Between September 6 and 7, the CBOE 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, with headquarters near
the Twin Towers, 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. (Note: AXA also
owns more than 25% of American Airlines stock,
making the attacks a "double whammy" for them.)
[17]
Concerning the statements of the
former chairman of the Deutsche Bundesbank Ernst
Welteke, their tenor in various press reports put
together is as follows:
German central bank president Ernst
Welteke later reports that a study by his bank
indicates, "There are ever clearer signs that
there were activities on international financial
markets that must have been carried out with the
necessary expert knowledge," not only in shares
of heavily affected industries such as airlines
and insurance companies, but also in gold and
oil. [Daily Telegraph, 9/23/2001] His
researchers have found "almost irrefutable proof
of insider trading". [Miami Herald, 9/24/2001]
"If you look at movements in markets before and
after the attack, it makes your brow furrow. But
it is extremely difficult to really verify it."
Nevertheless, he believes that "in one or the
other case it will be possible to pinpoint the
source". [Fox News, 9/22/2001] Welteke reports
"a fundamentally inexplicable rise" in oil
prices before the attacks [Miami Herald,
9/24/2001] and then a further rise of 13 percent
the day after the attacks. Gold rises nonstop
for days after the attacks. [Daily Telegraph,
9/23/2001] [18]
Related to those
observations, I sent a request via e-mail to the
press office of the Deutsche Bundesbank on August
1, 2011, from which I was hoping to learn:
How
did the Bundesbank deal with this information? Did
US federal agencies ask to see the study? With
whom did the Bundesbank share this information?
And additionally: 1. Can you confirm that there is
such a study of the Bundesbank concerning 9/11
insider trading, which was carried out in
September 2001?
2. If Yes: what is the
title?
3. If Yes: who were the authors?
4.
If Yes: has the study ever been made available to
the public?
On August 2, I was then
informed: "Your mail has been received by us and
is being processed under the number 2011 /
011551." Ultimately, however, the press office of
the Deutsche Bundesbank was only available for an
oral explanation on the phone. With this
explanation, I then turned to the press office of
the federal financial regulator in Germany, the
Bundesanstalt fur Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht,
BaFin, with the following e-mail - and that
because of obvious reasons:
Yesterday, I sent a request (see end
of this e-mail) to the press office of the
Deutsche Bundesbank relating to insider trading
connected to the terrorist attacks on September
11, 2001, and respectively relating to an
alleged study carried by the Deutsche
Bundesbank. The request carries the reference
number 2011 / 011551.
The press office
or respectively Mr Peter Trautmann was only
available for an oral explanation. I repeat this
now, because it is related to your entity. This
will be followed by my further questions.
According to an oral explanation from
the press office of the Deutsche Bundesbank,
there has never been a detailed and official
study on insider trading from the Bundesbank.
Rather, there has been probably ad-hoc analysis
with corresponding charts of price movements as
briefings for the Bundesbank board. In addition,
it would have been the duty of the
Bundesfinanzaufsicht to investigate this matter.
The press office of the Bundesbank was also not
willing to give out any written information, not
even after my hint that this alleged study by
the Bundesbank has been floating around the
Internet for years without any contradiction.
That was the oral information from the
Bundesbank press office, or respectively from Mr
Peter Trautmann.
Now my questions for
you:
1. Has the BaFin ever investigated the
9/11 insider trading?
2. With what result?
Have the results been made public?
3. Have
there not been any grounds for suspicion that
would have justified an investigation, for
example as damaged enterprise: Munich Re, and as
buyers of put options of UAL's United Airlines
Company: Deutsche Bank/Alex Brown?
4. Has the
Deutsche Bundesbank ever enquired with BaFin
what information they have regarding the 9/11
insider trading - for example for the creation
of ad-hoc analysis for the Bundesbank?
5.
Have the US federal agencies ever inquired if
the BaFin could cooperate with them in an
investigation?
Could you reply to me in
writing, unlike the Deutsche Bundesbank, please?
I would be very grateful for that!
The
next day I did indeed receive an e-mail concerning
this topic from Anja Engelland, the press officer
of the BaFin in which she answered my questions as
follows:
1. Yes, the former
Bundesaufsichtsamt fur Wertpapierhandel, BAWe
(federal supervisory for securities trading),
has carried out a comprehensive analysis of the
operations.
2. As a result, no evidence of
insider trading has been found. Their approach
and results have been published by the BAWe or
BaFin in the annual reports for the years 2001
(cf S 26/27) and 2002 (cf p 156 above first
paragraph). Here are the links. [See here
and here.]
3. See annual reports 2001 and 2002. Put
options on United Airlines were not traded on
German stock exchanges (the first EUREX options
on US equities were introduced only after the
attacks on 9/11/2001); there were warrants on
UAL and other US stocks, but those traded only
in low volumes.
4. I personally do not know
about such a request. Furthermore, the
Bundesbank itself would have to comment on this.
5. BaFin is fundamentally entitled to the
exchange of information with foreign supervisory
authorities, like SEC, on the basis of written
agreements, so-called memoranda of understanding
(MoU). Regarding potential inquiries from
foreign supervisory authorities, the BaFin can
unfortunately not comment, this would be a
matter of respective authority. For this I ask
for understanding.
Then I wrote
another brief note to BaFin, "in order to prevent
any misunderstanding: your answers refers, as far
as I understand, solely to the financial markets
in Germany and Frankfurt, or not?" The reply from
BaFin:
The answers refer to the German
financial market as a whole and not only on the
Frankfurt Stock Exchange. In terms of the
assessment of foreign financial markets, the
relevant authorities are the competent points of
contact.
In my
inquiries, I mentioned, among other things, a
scientific study by US economist Allen M Poteshman
from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, which had been carried out in
2006 regarding the put option trading around 9/11
related to the two airlines involved, United
Airlines and American Airlines. Poteshman came to
this conclusion: "Examination of the option
trading leading up to September 11 reveals that
there was an unusually high level of put buying.
This finding is consistent with informed investors
having traded options in advance of the attacks."
[19]
Another scientific study was
conducted by the economists Wong Wing-Keung (Hong
Kong Baptist University, HKBU), Howard E Thompson
(University of Wisconsin) and Kweehong Teh
(National University of Singapore, NUS), whose
findings were published in April 2010 under the
title "Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P
500 Index Options Prior to the September 11
Attacks?"
Motivated by the fact that there
had been many media reports about possible insider
trading prior to 9/11 in the option markets, the
authors looked in this study at the Standard &
Poor's 500 Index (SPX Index Options), in
particular with a focus on strategies emanating
from a bear market, namely those under the labels
Page 2 of
3
AN ASIA TIMES
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE INVESTIGATION
Insider trading 9/11 ...
the facts laid bare
By Lars
Schall
Another scientific study was
conducted by the economists Wong Wing-Keung (Hong
Kong Baptist University, HKBU), Howard E Thompson
(University of Wisconsin) and Kweehong Teh
(National University of Singapore, NUS), whose
findings were published in April 2010 under the
title "Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P
500 Index Options Prior to the September 11
Attacks?"
Motivated by the fact that there
had been many media reports about possible insider
trading prior to 9/11 in the option markets, the
authors looked in this study at the Standard &
Poor's 500 Index (SPX Index Options), in
particular with a focus on strategies emanating
from a bear market, namely those under the labels
"Put Purchase," "Put Bear
Spread" and "Naked ITM Call Write", as each of
these are in accordance with the assumption that
one would be betting on a general bear market if
one wanted to profit in anticipation of the 9/11
event. [20]
Along these lines, the authors
refer to an article which Erin E Arvedlund
published on October 8, 2001, in Barron's, the
heading of which suggested precisely that thesis:
"Follow the money: Terror plotters could have
benefited more from the fall of the entire market
than from individual stocks." [21]
Basically, Wong, Thompson and Teh came to
the conclusion "that our findings show that there
was a significant abnormal increase in the trading
volume in the option market just before the 9-11
attacks in contrast with the absence of abnormal
trading volume far before the attacks".
More specifically, they stated, "Our
findings from the out-of-the-money (OTM),
at-the-money (ATM) and in-the-money (ITM) SPX
index put options and ITM SPX index call options
lead us to reject the null hypotheses that there
was no abnormal trading in these contracts before
September 11th."
Instead, they found
evidence for "abnormal trading volume in OTM, ATM
and ITM SPX index put options" for September 2001,
and also in "ITM-SPX index call options" for the
same month. "In addition, we find that there was
evidence of abnormal trading in the September 2001
OTM, ATM and ITM SPX index put options immediately
after the 9-11 attacks and before the expiration
date. This suggests that owning a put was a
valuable investment and those who owned them could
sell them for a considerable profit before the
expiration date."
From all of this, they
took the position that whilst they couldn't
definitively prove that insiders were active in
the market, "our results provide credible
circumstantial evidence to support the insider
trading claim". [22]
Disambiguation: "in
the money" means that the circumstances arise on
which the owner of a put option is betting - the
market price of the underlying asset, for example
a stock (or in this case an index of shares), is
lower at that moment compared to the price at the
time when the transaction took place. "At the
money" means that the price of the underlying
asset has remained equal or nearly equal. And
"out-of-the-money" means that the price of the
underlying asset has gone up, so the opposite of
what the owner of the put option was betting on
took place. "In the money": win. "Out of the
money": loss.
There are also ITM, ATM and
OTM options both for trading strategies with put
and call options, depending on which kind of risk
one would like to take. For example, according to
Wong, Thomson and Teh, the "Put-Purchase Strategy"
in the case of a downward movement of the
underlying asset "is a cheaper alternative to
short-selling of the underlying asset and it is
the simplest way to profit when the price of the
underlying asset is expected to decline".
The use of the OTM put option compared to
the ITM put option, however, offers "both higher
reward and higher risk potentials (...) if the
underlying asset falls substantially in price.
However, should the underlying asset decline only
moderately in price, the ITM put often proves to
be the better choice (...) because of the relative
price differential."
That is why
speculators would fare best, if they bought ITM
put options, "unless the speculators would expect
a very substantial decline in the price of the
underlying asset." [23]
After they
calculated such strategies in the light of the
available trading data in the CBOE relating to
9/11, the three economists ultimately do not
accept a possible counter-argument that their
results could be attributed to the fact that the
stock markets were generally falling and that
there had already been a negative market outlook.
Finally they pointed out: "More conclusive
evidence is needed to prove definitively that
insiders were indeed active in the market.
Although we have discredited the possibility of
abnormal volume due to the declining market, such
investigative work would still be a very involved
exercise in view of the multitude of other
confounding factors," such as confusing trading
strategies, "intentionally employed by the
insiders" in order to attract less attention. [24]
That would be - and if only to invalidate
these scientific results once and for all -
primarily a task for the SEC, the FBI and other
governmental authorities of the United States.
However, we will have to wait for this in vain.
I think that not less worthy of a mention
is an article that the French financial magazine
Les Echos published in September 2007 about a
study conducted by two independent economics
professors from the University of Zurich, Marc
Chesney and Loriano Mancini. Journalist Marina
Alcaraz summarized the content of the findings in
Les Echos with these words and with these
explanations by Professor Chesney, which I for the
first time translated into German (and do now
translate from French into English):
"The atypical volumes, which are
very rare for specific stocks lead to the
suspicion of insider trading." Six years after
the attacks on the World Trade Center this is
the disturbing results of a recent study by Marc
Chesney and Loriano Mancini, professors at the
University of Zurich. The authors, one of them a
specialist in derivative products, the other a
specialist in econometrics, worked on the sales
options that were used to speculate on the
decline in the prices of 20 large American
companies, particularly in the aerospace and
financial sector.
Their analysis refers
to the execution of transactions between the 6th
and 10th of September 2001 compared to the
average volumes, which were collected over a
long period (10 years for most of the
companies). In addition, the two specialists
calculated the probability that different
options within the same sector in significant
volumes would be traded within a few days. "We
have tried to see if the movements of specific
stocks shortly before the attacks were normal."
We show that the movements for certain companies
such as American Airlines, United Airlines,
Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Citigroup, Marsh
& McLehnan are rare from a statistical point
of view, especially when compared to the
quantities that have been observed for other
assets like Coca-Cola or HP," explains Marc
Chesney, a former Professor at the HEC and
co-author of Blanchiment et financement du
terrorisme (Money laundering and
financing of terrorism), published by
Editions Ellipses. "For example 1,535 put option
contracts on American Airlines with a strike of
$30 and expiry in October 2001 were traded on
September 10th, in contrast to a daily average
of around 24 contracts over the previous three
weeks. The fact that the market was currently in
a bear market is not sufficient to explain these
surprising volumes."
The authors also
examined the profitability of the put options
and trades for an investor who acquired such a
product between the 6th and 10th September. "For
specific titles, the profits were enormous."
"For example, the investors who acquired put
options on Citigroup with an expiry in October
2001 could have made more than $15 million
profit," he said. On the basis of the connection
of data between volumes and profitability, the
two authors conclude that "the probability that
crimes by Insiders (Insider trading) occurred ,
is very strong in the cases of American
Airlines, United Airlines, Merrill Lynch, Bank
of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan. "There is
no legal evidence, but these are the results of
statistical methods, confirming the signs of
irregularities." [25]
As Alcaraz
continued to state for Les Echos, the study by
Chesney/Mancini about possible insider trading
related to the 9/11 attacks was not the first of
its kind; but it was in sharp contrast to the
findings of the US Securities and Exchange
Commission SEC and the 9/11 Commission, since they
classified the insider trading as negligible - the
trades in question had no connection to 9/11 and
had "consistently proved innocuous".
Different in the assessment is also the
scientific work that Chesney and Mancini had
published together with Remo Crameri in April 2010
at the University of Zurich, "Detecting Informed
Trading Activities in the option markets." In the
segment that is dedicated to the terror attacks of
9/11, the three authors come to the conclusion,
that there had been notable insider trading
shortly before the terrorist attacks on September
11 that was based on prior knowledge.
Without elaborating on the detailed
explanation of the mathematical and statistical
method, which the scientific trio applied during
the examination of the put option transactions on
the CBOE for the period between 1996 and 2006, I
summarize some of their significant conclusions.
"Companies like American Airlines, United
Airlines, Boeing" - the latter company is a
contractor of the two airlines as aircraft
manufacturer - "and to a lesser extent, Delta Air
Lines and KLM seem to have been targets for
informed trading activities in the period leading
up to the attacks. The number of new put options
issued during that period is statistically high
and the total gains realized by exercising these
options amount to more than $16 million. These
findings support the results by Poteshman (2006)
who also reports unusual activities in the option
market before the terrorist attacks." [26]
In the banking sector, Chesney, Crameri
and Mancini found five informed trading activities
in connection to 9/11. "For example the number of
new put options with underlying stock in Bank of
America, Citigroup, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch
issued in the days before the terrorist attacks
was at an unusually high level. The realized gains
from such trading strategies are around $11
million." [27]
For both areas, the
aviation and the banking sector, the authors state
that "in nearly all cases the hypothesis", that
the put options were not hedged, "cannot be
rejected". [28]
Regarding the options
traded on EUREX, one of the world's largest
trading places for derivatives, which in 1998
resulted from the merger between the German and
Swiss futures exchanges DTB and SOFFEX, Chesney,
Mancini and Crameri focused on two reinsurance
companies, which incurred costs in terms of
billions of dollars in connection with the World
Trade Center catastrophe: Munich Re and Swiss Re.
On the basis of EUREX trading data
provided by Deutsche Bank, the three scientists
detected one informed option trade related to
Munich Re, which occurred on August 30, 2001. The
authors write: "The detected put option with
underlying Munich Re matured at the end of
September 2001 and had a strike of € 320 (the
underlying asset was traded at € 300, 86 on August
30th). That option shows a large increment in open
interest of 996 contracts (at 92.2% quintile of
its two-year empirical distribution) on August
30th.
Its price on that day was € 10, 22.
... On the day of the terrorist attacks, the
underlying stock lost more than 15% (the closing
price on September 10th was € 261, 88 and on
September 11th € 220, 53) and the option price
jumped to € 89, 56, corresponding to a return of
776% in eight trading days. ... The gains ...
related to the exercise of the 996 new put options
issued on August 30th correspond to more than 3.4
million." Similar is true, according to the
authors, for one informed option trade on Swiss Re
on August 20, 2001 with "a return of 4,050% in
three trading weeks", or "more than € 8 million."
[29]
In a new version of their study that
was published on September 7, 2011, the authors
stuck to their findings from April 2010. They
added the emphasis that in no way the profits
gained with the put options to which they point
could have been achieved due to sheer fortunate
coincidence, but that in fact they were based on
prior knowledge which had been exploited. [30]
With those results in terms of what went
on at the EUREX according to Chesney, Crameri and
Mancini, I again addressed the BaFin, which had
written to me that for the financial centers in
Germany insider trading around 9/11 could be
excluded, and asked:
How does this go with your
information that the federal supervisory for
securities trading (BAWe) could in its
comprehensive analysis not find evidence for
insider trading? Do the authors, so to speak,
see ghosts with no good reason?
In
addition, I stated:
If it is true what Chesney, Crameri
and Mancini write, or if you at the BaFin cannot
(ad hoc) refute it, would this then cause the
BaFin to thoroughly investigate the matter
again? If the findings of Chesney, Crameri, and
Mancini were true, this would constitute illegal
transactions relating to a capital crime, which
has no status of limitations, or
not?
In case that a need for
clarification had arisen at the BaFin, I added
Professor Chesney to my e-mail-inquiry in the
"carbon copy" - address field, as because these
were the results of his scientific work.
The response that I received from BaFin
employee Dominika Kula was as follows:
As I already told you in my e-mail,
the former federal supervisory for securities
trading (BAWe) carried out a comprehensive
analysis of the operations in 2001. As a result,
no evidence of insider trading has been found.
For clarification purposes, I wish to point out
that violations of statutory provisions of
securities or criminal law can never be excluded
with absolute certainty. In order to pursue and
prosecute such matters concrete evidence of an
unlawful act is required ... Such evidence does
not exist here.
With regard to the
sources you mentioned, I ask for understanding
that I can neither comment on scientific
analyses, nor on reviews by third parties.
Regarding the statutes of limitations
for offences relating to the violation insider
trading regulations trading I can give you the
following information: A violation of the law to
prohibit insider trading is punishable with
imprisonment up to 5 years or with fines. The
statutes of limitations applied for crimes
carrying this kind of penalty (section 78
paragraph 3 No. 4 Penal Code) are five years.
These limitations are described in the statutes
of limitations (§§ 78 et seq.) (Criminal
Code).
In addition, I turned to the
EUREX with three questions:
1. How do you as
EUREX comment on the findings of Messrs Chesney,
Mancini and Crameri?
2. Did you at EUREX
perceive the particular trading in Munich Re and
Swiss Re it in any way as strange?
3. Have
domestic (eg BAWe and BaFin) or foreign (such as
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)
authorities ever inquired if there may have been
evidence of insider trading via the EUREX in
connection with the 9/11 attacks?
I
subsequently received the following response from
Heiner Seidel, the deputy head of the press office
of the Deutsche Borse in Frankfurt.
We do not give you a public written
response on behalf of the Deutsche Börse or
Eurex regarding the topics of your inquiry. This
is for the following reason: the trade
monitoring agency (HüSt) is part of the
Exchange, but it is independent and autonomous.
Their investigations are confidential and are
carried out in close coordination with the
BaFin. They are never public, a request which
HüSt is therefore not meaningful.
I
leave it to the reader to draw his/her conclusions
from these two replies from the press offices of
BaFin and Deutsche Borse. Regarding the topic of
option trades related to 9/11, I once more talked
with Swiss historian Dr Daniele Ganser ("Operation
Gladio"), by asking him this time about the
importance of those put options, which were traded
shortly before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Daniele Ganser: This
is an important point. This is about
demonstrating that there was insider trading on
the international stock exchanges before 11
September. Specifically put options, ie
speculation on falling stock prices were traded.
Among the affected stocks were United Airlines
and American Airlines, the two airlines involved
in the attacks.
A colleague of mine,
Marc Chesney, professor at the Institute of
banking at the University of Zurich, has
examined these put options. You first of all
have to check if there may have been
international speculation that the aviation
industry would be experiencing a weak period and
whether accordingly also put options on
Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa and Swiss were
bought. This was not the case.
Very
significant put option trades were only
transacted for these two airlines involved in
the attacks. Secondly, you must examine the
ratio of put options to call options and look if
they had also been purchased to a similarly
significant extent that would constitute
speculations on rising stock prices. And that is
also not the case. There were only significant
put options and only significant transactions
for United Airlines and American Airlines.
Now you need to look further in order to
see who actually bought the put options, because
that would be the insider who made millions on
September 11. Most people are unaware that money
was also earned with the attacks on September
11. The Security and Exchange Commission, SEC,
the Securities and Exchange Commission of the
United States, however, does not publish the
information on who bought the put options,
because you can do this anonymously. It is
disturbing that this data is not made public.
What you have is the 9/11 Commission
report, and here it is pointed out , that there
has been insider trading, but that this insider
trading cannot be traced to [al-Qaeda leader]
Osama bin Laden, which means that it is highly
unlikely that it had been Bin Laden.
Question: If this is not
pursued any further, what does it mean?
Daniele Ganser: This means
that the investigation of the terrorist attacks
was incomplete, and always at the point where
there are contradictions to the SURPRISE story,
no further investigations are made. It looks
very much as if one wants to examine only one
story, the investigation is therefore one-sided.
But this does not only apply to the put options.
[31]
Interestingly enough, when Dr
Ganser points out in his reply that this important
data is not published, it is actually only half of
the truth. Why? The answer is very simple and odd
at the same time: David Callahan, the editor of
the US magazine SmartCEO, filed a request to the
SEC about the put options which occurred prior to
September 11 within the framework of the Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA). The SEC informed
Callahan in its reply of December 23, 2009 under
the number "09 07659-FOIA" as follows:
This letter is in response to your
request seeking access to and copies of the
documentary evidence referred to in footnote 130
of Chapter 5 of the September 11 (9/11)
Commission Report... We have been advised that
the potentially responsive records have been
destroyed. [32]
Therefore, we will
unfortunately never know exactly how the SEC and
the 9/11 Commission came to their conclusions
regarding the 9/11 put options trading for their
final report, because relevant documents were not
only held back, but also destroyed - and that in
spite of an agreement between the SEC and the
National Archive of the United States, in which
the SEC has agreed to keep all records for at
least 25 years. [33]
The 9/11 Commission report wrote
this in footnote 130 of Chapter 5, which briefly
focuses on the alleged insider trading:
Highly publicized allegations of
insider trading in advance of 9 / 11 generally
rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading
activity in companies whose stock plummeted
after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in
fact occur, but each such trade proved to have
an innocuous explanation. For example, the
volume of put options - investments that pay off
only when a stock drops in price - surged in the
parent companies of United Airlines on September
6 and American Airlines on September 10 - highly
suspicious trading on its face.
Yet,
further investigation has revealed that the
trading had no connection with 9/11. A single
US-based institutional investor with no
conceivable ties to al-Qaeda purchased 95
percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part
of a trading strategy that also included buying
115,000 shares of American on September 10.
Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious
trading in American on September 10 was traced
to a specific US-based options trading
newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday,
September 9, which recommended these trades.
These examples typify the evidence
examined by the investigation. The SEC and the
FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities
industry, devoted enormous resources to
investigating this issue, including securing the
cooperation of many foreign governments. These
investigators have found that the apparently
suspicious consistently proved innocuous.
(Joseph Cella interview (Sept 16, 2003; May 7,
2004; May 10-11, 2004); FBI briefing (Aug 15,
2003); SEC memo, Division of Enforcement to SEC
Chair and Commissioners, "Pre-September 11, 2001
Trading Review," May 15, 2002; Ken Breen
interview (Apr. 23, 2004); Ed G. interview (Feb.
3, 2004).
The author Mark H Gaffney
commented on this finding of
"innocuousness":
Notice ... the commission makes no
mention in its footnote of the 36 other
companies identified by the SEC in its insider
trading probe. What about the pre-9/11 surge in
call options for Raytheon, for instance, or the
spike in put options for the behemoth Morgan
Stanley, which had offices in WTC 2? The 9/11
Commission Report offers not one word of
explanation about any of this. The truth, we
must conclude, is to be found between the lines
in the report's conspicuous avoidance of the
lion's share of the insider trading issue.
Indeed, if the trading was truly
"innocuous", as the report states, then why did
the SEC muzzle potential whistleblowers by
deputizing everyone involved with its
investigation? The likely answer is that so many
players on Wall Street were involved that the
SEC could not risk an open process, for fear of
exposing the unthinkable. This would explain why
the SEC limited the flow of information to those
with a "need to know", which, of course, means
that very few participants in the SEC
investigation had the full picture.
It
would also explain why the SEC ultimately named
no names. All of which hints at the true and
frightening extent of criminal activity on Wall
Street in the days and hours before 9/11. The
SEC was like a surgeon who opens a patient on
the operating room table to remove a tumor, only
to sew him back up again after finding that the
cancer has metastasized through the system.
At an early stage of its investigation,
perhaps before SEC officials were fully aware of
the implications, the SEC did recommend that the
FBI investigate two suspicious transactions. We
know about this thanks to a 9/11 Commission
memorandum declassified in May 2009 which
summarizes an August 2003 meeting at which FBI
agents briefed the commission on the insider
trading issue. The document indicates that the
SEC passed the information about the suspicious
trading to the FBI on September 21, 2001, just
ten days after the 9/11 attacks.
Although the names in both cases are
censored from the declassified document, thanks
to some nice detective work by Kevin Ryan we
know whom (in one case) the SEC was referring
to. The identity of the suspicious trader is a
stunner that should have become prime-time news
on every network, world-wide. Kevin Ryan was
able to fill in the blanks because, fortunately,
the censor left enough details in the document
to identify the suspicious party who, as it
turns out, was none other than Wirt Walker III,
a distant cousin to then-president G W Bush.
Several days before 9/11, Walker and his
wife Sally purchased 56,000 shares of stock in
Stratesec, one of the companies that provided
security at the World Trade Center up until the
day of the attacks. Notably, Stratesec also
provided security at Dulles International
Airport, where AA 77 took off on 9/11, and also
security for United Airlines, which owned two of
the other three allegedly hijacked aircraft. At
the time, Walker was a director of Stratesec.
Amazingly, Bush's brother Marvin was also on the
board.
Walker's investment paid off
handsomely, gaining $50,000 in value in a matter
of a few days. Given the links to the World
Trade Center and the Bush family, the SEC lead
should have sparked an intensive FBI
investigation. Yet, incredibly, in a
mind-boggling example of criminal malfeasance,
the FBI concluded that because Walker and his
wife had "no ties to terrorism ... there was no
reason to pursue the investigation." The FBI did
not conduct a single interview.
[34]
For this translation, I asked
Kevin Ryan via e-mail if he could send me a link
for his "nice detective work". Ryan, who's in my
humble opinion one of roughly 10 people around the
world who have to be taken seriously regarding
9/11, replied:
You are referring to my paper
"Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of
September 11." [See here.]
The following two references from the paper are
relevant to what you are describing. [2] 9/11
Commission memorandum entitled "FBI
Briefing on Trading", prepared by Doug
Greenburg, 18 August 2003, [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 were 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). Here are two other
recent articles on Stratesec and its operators.
[See here
and here.]
The stock of Stratesec, I should add by
myself, increased in value from $0.75 per share
on September 11 to $1.49 per share when the
market re-opened on September 17. As a firm that
provides technology-based security for large
commercial and government facilities, Stratesec
benefited from the soaring demand of security
companies right after 9/11.
It is also
remarkable what Ryan wrote to me regarding a
company on which he did some research, too:
Viisage Corp, another high-tech security firm.
Kevin Ryan: In late 2005,
George Tenet became a director for Viisage,
which had been flagged by the SEC for 9/11
trading but never investigated. Viisage was led
by Roger LaPenta, formerly of Lockheed.
Seven months later, in 2006, FBI
director Louis Freeh also joined the Viisage
board. One might think that when both the CIA
director (on 9/11) and the FBI director (from
1993 to June 2001) joined a company suspected of
9/11 insider trading, we might want to go back
and actually investigate the SEC's flagging of
that company. But, of course, that was not the
case. In 2009, "Bandar Bush" hired Freeh as his
personal attorney.
Freeh is nowadays
the bankruptcy trustee of the alleged market
manipulator MF Global. And about his client, the
former Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, I should
add that we know for sure that he bankrolled
indirectly via his wife two of the alleged
would-be 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and
Nawaf Al-Hazmi. [35]
But let's get back to
the subject of destruction. On September 11, not
only human life, aircraft and buildings were
destroyed in New York City, but also data on
computers and in archives. For example, several
federal agencies occupied space in Building 7 of
the World Trade Center, including the Securities
and Exchange Commission on floors 11 to 13.
Those and other data could have given
information about the alleged 9/11 insider trading
(though it seems to be very unlikely that no
backup existed elsewhere independent of the local
computer systems). In fact, some technology
companies were commissioned to recover damaged
hard disks, which had been recovered from the
debris and dust of Ground Zero.
One of
these companies was the English company group
Convar, more precisely: their data rescue center
in the German city Pirmasens. Erik Kirschbaum from
the news agency Reuters reported in December 2001
that Convar had at that time successfully restored
information from 32 computers, supporting
"suspicions that some of the 911 transactions were
illegal".
'The suspicion is that inside
information about the attack was used to send
financial transaction commands and authorizations
in the belief that amid all the chaos the
criminals would have, at the very least, a good
head start,' says Convar director Peter Henschel."
[36] Convar received the costly orders - according
to Kirschbaum´s report the companies had to pay
between $20,000 and $30,000 per rescued computer -
in particular from credit card companies, because:
"There was a sharp rise in credit card
transactions moving through some computer systems
at the WTC shortly before the planes hit the twin
towers. This could be a criminal enterprise - in
which case, did they get advance warning? Or was
it only a coincidence that more than $100 million
was rushed through the computers as the disaster
unfolded?" [37]
The companies for which
Convar was active cooperated with the FBI. If the
data were reconstructed they should have been
passed on to the FBI, and the FBI, according to
its statutory mandate, should have initiated
further investigation based on the data to find
out who carried out these transactions. Henschel
was optimistic at the time that the sources for
the transactions would come to light.
Richard Wagner, a Convar employee, told
Kirschbaum that "illegal transfers of more than
$100 million might have been made immediately
before and during the disaster. '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,'
he says. 'They thought that the records of their
transactions could not be traced after the main
frames were destroyed'." [38]
Wagner's
observation that there had been "illegal financial
transactions shortly before and during the WTC
disaster" matches an observation which Ruppert
describes in Crossing the Rubicon. Ruppert
was contacted by an employee of Deutsche Bank, who
survived the WTC disaster by leaving the scene
when the second aircraft had hit its target.
According to the employee, about
five minutes before the attack the entire
Deutsche Bank computer system had been taken
over by something external that no one in the
office recognized and every file was downloaded
at lightning speed to an unknown location. The
employee, afraid for his life, lost many of his
friends on September 11, and he was well aware
of the role which the Deutsche Bank subsidiary
Alex Brown had played in insider trading.
[39]
I was curious and wanted more
information from Convar regarding their work on
the WTC-computer hard drives, but also about the
statements made by Peter Henschel and Richard
Wagner. Thus, I contacted the agency which
represents Convar for press matters, with a
written request. But their agency "ars publicandi"
informed me swiftly:
Due to time constraints, we can
currently offer you neither information nor
anyone on the part of our client to talk to
regarding this requested topic.
I also
approached KrollOntrack, a very interesting
competitor of Convar in writing. Ontrack Data
Recovery, which also has subsidiaries in Germany,
was purchased in 2002 by Kroll Inc - "one of the
nation's most powerful private investigative and
security firms, which has long-standing
involvement with executive protection US
government officials including the president. This
would require close liaison with the Secret
Service." [40]
At the time of the 9/11
attacks, a certain Jerome Hauer was one of the
managing directors at Kroll Inc. He had previously
established the crisis center for the mayor of New
York City as director of the Office of Emergency
Management (OEM), which occupied office space on
the 23rd floor of the WTC Building 7. Hauer helped
former FBI agent John O'Neill to get the post of
the head of Security Affairs at the WTC, and spent
the night of September 11 with O'Neill in New York
before the latter lost his life on September 11 in
the WTC. Hauer was most likely involved in the
planning of "Tripod II", the war game exercise at
the port of New York City. [41]
Therefore,
I found it appealing to uncover some more details
of this aspect, or, more accurately to find out if
Ontrack or KrollOntrack had received an order in
2001 or after to rescue computer hard drives from
the WTC. The answer I received from KrollOntrack
said:
Kroll Ontrack was not at the site of
the data recovery - the devices at the Twin
Towers have been completely destroyed or
vaporized. The firm Kroll was, however, at that
time active in the field of computer-forensic
investigations, securing devices in the
surrounding buildings.
In essence,
these two inquiries did not help me at all. If
anything, a further question arose: why did
KrollOntrack send me a response, where it was
really obvious that the content did not match the
facts? After all, I had written in my inquiry that
Convar had received orders to restore damaged
computer hard drives from the World Trade Center.
I sent a new inquiry, attaching a link for
Erik Kirschbaum's Reuters article and additional
cinematic reports on Convar's which showed that
some of the WTC disks had not been "completely
destroyed or vaporized". I stated to KrollOntrack:
"Your answer does not seem to match the facts,
when it comes to 'completely destroyed or
vaporized'. Will you still stick to your answer?"
KrollOntrack then replied that their
previously given assessment constituted "not a
statement, but an opinion".
I do not find
this assessment worthless, because it is in line
with the knowledge of the general public and can
easily be refuted in argumentum in contrario by
Convar´s activities.
One film report to
which I referred to in my second inquiry to
KrollOntrack originated from the German television
journal Heute-Journal broadcast on March 11, 2002,
on ZDF, and the other from the Dutch TV
documentary Zembla, broadcast on September 10,
2006.
The ZDF report showed that Convar
received the WTC disks from the US Department of
Defense and that Convar had managed until March
2002 to recover more than 400 hard drives. It also
reported that the private companies that employed
Convar had paid between $25,000 and $50,000 per
hard drive. In the TV documentary Zembla, Convar
essentially maintained its position as it had been
reported by Erik Kirschbaum in 2001.
Obviously, in connection with 9/11 there
has not only been insider trading via put options,
but there is additional evidence that there have
been illegal financial transactions via credit
cards through which more than 100 million US
dollars were removed from the WTC computer
systems.
Those occurred shortly before and
during the WTC disaster. It remains unclear what
the FBI did later on with the data recovered by
Convar. On the other hand, it may have been not
very much, as can be seen from a memorandum from
the 9/11 Commission, which was released in May
2009.
The 9/11 Commission asked the FBI
about the use of credit cards for insider dealing.
On the basis of the information provided by the
FBI, 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 or the alleged scheme"
- but above all "everything at the WTC was
pulverized to near powder, making it extremely
unlikely that any hard-drives survived". [42]
The activities of Convar, however, prove
the exact opposite.
But it gets even
better. According to Zembla, the FBI was directly
involved with the data rescue efforts of Convar.
And on top of it, the broadcast of Heute-Journal
reported that Convar worked in that "highly
sensitive" matter with several federal agencies of
the United States government.
So there
have been ample indications for insider trading
based on foreknowledge of the attacks, but there
are very few hard facts as Catherine Austin Fitts,
a former managing director and member of the board
of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read
& Co, Inc (now part of UBS), pointed out when
I talked with her about this topic.
Ms Fitts, what are your general
thoughts related to the alleged 9/11-insider
trading?
Catherine Austin
Fitts: Well, I've never been able to see
concrete evidence that the insider trading has
been proved. There's a lot of anecdotal
information from investment bankers and people
in the investment community that indicate that
there was significant insider trading,
particularly in the currency and bond markets,
but again it hasn't been documented.
I
think around situations like 9/11 we've seen
things that can only be explained as insider
trading. Therefore, it wouldn't surprise me if
it turns out the allegations are true, because
my suspicion is that 9/11 was an extremely
profitable covert operation and a lot of the
profits came from the trading. It wouldn't even
surprise me if it turns out that the Exchange
Stabilization Fund traded it and that some of
the funding for the compensation fund for the
victims came from the ESF.
Insider
trading happens around these kinds of events,
but if you really want to produce evidence of
insider trading, you need the subpoena powers of
the SEC, and of course we know that they haven't
exercised them. If anything, right after 9/11,
the government settled a significant amount of
cases I presume because a lot of the documents
were destroyed by the destruction of WTC
building number 7, where the SEC offices and
other governmental investigation offices were.
[43]
Fitts, who had written a longer
essay in 2004 related to this, replied to my
question about who had benefited from 9/11:
Catherine Austin
Fitts: 9/11 was extraordinarily
profitable for Wall Street, they of course got a
kind of "Get Out of Jail Free card" as I've just
described. In addition, the largest broker of
government bonds, Cantor Fitzgerald, was
destroyed, and there was a great deal of money
missing from the federal government in the prior
four or five years. If you look at the amount of
funds involved, it is hard to come to a
conclusion other than massive securities fraud
was involved, so I find it very interesting that
this happened. [44]
A short
explanation: Cantor Fitzgerald's headquarters were
located in the North Tower of the WTC (floors
101-105). On 9/11, the company lost nearly
two-thirds of its entire workforce, more than any
other tenant in the WTC. (Also two other
government bonds brokers, Garbon Inter Capital and
Eurobrokers, occupied office space in the WTC
towers that were destroyed.) Back to Fitts and the
question: "Cui bono 9/11?"
Catherine Austin
Fitts: In addition, the federal
government took the position that they couldn't
produce audited financial statements after 9/11,
because they said the office at the Pentagon
that produced financial statements was
destroyed. Now given what I know of the federal
set up of financial statements, I am skeptical
of that statement.
But needless to say,
if you take the government on its word, you had
another "Get Out of Jail Free card" for four
trillion dollars and more missing from the
federal government. So if you're just looking at
the financial fraud angle, there were a lot of
parties that benefited from 9/11. But then of
course what 9/11 did, it staged the passage of
the Patriot Act and a whole series of laws and
regulations that I collectively refer to as "The
Control on Concentration of Cash Flow Act." It
gave incredible powers to centralize.
In
addition, if you look at monetary policies right
after 9/11 - I remember I was over in the City
of London driving around with a money manager
and his phone rang and he answered it on his
speaker phone. It was somebody on Wall Street
who he hadn't talked to since before 9/11, and
he said to him: "Oh Harry, I am so sorry about
what has happened, it must have been very
traumatic." And the guy said: "Don't be
ridiculous! We were able to borrow cheap short
and invest long, we're running a huge arbitrage,
we're making a fortune, this is the most
profitable thing that ever happened to us!" - So
you could tell the monetary policies and sort of
insider games were just pumping profits into the
bank at that time, so that was very profitable.
But of course the big money was used for
a significant movement of the military abroad
and into Afghanistan and then into Iraq ... You
could see that the country was being prepared to
go to war. And sure enough, 9/11 was used as a
justification to go to war in Afghanistan, to go
to war in Iraq, and commit a huge number of
actions, and now much of the challenges about
the budget are the result of extraordinary
expenditures on war including in Afghanistan and
Iraq and the costs of moving the army abroad and
engaging in this kind of empire building with
ground military force.
So I think if you
ask Cui Bono on 9/11, one of the big categories
was all the people who made money on engineering
the popular fear they needed to engineer these
wars. I believe whether it was financial fraud,
engineering new laws or engineering wars, it was
a fantastically profitable covert operation.
[45]
In that category of people who
benefit from 9/11 are also the arms manufacturer
Raytheon, whose share price gained directly from
the 9/11 attacks. Trading of the shares of
Raytheon, the producer of Tomahawk and Patriot
missiles (and parent company of E-systems, whose
clients include the National Security Agency and
CIA), experienced an abrupt six-time increase of
call option purchases on the day immediately
before September 11. [46]
The outright
purchase of call options implies the expectation
that a stock price will rise. In the first week
after 9/11, when the New York Stock Exchange
opened again, the value of Raytheon actually shot
up considerably. Looking at the development of the
stock price, the impression is a very weak
performance before the attacks - and then, after
resumption of trade, a "gap" (at substantial
volume) upwards. In other words: just under $25 on
September 10, the low in the period between August
20 to September 28, at $31, 50 on September 17 and
up to $34, and 80 on September 27, 2001.
With regards to government bonds, buyers
of US Treasury securities with a maturity of five
years were also winners. These securities were
traded in an unusually large volume shortly before
the attacks. The Wall Street Journal reported at
least in early October 2001 that the Secret
Service had started an investigation into a
suspiciously high volume of US government bond
purchases before the attacks. The Wall Street
Journal explained:
Five-year Treasury bills are the
best investments in the event of a global
crisis, in particular one like this which has
hit the United States. The papers are treasured
because of their safety, and because they are
covered by the US government, and usually their
prices rise if investors shun riskier
investments, such as shares.
[47]
Adding to this phenomenon, the
government issues these bonds that serve as a
basis of money creation for funding a war such as
the immediately declared "war on terror", engaging
the Tomahawks from Raytheon. And here it may again
be useful to have a quick look at the "cui bono"
relationship:
The US Federal Reserve creates money
to fund the war and lends it to the American
government. The American government in turn must
pay interest on the money they borrow from the
Central Bank to fund the war. The greater the
war appropriations, the greater the profits are
for bankers. [48]
A multi-layered
combination, one could say.
I also talked
about the topic of 9/11 insider trading with one
of the world's leading practitioners at the
interface between the international capital
markets, the national security policy of the US as
well as geopolitics, James G Rickards. He gave me
some answers in a personal discussion, which I am
allowed to repeat here with his expressed
approval.
Question: Did
suspicious trading activities of uncovered put
options on futures markets occur shortly before
9/11?
James G Rickards:
Well, the trading documents certainly look
suspicious. It is simply a fact that an
unusually high volume of purchases of
put-options for the two airlines occurred over
the three trading days before the attacks. This
is a mere fact, no speculation, no guessing
around. This is clearly obvious from the
documents of the trading sessions on the
derivatives exchanges.
Question: Do you think
that the intelligence agencies could have got a
warning signal based on this information?
James G Rickards:
Theoretically that is possible, if are you are
looking and watching out for this. But there was
far more significant information, which was
ignored.
Question: Do you
also think that some people with foreknowledge
operated speculatively in the option markets?
James G Rickards: Based on
the documentation of the trading session it
seems that this has been the case, yes.
Let's sum up a bit at the end. We
have, among other things:
The "nice detective work" by Kevin Ryan
related to Stratesec/Wirt Walker III.
Some highly inconsistent information vis-a-vis
Convar/illegal credit card transactions.
Scientific papers supporting the allegations
that there were indeed unusual trading activities
in the option market before the terrorist attacks
of 9/11, although the 9/11 Commission (based on
the investigation of the SEC and the FBI) ruled
that possibility out.
As it became clear
that I would publish this article here at Asia
Times Online, I contacted the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation via its press spokesman Paul Bresson
in order "to give the FBI the opportunity to give
a public statement with regards to three specific
issues". Those three specific issues were the ones
I have just highlighted. Related to each of them
I've asked Mr Bresson/the FBI: "Could you comment
on this for the public, please?" Up to this
moment, Mr Bresson/the FBI did not respond to my
inquiry in any way whatsoever. Does this come as a
surprise?
I've also got back in touch with
"ars publicandi", the firm that does public
relations for Convar in Germany. The response
said: "Unfortunately I have to inform you that the
status has not changed, and that Convar considers
the issue of 9/11 as dead in general."
As
you have read, the status in August of last year
was slightly different.
At the end of this
article, I should perhaps mention that this
research ultimately led to negative consequences
for me. After I contacted the FBI, I was informed
by the publisher of a German financial website,
for which I conducted interviews for a
professional fee (and had already prepared more
work), that no further cooperation was possible.
Now that I will come in one way or another into
the focus of the FBI, any association with me
would be undesirable.
Well, you know the
rules.
As far as the abnormal option
trades around 9/11 are concerned, I want to give
Max Keiser the last word in order to point out the
significance of the story.
Max Keiser: Regardless
of who did it, we can know that more than a few
had advance warning - the trading in the option
market makes that
clear.
Notes
i. PROMIS was first developed by Inslaw during
the 1970s under contracts and grants from the Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA).
These guarantees gave the government licenses to
use the early versions of PROMIS but not to modify
them, or to create derivative works, or to
distribute PROMIS outside the federal government.
By 1982, because of strong disagreements over a
fee-incentive, Modification 12 Agreement to the
original contract, the United States Department of
Justice and Inslaw Inc became involved in a
widely-publicized and protracted lawsuit. PROMIS
was originally designed as a case-management
system for prosecutors. (Source Wikipedia.)
1.
Compare Michael C Ruppert: Crossing the
Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the
End of the Age Of Oil, New Society Publishers,
Gabriola Island, 2004, page 152.
2. Ibid, page
153.
3. Ibid, page 154-155.
4. Ibid, page
170.
5. Ibid, page 238-253: "9/11 Insider
Trading, or 'You Didn't Really See That, Even
Though We Saw It'."
6. Ibid, page 239.
7.
Compare Chris Blackhurst: "Mystery of terror
'insider dealers' ", published at The Independent
on October 4, 2001, see here.
8. Compare "Profits of Death", published at
From the Wilderness on December 6, 2001, see here.
9. For the fact, that it was George Tenet who
recruited Krongard, compare George Tenet: At
the Center of the Storm, Harper Collins, New
York, 2007, page 19.
10. Compare Marc Chesney,
Remo Crameri and Loriano Mancini: "Detecting
Informed Trading Activities in the Option
Markets", University of Zurich, April 2010, online
here.
11. Nafeez M Ahmed: Geheimsache 09/11.
Hintergründe uber den 11. September und die Logik
amerikanischer Machtpolitik, Goldmann Verlag,
Munich, 2004, page 182. (Translated back into
English from German.)
12. Compare Michael C
Ruppert: Crossing the Rubicon, page
244-247.
13. Wing-Keung Wong, Howard E.
Thompson und Kweehong Teh: "Was there Abnormal
Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to
the September 11 Attacks?", published at Social
Sciences Research Network, April 2010, see here.
14. Compare "Bank of America among 38 stocks
in SEC's attack probe", published at Bloomberg
News on October 3, 2001, archived here.
15. Michael C Ruppert: Crossing the
Rubicon, page 243.
16. Ibid.
17.
"Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading
Lead Directly into the CIA's Highest Ranks",
published at From the Wilderness on October 9,
2001, see here.
18. Compare "Early September 2001: Almost
Irrefutable Proof of Insider Trading in Germany",
published at History Commons, see here.
19. Allen M Poteshman: "Unusual Option Market
Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September
11, 2001", published in The Journal of Business,
University of Chicago Press, 2006, Vol 79, Edition
4, page 1703-1726.
20. Wing-Keung Wong, Howard
E Thompson und Kweehong Teh: "Was there Abnormal
Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to
the September 11 Attacks?", see end note
13.
21. Ibid. The authors refer to Erin E
Arvedlund: "Follow the money: terrorist
conspirators could have profited more from fall of
entire market than single stocks", published in
Barron's on October 8, 2001.
22. Wong,
Thompson, Teh: "Was there Abnormal Trading in the
S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September
11 Attacks?"
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25.
Marina Alcaraz: "11 septembre 2001: des volumes
inhabituels sur les options peu avant l'attentat",
published in Les Echos, page 34, September 10,
2001, online here.
26. Marc Chesney, Remo Crameri and Loriano
Mancini: "Detecting Informed Trading Activities in
the Option Markets", see end note 10.
27.
Ibid.
28. ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Compare
Marc Chesney, Remo Crameri and Loriano Mancini:
"Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the
Option Markets", published at the University of
Zurich on September 7, 2011, see here.
31. Vgl Lars Schall: "Sapere Aude!", German
Interview with Dr Daniele Ganser, published at
LarsSchall.com on August 18, 2011, see here.
32. Compare a copy of the letter by the SEC on
MaxKeiser.com, see here.
33. Compare related to this agreement Matt
Taibbi: "Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street
Crimes?", published at Rolling Stone on August 17,
2011, see here.
34.
Mark H Gaffney: "Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark
Side", published at Foreign Policy Journal on
March 2, 2011, see here.
35. Compare Peter Dale Scott: "Launching the
US Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and
Central Asia", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10,
Issue 12, No 3, March 19, 2012, see online here.
35. Erik Kirschbaum: "German Firm Probes
Last-Minute World Trade Center Transactions",
published at Reuters on December 19, 2001, online
here.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Michael C
Ruppert: Crossing the Rubicon, page
244.
39. Ibid, page 423.
40. Ibid, page
423-426.
41. Commission Memorandum: "FBI
Briefing on Trading", dated August 18, 2003, page
12, online here.
42. Lars Schall: "9/11 Was A Fantastically
Profitable Covert Operation", Interview with
Catherine Austin Fitts, published at
LarsSchall.com on September 3, 2011, see here.
43.
Ibid. Compare further related to the "cui bone"
topic Catherine Austin Fitts: "9-11 Profiteering:
A Framework for Building the 'Cui Bono'?",
published at GlobalResearch on March 22, 2004, see
here.
44.
Lars Schall: "9/11 Was A Fantastically Profitable
Covert Operation", see end note 42.
45.
Compare "Bank of America among 38 stocks in SEC's
attack probe", see end note 14. "A Raytheon option
that makes money if shares are more than $25 each
had 232 options contracts traded on the day before
the attacks, almost six times the total number of
trades that had occurred before that day. A
contract represents options on 100 shares.
Raytheon shares soared almost 37 percent to $34.04
during the first week of post-attack US trading."
46. Compare Barry Grey: "Suspicious trading
points to advance knowledge by big investors of
September 11 attacks," published at World
Socialist Web Site on October 5, 2001, see here.
47. J S Kim: "Inside the Illusory Empire of
the Banking Commodity Con Game," published at The
Underground Investor on October 19, 2010, see here.
Lars
Schall is a German financial journalist. This
article is an exclusive, slightly modified and
updated excerpt from the book Mordanschlag
9/11. Eine kriminalistische Recherche zu Finanzen,
Ol und Drogen (Assassination 9/11: A criminalistic
research on finance, oil and drugs), published
in Germany by Schild Verlag.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times
Online (Holdings) Ltd.
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9 December 2014 Last updated at 16:15
American diplomatic and military posts overseas have been told to prepare themselves for violent protests this week if the US Senate proceeds with its promised release of a long-awaited report into 'enhanced' interrogation techniques used by the CIA on prisoners after the 11 September attacks 13 years agoWhat is the report?
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