a single indictment. That’s because the people identified as having been involved in the suspicious trades were seen as unlikely to have been associated with those alleged to have committed the 9/11 crimes.
This is an example of the circular logic often used by those who created the official explanations for 9/11. The reasoning goes like this: if we assume that we know who the perpetrators were (i.e. the popular version of “al Qaeda”) and those who were involved in the trades did not appear to be connected to those assumed perpetrators, then insider trading did not occur.
That’s basically what the 9/11 Commission told us. The Commission concluded that “exhaustive investigations” by the SEC and the FBI “uncovered no evidence that anyone with advance knowledge of the attacks profited through securities transactions.” What they meant was that someone did profit through securities transactions but, based on the Commission’s assumptions of guilt, those who profited were not associated with those who were guilty of conducting the attacks. In a footnote, the Commission report acknowledged “highly suspicious trading on its face,” but said that this trading on United Airlines was traced back to “A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda.”[1]
With respect to insider trading, or what is more technically called informed trading, the Commission report was itself suspect for several reasons.
First, the informed trades relating to 9/11 covered far more than just airline company stock. The stocks of financial and reinsurance companies, as well as other financial vehicles, were identified as being associated with suspicious trades. Huge credit card transactions, completed just before the attacks, were also involved. The Commission ultimately tried to frame all of this highly suspicious trading in terms of a series of misunderstandings. However, the possibility that so many leading financial experts were so completely wrong is doubtful at best and, if true, would constitute another unbelievable scenario in the already highly improbable sequence of events represented by the official story of 9/11.
In the last few years, new evidence has come to light on these matters. In 2006 and 2010, financial experts at a number of universities have established new evidence, through statistical analyses, that informed trades did occur with respect to the 9/11 attacks. Additionally, in 2007, the 911 Commission released a memorandum summary of the FBI investigations on which its report was based.[2] A careful review of this memorandum indicates that some of the people who were briefly investigated by the FBI, and then acquitted without due diligence, had links to al Qaeda and to US intelligence agencies. Although the elapsed time between the informed trades and these new confirmations might prevent legal action against the guilty, the facts of the matter can help lead us to the truth about 9/11.
Early signs
Within a week of the attacks, Germany’s stock market regulator, BAWe, began looking into claims of suspicious trading.[3] That same week, Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Martino, made it clear that he had concerns by issuing this public statement: “I think that there are terrorist states and organisations behind speculation on the international markets.”[4]
Within two weeks of the attacks, CNN reported that regulators were seeing “ever-clearer signs” that someone “manipulated financial markets ahead of the terror attack in the hope of profiting from it.” Belgian Finance Minister, Didier Reynders, said that there were strong suspicions that British markets were used for transactions.[5] The CIA was reported to have asked the British regulators to investigate some of the trades.[6] Unfortunately, the British regulator , The Financial Services Authority, wrote off its investigation by simply clearing “bin Laden and his henchmen of insider trading.”[7]
Conversely, German central bank president, Ernst Welteke, said his bank conducted a study that strongly indicated “terrorism insider trading” associated with 9/11. He stated that his researchers had found “almost irrefutable proof of insider trading.”[8] Welteke suggested that the insider trading occurred not only in shares of companies affected by the attacks, such as airlines and insurance companies, but also in gold and oil. [9]
The extent of the 9/11-related informed trading was unprecedented. An ABC News Consultant, Jonathan Winer, said, “it’s absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan to the US to North America to Europe.”[10]
By October 2001, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the four other options exchanges in the US had joined forces with the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate a list of 38 stocks, as well as multiple options and Treasury bonds, that were flagged in relation to potential informed trades. SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt gave testimony to the House Financial Services Committee at the time, saying, “We will do everything in our power to track those people down and bring them to justice.”[11]
Mary Bender, chief regulatory officer at the CBOE, stated “We’ve never really had anything like this, [the option exchanges are] using the same investigative tools as we would in an insider-trading case. The point is to find people who are connected to these heinous crimes.”
The people ultimately found included an unnamed customer of Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown (DBAB). This involved a trade on United Airlines (UAL) stock consisting of a 2,500-contract order that was, for some reason, split into chunks of 500 contracts each and then directed to multiple exchanges around the country simultaneously.[12] When the 9/11 Commission report pointed to a “single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda,” it was referring to either DBAB or its customer in that questionable trade.
Michael Ruppert has since written about DBAB, noting that the company had previously been a financier of The Carlyle Group and also of Brown Brothers Harriman, both of which are companies closely related to the Bush family. Ruppert also noted that Alex. Brown, the company purchased by Deutsche Bank to become DBAB, was managed by A.B. (Buzzy) Krongard, who left the firm in 1998 to join the CIA as counsel to director George Tenet.[13] Krongard had been a consultant to CIA director James Woolsey in the mid 1990s and, on September 11th, he was the Executive Director of the CIA, the third highest position in the agency.
Stock And Treasury Bonds Traded
In 2002, investigator Kyle Hence wrote about the stocks involved in the SEC’s target list. Those that had the highest examples of trade volume over the average were UAL [285 times over average], Marsh & McLennan (Marsh) [93 times over average], American Airlines (AMR) [60 times over average], and Citigroup [45 times over average].[14] Other stocks flagged included financial firms, defense-related companies, and the reinsurance firms Munich Re, Swiss Re and the AXA Group. Put options for these reinsurance firms, or bets that the stock would drop, were placed at double the normal levels in the few days before the attacks.
Regulators were concerned about “large block trades” on these stocks because the three firms were liable for billions in insurance payouts due to the damage inflicted on 9/11.[15]
The four highest-volume suspect stocks — UAL, Marsh, AMR and Citigroup — were closely linked to the attacks of 9/11. The two airline companies each had two planes hijacked and destroyed. Marsh was located in the exact 8 floors out of 110 in the north tower of the WTC where Flight 11 impacted and the fires occurred. Citigroup was the parent of Travelers Insurance, which was expected to see $500 million in claims, and also Salomon Smith Barney, which occupied all but ten floors in World Trade Center (WTC) building 7. Oddly enough, Salomon Smith Barney had both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney on its advisory board until January 2001.
Marsh occupied a number of floors in the south tower as well. This is where the office of Marsh executive, L. Paul Bremer, was located. Bremer was a former managing director at Kissinger Associates and had just completed leading a national terrorism commission in 2000. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that Bremer was a source of early claims that rich Arabs were financing Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. In an article on the 9/11 informed trades, the Chronicle reported that “The former chairman of the State Department’s National Commission on Terrorism, L. Paul Bremer, said he obtained classified government analyses early last year of bin Laden’s finances confirming the assistance of affluent Middle Easterners.”[16]
On the day of 9/11, Bremer was interviewed by NBC News and stated that he believed Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. For unknown reasons, Google removed the interview video from its servers three times, and blocked it once.[17]
The trading of Treasury bonds just before 9/11 was also flagged as being suspicious. Reporters from The Wall street Journal wrote that the “U.S. Secret Service contacted a number of bond traders regarding large purchases of five-year Treasury notes before the attacks, according to people familiar with the probe. The investigators, acting on a tip from traders, are examining whether terrorists, or people affiliated with terrorist organizations, bought five-year notes, including a single $5 billion trade.”[18]
Some reports claimed that the 9/11 informed trades were such that millions of dollars were made, and some of that went unclaimed. [19] Others suggested that the trades resulted in the winning of billions of dollars in profits. One such suggestion was made by the former German Minister of Technology, Andreas von Buelow, who said that the value of the informed trades was on the order of $15 billion.[20]
The FBI Investigations
In May 2007, a 9/11 Commission document that summarized the FBI investigations into potential 9/11-related informed trading was declassified. [21] This document was redacted to remove the names of two FBI agents from the New York office, and to remove the names of select suspects in the informed trading investigations. The names of other FBI agents and suspects were left in. Regardless, some information can be gleaned from the document to help reveal the trades and traders investigated.
On September 21, 2001, the SEC referred two specific transactions to the FBI for criminal investigation as potential informed trades. One of those trades was a September 6, 2001 purchase of 56,000 shares of a company called Stratesec, which in the few years before 9/11 was a security contractor for several of the facilities that were compromised on 9/11. These facilities included the WTC buildings, Dulles airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off, and also United Airlines, which owned two of the other three ill-fated planes.
The affected 56,000 shares of Stratesec stock were purchased by a director of the company, Wirt D. Walker III, and his wife Sally Walker. This is clear from the memorandum generated to record the FBI summary of the trades investigated.[22] The Stratesec stock that the Walkers purchased doubled in value in the one trading day between September 11th and when the stock market reopened on September 17th. The Commission memorandum suggests that the trade generated a profit of $50,000 for the Walkers. Unfortunately, the FBI did not interview either of the Walkers and they were both cleared of any wrongdoing because they were said to have “no ties to terrorism or other negative information.” [23]
However, Wirt Walker was connected to people who had connections to al Qaeda. For example, Stratesec director James Abrahamson was the business partner of Mansoor Ijaz, who claimed on several occasions to be able to contact Osama bin Laden.[24] Additionally, Walker hired a number of Stratesec employees away from a subsidiary of The Carlyle Group called BDM International, which ran secret (black) projects for government agencies. The Carlyle Group was partly financed by members of the bin Laden family.[25] Mr. Walker ran a number of suspicious companies that went bankrupt, including Stratesec, some of which were underwritten by a company run by a first cousin of former CIA director (and President) George H.W. Bush. Additionally, Walker was the child of a CIA employee and his first job was at an investment firm run by former US intelligence guru, James “Russ” Forgan, where he worked with another former CIA director, William Casey.[26] Of course, Osama bin Laden had links to the CIA as well.[27]
Another trade investigated by the FBI, on request from the SEC, focused on Amir Ibrahim Elgindy, an Egyptian-born, San Diego stock advisor who on the day before 9/11 had allegedly attempted to liquidate $300,000 in assets through his broker at Salomon Smith Barney. During the attempted liquidation, Elgindy was said to have “predicted that the Dow Jones industrial average, which at the time stood at about 9,600, would soon crash to below 3,000.”[28]
The 9/11 Commission memorandum suggests that the FBI never interviewed Mr. Elgindy either, and had planned to exonerate him because there was “no evidence he was seeking to establish a position whereby he would profit from the terrorist attacks.” Apparently, the prediction of a precipitous drop in the stock market, centered on the events of 9/11, was not sufficient cause for the FBI to interview the suspect.
In late May 2002, Elgindy was arrested along with four others, including an FBI agent and a former FBI agent, and charged with conspiracy to manipulate stock prices and extort money from companies. The FBI agents, Jeffrey A Royer and Lynn Wingate, were said to have “used their access to F.B.I. databases to monitor the progress of the criminal investigation against Mr. Elgindy.”[29] A federal prosecutor later accused Elgindy, who also went by several aliases, of having prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Although the judge in that case did not agree with the prosecutor on the 9/11 informed trading accusation, Mr. Elgindy was eventually convicted, in 2005, of multiple crimes including racketeering, securities fraud, and making false statements.
The Boston office of the FBI investigated stock trades related to two companies. The first was Viisage Technologies, a facial recognition company that stood to benefit from an increase in terrorism legislation. The Viisage purchase, made by a former employee of the Saudi American Bank, “revealed no connection with 9/11.” However, the Saudi American Bank was named in a lawsuit brought by the 9/11 victims’ families due to the bank having — “financed development projects in Sudan benefiting bin Laden in the early 1990s.”[30]
The second company investigated by the Boston FBI office was Wellington Management, a company that allegedly held a large account for Osama bin Laden. The FBI found that Wellington Management maintained an account for “members of the bin Laden family” but dropped the investigation because it could not link this to “Osama, al Qaeda, or terrorism.”[31]
Although the connections to al Qaeda in three of these cases (Walker, the Viisage trader, and Wellington Management) can be seen as circumstantial, the amount of such evidence is considerable. The quality of the FBI investigations, considering the suspects were not even interviewed, was therefore much less than “exhaustive”, as the 9/11 Commission characterized it. The summary of FBI investigations released by the 9/11 Commission also described how the Commission questioned the FBI about damaged computer hard drives that might have been recovered from the WTC. This questioning was the result of “press reports [contending] that large volumes of suspicious transactions flowed through the computers housed in the WTC on the morning of 9/11 as part of some illicit but ill-defined effort to profit from the attacks.”[32]
The Commission came to the conclusion that no such activity occurred because “the assembled agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive recovery effort” and “everything at the WTC was pulverized to near powder, making it extremely unlikely that any hard-drives survived.”
The truth, however, is that many such hard-drives were recovered from the WTC and were sent to specialist companies to be cleaned and have data recovered. A German company named Convar did a good deal of the recovery work.
In December 2001, Reuters reported that “Convar has recovered information from 32 computers that support assumptions of dirty doomsday dealings.” Richard Wagner, a data retrieval expert at Convar, testified that “There is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time of the plane crashes in order to move out amounts exceeding $100 million. They thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed.” Director of Convar, Peter Henschel, said that it was “not only the volume, but the size of the transactions [that] was far higher than usual for a day like that.”[33]
By late December 2001, Convar had completed processing 39 out of 81 drives, and expected to receive 20 more WTC hard drives the next month. Obviously, the 911 Commission memorandum drafted in August 2003 was not particularly reliable considering it reported that the FBI and the 911 Commission had no knowledge of any of this.
Statistical confirmations
Considering that the FBI and 9/11 Commission overlooked the suspicious connections of informed trading suspects like Wirt Walker, and also claimed in 2003 to have no knowledge of hard drive recoveries publicly reported in 2001, we must assume that they did a poor job of investigating. Today, however, we know that several peer-reviewed academic papers have reported solid evidence that informed trades did occur. That is, the conclusions reached by the official investigations have now been shown, through scientific analysis, to be quite wrong.
In 2006, a professor of Finance from the University of Illinois named Allen Poteshman published an analysis of the airline stock option trades preceding the attacks. This study came to the conclusion that an indicator of long put volume was “unusually high which is consistent with informed investors having traded in the option market in advance of the attacks.”[34]
Long puts are bets that a stock or option will fall in price.
The unusually high volume of long puts, purchased on UAL and AMR stock before these stocks declined dramatically due to the 9/11 attacks, are evidence that the traders knew that the stocks would decline.
statistical techniques to evaluate conditional and unconditional distributions of historical stock option activity, Professor Poteshman showed that the data indicate that informed trading did occur.
In January 2010, a team of financial experts from Switzerland published evidence for at least thirteen informed trades in which the investors appeared to have had foreknowledge of the attacks. This study focused again on a limited number of companies but, of those, the informed trades centered on five airline companies and four financial companies. The airline companies were American Airlines, United Airlines and Boeing. Three of the financial companies involved were located in the WTC towers and the fourth was Citigroup, which stood to lose doubly as the parent of both Travelers Insurance and the WTC 7 tenant, Salomon Smith Barney.[35]
More recently, in April 2010, an international team of experts examined trading activities of options on the Standard & Poors 500 index, as well as a volatility index of the CBOE called VIX. These researchers showed that there was a significant abnormal increase in trading volume in the option market just before the 9/11 attacks, and they demonstrated that this was in contrast to the absence of abnormal trading volume over periods long before the attacks. The study also showed that the relevant abnormal increase in trading volume was not simply due to a declining market.[36] Their findings were “consistent with insiders anticipating the 9-11 attacks.”
Notes Conclusion
In the early days just after 9/11, financial regulators around the world gave testimony to unprecedented evidence for informed trading related to the terrorist attacks of that day. One central bank president (Welteke) said there was irrefutable proof of such trading. This evidence led US regulators to vow, in Congressional testimony, to bring those responsible to justice. Those vows were not fulfilled, as the people in charge of the investigations let the suspects off the hook by conducting weak inquiries and concluding that informed trading could not have occurred if it was not done directly by Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.
The “exhaustive investigations” conducted by the FBI, on which the 9/11 Commission report was based, were clearly bogus. The FBI did not interview the suspects and did not appear to compare notes with the 9/11 Commission to help make a determination if any of the people being investigated might have had ties to al Qaeda. The Commission’s memorandum summary suggests that the FBI simply made decisions on its own regarding the possible connections of the suspects and the alleged terrorist organizations. Those unilateral decisions were not appropriate, as at least three of the suspected informed trades (those of Walker, the Viisage trader, and Wellington Management) involved reasonably suspicious links to Osama bin Laden or his family.
Another suspect (Elgindy) was a soon-to-be convicted criminal who had direct links to FBI employees who were later arrested for securities-related crimes.
The FBI also claimed in August 2003 that it had no knowledge of hard drives recovered from the WTC, which were publicly reported in 2001. According to the people who retrieved the associated data, the hard drives gave evidence for “dirty doomsday dealings.”
The evidence for informed trading on 9/11 includes many financial vehicles, from stock options to Treasury bonds to credit card transactions made at the WTC just before it was destroyed. Today we know that financial experts from around the world have provided strong evidence, through established and reliable statistical techniques, that the early expert suspicions were correct, and that 9/11 informed trading did occur.
People knew in advance about the crimes of 9/11, and they profited from that knowledge. Those people are among us today, and our families and communities are at risk of future terrorist attacks and further criminal profiteering if we do not respond to the evidence. It is time for an independent, international investigation into the informed trades and the traders who benefited from the terrorist acts of September 11th.
[1] National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, July 2004, p 172, and Chapter 5, footnote 130, http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf
[2] 9/11 Commission memorandum entitled “FBI Briefing on Trading”, prepared by Doug Greenburg, 18 August 2003, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf
[3] Dave Carpenter, Exchange examines odd jump: Before attack: Many put options of hijacked planes’ parent companies purchased , The Associated Press, 18 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11/cjonline_oddjump.html
[4] BBC News, Bin Laden ‘share gains’ probe, 18 September 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1548118.stm
[5] Tom Bogdanowicz and Brooks Jackson, Probes into ‘suspicious’ trading, CNN, 24 September 2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20011114023845/http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/09/24/gen.europe.shortselling/
[6] James Doran, Insider Trading Apparently Based on Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks, The London Times, 18 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11/londontimes_insidertrading.html
[7] David Brancaccio, Marketplace Public Radio: News Archives, 17 October 2001, http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2001/10/17_mpp.html
[8] Paul Thompson and The Center for Cooperative Research, Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11 – and America’s Response, Harper Collins, 2004. Also found at History Commons, Complete 9/11 Timeline, Insider Trading and Other Foreknowledge http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=insidertrading
[9] Associated Press, EU Searches for Suspicious Trading , 22 September 2001, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34910,00.html
[10] World News Tonight, 20 September 2001
[11] Erin E. Arvedlund, Follow The Money: Terrorist Conspirators Could Have Profited More From Fall Of Entire Market Than Single Stocks, Barron’s (Dow Jones and Company), 6 October 2001
[Ibid.]
[13] Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: the decline of the American empire at the end of the age of oil, New Society Publishers, 2004
[14] Kyle F. Hence, Massive pre-attack ‘insider trading’ offer authorities hottest trail to accomplices, Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), 21 April 2002, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HEN204B.html
[15] Grant Ringshaw, Profits of doom, The London Telegraph, 23 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11/telegraph_profitsofdoom.html
[16] Christian Berthelsen and Scott Winokur, Suspicious profits sit uncollected: Airline investors seem to be lying low, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 September 2001, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fchronicle%2Farchive%2F2001%2F09%2F29%2FMN186128.DTL#ixzz14XPGwh6e
[17] Lewis Paul Bremer III on Washington, DC, NBC4 TV, 11 September 2001, Vehmgericht http://vehme.blogspot.com/2007/08/lewis-paul-bremer-iii-on-washington-dc.html
[18] Charles Gasparino and Gregory Zuckerman, Treasury Bonds Enter Purview of U.S. Inquiry Into Attack Gains, The Wall Street Journal, 2 October 2001, http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/wallstreetjournal100201.html
[19] Christian Berthelsen and Scott Winokur
[20] Tagesspiegel, Former German Cabinet Minister Attacks Official Brainwashing On September 11 Issue Points at “Mad Dog” Zbig and Huntington, 13 January 2002, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/VonBuelow.html
[21] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[22] The 9/11 Commission memorandum that summarized the FBI investigations refers to the traders involved in the Stratesec purchase. From the references in the document, we can make out that the two people had the same last name and were related. This fits the description of Wirt and Sally Walker, who are known to be stock holders in Stratesec. Additionally, one (Wirt) was a director at the company, a director at a publicly traded company in Oklahoma (Aviation General), and chairman of an investment firm in Washington, DC (Kuwam Corp).
[23] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[24] Sourcewatch, Mansoor Ijaz/Sudan, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mansoor_Ijaz/Sudan
[25] History Commons, Complete 911 Timeline, Bin Laden Family, http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?financing_of_al-qaeda:_a_more_detailed_look=binladenFamily&timeline=complete_911_timeline
[26] Kevin R. Ryan, The History of Wirt Dexter Walker: Russell & Co, the CIA and 9/11, 911blogger.com, 3 September 2010, http://911blogger.com/news/2010-09-03/history-wirt-dexter-walker-russell-company-cia-and-911
[27] Michael Moran, Bin Laden comes home to roost : His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story, MSNBC, 24 August 1998, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101
[28] Alex Berenson, U.S. Suggests, Without Proof, Stock Adviser Knew of 9/11, The New York Times, 25 May 2002, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E4DB143BF936A15756C0A9649C8B63
[29] Alex Berenson, Five, Including F.B.I. Agents, Are Named In a Conspiracy, The New York Times, 23 May 2002
[30] History Commons, Complete 911 Timeline, Saudi American Bank, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=saudi_american_bank
[31] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[32] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[33] Erik Kirschbaum, German Firm Probes Final World Trade Center Deals, Reuters, 16 December 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11/reuters_wtc_drives.html
[34] Allen M. Poteshman, Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, The Journal of Business, 2006, vol. 79, no. 4, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/503645
[35] Marc Chesney, et al, Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the Options Markets, Social Sciences Research Network, 13 January 2010,
[36] Wing-Keung Wong, et al, Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September 11 Attacks?, Social Sciences Research Network, April 2010,
* insurance
* bonds traded
* insurance companies
* credit card
Kevin R. Ryan began to investigate the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 through his work as Site Manager for a division of Underwriters Laboratories (UL). He was fired by UL in 2004 for writing to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), asking about its World Trade Center investigation and UL’s work to ensure the fire resistance of the buildings. He now serves as co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, and board director at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Ryan has co-authored several books and peer-reviewed scientific articles on the subject.
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