9/11 insider trading

[Drew Phipps]

From foreign policy journal:

Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11

by Kevin Ryan | November 18, 2010


.....

(four page article here)

"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."

(Does this remind anyone of the Warren Commission's reluctance to investigate anything other than the "lone nut"? You would think that the very next question asked by a Comission is, "so, how exactly did this single institution with no ties to al-Qaeda obtain its information?)
....
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 11[SUP]th[/SUP].

[David Guyatt]

I should think that it would be a minimum requirement to have a thorough and open and public investigation of this.

The fact that it hasn't happened speaks volumes.

[Tracy Riddle]

I wish everyone would get in the habit of posting the links to the original site -

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010...tember-11/

[Drew Phipps]

sorry will endeavor to do so in the future.

[Tracy Riddle]

sorry will endeavor to do so in the future.

It's ok, it seems to be a very common practice around here for some reason.

[Peter Lemkin]

I should think that it would be a minimum requirement to have a thorough and open and public investigation of this.

The fact that it hasn't happened speaks volumes.

Dave, I hate to say it, but I fear if there is to be a 'public investigation' you or some other pleb[s] will have to instigate it; no 'officials' will touch this...as they don't want the Truth to be told!::

[Magda Hassan]

Another of the smoking guns as to prior knowledge of the events. No they wont go there at all.

[Drew Phipps]

The good news is that some of the data on the hard drives in the destroyed buildings was recovered and preserved. There is still existing evidence as to who profited and by how much. Someday, this information will reveal the identities of the folks who chose to profit from their foreknowledge of the event rather than save people's lives. The statute of limitations of these criminal activities may pass, but I can promise that the statute of limitations won't ever expire in the court of public outrage.

[Peter Lemkin]

Few people know about the insider stock/futures/short selling related to 9-11-01. Even bigger IMO was what happened to the gold stored under the WTC complex. Most of it was removed just before the 'event' and one truck laden with some of the gold was found abandoned by the driver and other workmen/security - having had advance warning the buildings were coming down. Quite obvious to me is that whoever ordered the gold moved knew what was about to happen. The gold depository was gold owned by several entities - not just one...so the 'word' must have been not too tightly held. Add to that Silverstein's prescient notion to buy the buildings weeks before and insure them in the way he did. Oh, and his wife conveniently arranged a medical appointment for him that morning. The ultra-large and ultra-secure safe used by several of the spook agencies and their ilk housed in WTC-7 removed many of their files and other things from that safe before the event, so they also knew something was about to happen. While those items may not have had monetary value in the normal sense, they had value in the political control sense [as did not letting it be known publicly what was about to happen and by whom, generally]. And while there is ample evidence that many others knew beforehand what was about to happen, the last one I can think of that bears on direct financial benefit are all of the files [such as Enron - but hundreds of others of that kind] that were to be used by the SEC and legal system [sic] to track the money swindled by Corporate Crooks and prosecute those guilty - all destroyed - rendering prosecutions all but impossible....and not one attempted thereafter on any of the corporations named in those destroyed files - how 'convenient'. In the same way that many different persons and entities had a reason to see that JFK was assassinated [and cover it up]; many different persons and entities had a reason to see that 9-11 happened [and cover it up].

On the gold [and there was more than reported in this early article...(some reports of up to 1.7 Billion) and more than precious metals that went 'missing' both before and after the planes or drones hit and explosives exploded on 9-11-01].

Missing Gold by Jim Hoffman

Precious Metals in WTC 4 Vault: Only a Fraction Recovered?

[TABLE="class: figure_right, width: 360, align: right"]
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[TD]This image is found on the PBS.org website companion for the television documentaryAmerica Rebuilds under the section Uncovering Property. The page, entitled A Treasure in Silver and Gold, describes the vault as two levels of 3,000 square feet each. See the source for the full-sized image. The page credits images to Leslie E. Robertson and Associates.[/TD]
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The basement of 4 World Trade Center housed vaults used to store gold and silver bullion. Published articles about precious metals recovered from the World Trade Center ruins in the aftermath of the attack mention less than $300 million worth of gold. All such reports appear to refer to a removal operation conducted in late October of 2001. On Nov. 1, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced that "more than $230 million" worth of gold and silver bars that had been stored in a bomb-proof vault had been recovered. A New York Times article contained:
Two Brinks trucks were at ground zero on Wednesday to start hauling away the $200 million in gold and silver that the Bank of Nova Scotia had stored in a vault under the trade center ... A team of 30 firefighters and police officers are helping to move the metals, a task that can be measured practically down to the flake but that has been rounded off at 379,036 ounces of gold and 29,942,619 ounces of silver .. [SUP]1 [/SUP]
Reports describing the contents of the vaults before the attack suggest that nearly $1 billion in precious metals was stored in the vaults. A figure of $650 million in aNational Real Estate Investor article published after the attack is apparently based on pre-attack reports.
Unknown to most people at the time, $650 million in gold and silver was being kept in a special vault four floors beneath Four World Trade Center. [SUP]2 [/SUP]
An article in the TimesOnline gives the following rundown of precious metals that were being stored in the WTC vault belonging to Comex. [SUP]3 [/SUP]

• Comex metals trading - 3,800 gold bars weighing 12 tonnes and worth more than $100 million
  
• Comex clients - 800,000 ounces of gold with a value of about $220 million
  
• Comex clients - 102 million ounces of silver, worth $430 million
  
• Bank of Nova Scotia - $200 million of gold
  

The TimesOnline article is not clear as to whether the $200 million in gold reported by the Bank of Nova Scotia was part of the $220 million in gold held by Comex for clients. If so, the total is $750 million; otherwise $950 million.
There appear to be no reports of precious metals discovered between November of 2001 and the completion of excavation several months later. Assuming that the above reports described the value of precious metals in the vaulst before the attack, and that the $230 million mentioned by Giuliani represented the approxmiate value of metals recovered, it would seem that at least the better part of a billion dollars worth of precious metals went missing. (It is not plausible, of course, that whatever destroyed the towers vaporized gold and silver, which are dense, inert metals that are extremely unlikely to participate in chemical reactions with other materials.)
An article in The Sierra Times suggests that gold was recovered from two trucks in a tunnel under 5 World Trade Center, giving rise to suspicions that the trucks were being used to remove the gold from the vaults before the South Tower fell. [SUP]4 [/SUP] However, this report may have been based on an erroneous reading of other reports that describe the removal of crushed vehicles from a tunnel under 5 WTC in order to gain access to the vaults under 4 WTC to remove their contents. [SUP]5 [/SUP]
Why is there this huge discrepancy between the value of gold and silver reported recovered, and the value reported to have been stored in the vaults? There are a number of possible explanations, from outright theft using the attack as cover, to insurance fraud. Until there is a genuine investigation that probes all the relevant facts and circumstances surrounding the attack, we can only speculate.

---

References

1. Below Ground Zero, Silver and Gold, New York Times, 11/1/2001
2. Thanksgiving at Ground Zero, National Real Estate Investor, [cached]
3. Crushed towers give up cache of gold ingots, TimesOnline, 11/1/02 [cached]
4. Cache of Gold Found at WTC Two truckloads retrieved through a tunnel in rubble2, [cached]
5. , Reuters and New York Daily News, [cached]

[Peter Lemkin]

9/11 Attacks: Criminal Foreknowledge and Insider Trading lead directly to the CIA's Highest Ranks

CIA Executive Director "Buzzy" Krongard managed Firm that handled "Put" Options on UAL

By Michael C. Ruppert
Global Research, April 16, 2014
20 October 2001

We pay tribute to Michael C. Ruppert, author and former LAPD detective, who passed away on April 13.
The following text by Michael C. Ruppert published on GR in October 2001 brings to the forefront the issue of foreknowledge and insider trading pertaining to airline listings on the Chicago Board Options Exchange including United Airlines and American Airlines.
Suppressed Details of 9/11 Criminal Insider Trading lead directly into the CIA`s Highest Ranks
CIA Executive Director "Buzzy" Krongard managed Firm that handled "put" Options on UAL
by Michael C. Ruppert
FTW Publications, 9 October 2001, Centre for Research on Globalisation, globalresearch.ca, 20 October 2001
Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That evidence also demonstrates that, in the case of at least one of these trades which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed the firm used to place the "put options" on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who is now in the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency. Until 1997 A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard had been Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown. A.B. Brown was acquired by Banker's Trust in 1997. Krongard then became, as part of the merger, Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust-AB Brown, one of 20 major U.S. banks named by Senator Carl Levin this year as being connected to money laundering. Krongard's last position at Banker's Trust (BT) was to oversee "private client relations." In this capacity he had direct hands-on relations with some of the wealthiest people in the world in a kind of specialized banking operation that has been identified by the U.S. Senate and other investigators as being closely connected to the laundering of drug money.
Krongard (re?) joined the CIA in 1998 as counsel to CIA Director George Tenet. He was promoted to CIA Executive Director by President Bush in March of this year. BT was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999. The combined firm is the single largest bank in Europe. And, as we shall see, Deutsche Bank played several key roles in events connected to the September 11 attacks.
The Scope of Known Insider Trading
Before looking further into these relationships it is necessary to look at the insider trading information that is being ignored by Reuters, The New York Times and other mass media. It is well documented that the CIA has long monitored such trades in real time as potential warnings of terrorist attacks and other economic moves contrary to U.S. interests. Previous stories in FTW have specifically highlighted the use of Promis software to monitor such trades.
It is necessary to understand only two key financial terms to understand the significance of these trades. "Selling Short" is the borrowing of stock, selling it at current market prices, but not being required to actually produce the stock for some time. If the stock falls precipitously after the short contract is entered, the seller can then fulfill the contract by buying the stock after the price has fallen and complete the contract at the pre-crash price. These contracts often have a window of as long as four months. "Put Options," purchased at nominal prices of, for example, $1.00 per share, are sold in blocks of 100 shares. If exercised, they give the holder the option of selling selected stocks at a future date at a price set when the contract is issued. Thus, for an investment of $10,000 it might be possible to tie up 10,000 shares of United or American Airlines at $100 per share, and the seller of the option is then obligated to buy them if the option is executed. If the stock has fallen to $50 when the contract matures, the holder of the option can purchase the shares for $50 and immediately sell them for $100 regardless of where the market then stands.
A "call option" is the reverse of a put option, which is, in effect, a derivatives bet that the stock price will go up.
A September 21 story by the Israeli Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism, entitled "Black Tuesday: The World's Largest Insider Trading Scam?" documented the following trades connected to the September 11 attacks:

• Between September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options… Assuming that 4,000 of the options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the imminent attacks, these "insiders" would have profited by almost $5 million.
  
• On September 10, 4,516 put options on American Airlines were bought on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 748 calls. Again, there was no news at that point to justify this imbalance;… Again, assuming that 4,000 of these options trades represent "insiders," they would represent a gain of about $4 million.
  
• [The levels of put options purchased above were more than six times higher than normal.]
  
• No similar trading in other airlines occurred on the Chicago exchange in the days immediately preceding Black Tuesday.
  
• Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center, saw 2,157 of its October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday; this compares to an average of 27 contracts per day before September 6. Morgan Stanley's share price fell from $48.90 to $42.50 in the aftermath of the attacks. Assuming that 2,000 of these options contracts were bought based upon knowledge of the approaching attacks, their purchasers could have profited by at least $1.2 million.
  
• Merrill Lynch & Co., which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center, saw 12,215 October $45 put options bought in the four trading days before the attacks; the previous average volume in those shares had been 252 contracts per day [a 1200% increase!]. When trading resumed, Merrill's shares fell from $46.88 to $41.50; assuming that 11,000 option contracts were bought by "insiders," their profit would have been about $5.5 million.
  
• European regulators are examining trades in Germany's Munich Re, Switzerland's Swiss Re, and AXA of France, all major reinsurers with exposure to the Black Tuesday disaster. [FTW Note: AXA also owns more than 25% of American Airlines stock making the attacks a "double whammy" for them.]
  

On September 29, 2001 in a vital story that has gone unnoticed by the major media the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data.

"The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors whose identities and nationalities have not been made public had advance knowledge of the strikes." They don't dare show up now. The suspension of trading for four days after the attacks made it impossible to cash-out quickly and claim the prize before investigators started looking.
"… October series options for UAL Corp. were purchased in highly unusual volumes three trading days before the terrorist attacks for a total outlay of $2,070; investors bought the option contracts, each representing 100 shares, for 90 cents each. [This represents 230,000 shares]. Those options are now selling at more than $12 each. There are still 2,313 so-called "put" options outstanding [valued at $2.77 million and representing 231,300 shares] according to the Options Clearinghouse Corp."
"…The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options…"

As reported in other news stories, Deutsche Bank was also the hub of insider trading activity connected to Munich Re. just before the attacks.
CIA, the Banks and the Brokers
Understanding the interrelationships between CIA and the banking and brokerage world is critical to grasping the already frightening implications of the above revelations. Let's look at the history of CIA, Wall Street and the big banks by looking at some of the key players in CIA's history. Clark Clifford The National Security Act of 1947 was written by Clark Clifford, a Democratic Party powerhouse, former Secretary of Defense, and one-time advisor to President Harry Truman. In the 1980s, as Chairman of First American Bancshares, Clifford was instrumental in getting the corrupt CIA drug bank BCCI a license to operate on American shores. His profession: Wall Street lawyer and banker.
John Foster and Allen Dulles These two brothers "designed" the CIA for Clifford. Both were active in intelligence operations during WW II. Allen Dulles was the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland where he met frequently with Nazi leaders and looked after U.S. investments in Germany. John Foster went on to become Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower and Allen went on to serve as CIA Director under Eisenhower and was later fired by JFK. Their professions: partners in the most powerful to this day Wall Street law firm of Sullivan, Cromwell.
Bill Casey Ronald Reagan's CIA Director and OSS veteran who served as chief wrangler during the Iran-Contra years was, under President Richard Nixon, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His profession: Wall Street lawyer and stockbroker.
David Doherty The current Vice President of the New York Stock Exchange for enforcement is the retired General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency.
George Herbert Walker Bush President from 1989 to January 1993, also served as CIA Director for 13 months from 1976-7. He is now a paid consultant to the Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the nation, and which shares joint investments with the bin Laden family.
A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard The current Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the former Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown and former Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust.
John Deutch This retired CIA Director from the Clinton Administration currently sits on the board at Citigroup, the nation's second largest bank, which has been repeatedly and overtly involved in the documented laundering drug money. This includes Citigroup's 2001 purchase of a Mexican bank known to launder drug money, Banamex.
Nora Slatkin This retired CIA Executive Director also sits on Citibank's board.
Maurice "Hank" Greenburg The CEO of AIG insurance, manager of the third largest capital investment pool in the world, was floated as a possible CIA Director in 1995. FTW exposed Greenberg's and AIG's long connection to CIA drug trafficking and covert operations in a two-part series that was interrupted just prior to the attacks of September 11. AIG's stock has bounced back remarkably well since the attacks. To read that story, please go tohttp://www.copvcia.com/stories/part_2.html.
One wonders how much damning evidence is necessary to respond to what is now irrefutable proof that CIA knew about the attacks and did not stop them. Whatever our government is doing, whatever the CIA is doing, it is clearly NOT in the interests of the American people, especially those who died on September 11.
The original URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/RUP110A.html