Ok so if the C.I.A. thought a tip that said “OBL and his cronies are planning to hijack a coupla planes” was complete bullshit, why tell the President? I agree that the C.I.A. both before 9/11 and after gets all sorts of bogus tips from people with too much time on their hands calling in threats or conspiracy nuts who claim to have inside information. I’m sure Bush doesn’t hear all these, so why some completely unbelivable (at the time) tip about hijackings. I think the info was credible and everyone just sat on their asses waiting for someone else to make the first move.
But they didn’t lock the friggin’ doors! How smart do you have to be? How many of you were as stunned as I to find out that they just walked in to the cockpit? Never mind the subtle stuff, paying cash for one way tickets, no luggage, clearly not in the Gus and Shirley Johnson profile. We got hit because we were stupid and complacent. On that, we are as one in our unity, our utterly non-partisan cupidity.
Why did they keep the warnings under wraps? Because it made them look bad. Period. The Pubbies were smitten with a vision of Bush-as-Churchill, and an electorate in servile awe. (Sure, it was a tragedy, but if a politician sees his mother drop dead at this feet, at least one part of his brain is calculating what political advantage can be gleaned.)
They should have come clean on Sept. 12. No guts. Tough shit. When were they planning on releasing this info? Let’s pick a date at random, oh, say…November 8th?
How long before Dick Cheney begins glowering darkly about criticizing Our Leader in a Time of War? What? Say again? He already has?
Well, there you have it.
Well, maybe. Or maybe nobody yet had put the pieces of the puzzle together, and when they finally did, too much time had elapsed. And don’t forget the very short period of time since they had excoriated Clinton for his own attempts to get bin Laden (“Wagging the dog! He’s just trying to distract us from the blowjob story!”). It would be too embarrassing to Lott, DeLay, et al. to say anything at all.
Of course, the rabid right commentariat is working overtime on trying to blame Clinton for this, too. The best they can come up with so far, though, is that he chronically underfunded the intelligence agencies - even though they simultaneously claim this fiasco to be the result of too much information being gathered. But I have no doubt that they can come up with the connection eventually, and that the same people who always believe Clinton-hatred will believe it, too.
I agree with much of what you say, to start with. But just to clarify, I think they are saying that members of congress, Rep. or Dem., who had the need to know, were informed of the same thing the administration was. I don’t think they were saying Feinstein knew two jets were going to be flown into WTC. They are sayinf the threat was communicated to the appropriate people in the legislaive and executive branches, regardless of party.
This thread in GQ has some bearing on similar events that happened in the past. Let’s face it, if the Shrub and his cronies had the “blueprints” for the attacks on 9/11 in front of them in August, do you think that they’d have said, “Hey! Let’s not do anything about this! It’ll enable us to go to war, boost defense spending and ensure re-election in '04!”? The kind of mentality that would allow an event like 9/11 to occur just for political gain is the same kind of mentality that’s going to call for the mass round up and shipping off to “work camps” of “undesirable citizens” long before.
Back when I was in high school and we took a trip to NYC in 1986, I looked at the WTC buildings and thought that if someone crashed a plane into the buildings they’d collapse. Was I prescient? No, I was just a punk kid who thought large disasters was cool. I had no idea of the engineering principals used in designing the buildings or the physics involved in a plane crash. And I was just as surprised as everyone else when the buildings came down.
If Bush & Co. are guilty of anything, its of being human and not being able to realize all possible outcomes of a particular tidbit of information. I seriously doubt that if any other President (from Washington to Clinton) had been elected to office in 2000 they would have been able to prevent the events of 9/11 with the same information that Bush had prior to it.
Oh really? Why don’t you ask Senator Durbin, who’s actually on the intelligence comittee
Well, what do you say we saw this down to the bone?
Did Bush know?
Ridiculous. He is vapid, yes, but not brain dead. Even if one avers the most dastardly partisan motives, no way. He would have to have known that if he was busted on this, he wouldn’t have to worry about being re-elected, he would have to worry he wasn’t dragged out, stood up and shot against the Washington Monument.
Did his Inner Circle know?
Of course not. See above.
Did anybody?
No. Some people thought of the idea of crashing a jetliner, and worried about it, wrote memos. Other people had the same idea with vastly worse results. The idea wasn’t spectacularly original, as several Dopsters have testified.
Should there be an investigation? Or an Investigation?
Yes. We need to know, if for no other reason than to assure ourselves of the obvious. I freely admit I would be cheered to see the Administration politically embarassed, * so long as it is well deserved* Thus far, that hasn’t been a problem.
My bet: the intelligence came in, the Admin quietly whispered to airline execs that it might be needful and patriotic to make air travel very inconvenient and frustrating. The porcine squeel of rage can only be imagined.
My question, rather off the OP: why haven’t the Evil Ones done anything since? Have they shot thier bolt?
Remember the ending scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when the source of cosmic power was stashed in a warehouse? It’s funny because it’s true. Beauracracies do not change when situations change.
Challanger blew up because the weather was cold.
Stalin reacted poorly to the German invasion.
Hitler reacted poorly to the Normandy invasion.
We reacted poorly to warnings or Pearl Harbor. WTC, and a zillion other threats.
Something else that will never change is that people will claim they would have done a better job. No you wouldn’t. You’d have fumbled it too.
I’m not saying that GW isn’t a cretinous coward who has been hiding the information. He is. And that is the problem he has now. But we are stuck with him until the next election in 04. Nonetheless, he didn’t cause the attacks, and the false suggestion that he knew or should have known is just weirdly bizarre and a blame pointing view of the world that has no basis in reality. We are being sold a load of crap by a media that has completely abandoned its constitutional duty to investigate, analyze and report. The spin the “let’s find someone to crucify” right wing media is giving this is that Bush is some kind of traitor. If there is a real story it is how the Bushistas are secret to a degree that would shock Richard Nixon. The motivation here seems to be that they want to look like omniscient power players on the world stage, and they come off looking like frat boys getting caught stealing the answers to the exam, only to be discovered stealing the answers to last year’s exam.
I’m on the US Embassy mailing list here in China. I get warnings every week or two about how US citizens abroad are at risk and should be careful.
I’ve received hundreds of warnings over the years. I never even read them any more, but just hit delete.
You know, the number of people making such false suggestions today seems to be miniscule compared to the number of people who wish to understand the mechanism whereby the attacks slipped under the nation’s radar. However, there’s certainly no scarcity of right wing ideologues trying to slander everyone who won’t just shut the heck up about it all. I don’t particularly care that a few jerks are making absurd claims about what Bush should have known or done, but it’s very disturbing to see the right trying to stifle any open discussion of what what went wrong and what might be done to fix it.
My first reaction to this whole thing is that it wasn’t that big of a deal, my main problem being the timing question. Why now? Why not last fall when jumping on the intelligence-bashing bandwagon was de riguer? At that time saying they knew nothing about the attack made them look probably more inept than saying “we had various bits of info that in hindsight that we found hard to believe when put together,” and the administration probably could have gotten away with it. Saying it now it makes you wonder what else they knew.
But now, with more thought and information gleaning, I think the way the Clinton administration handled the millennium terrorist threats is making the current crew look quite poor. Remember being told all sorts of vague things about someone maybe trying to take advantage of new years celebrations? They were vague to say the least, but they at least made people consider the remote possibilities of something happening. Now we are told that there is nothing Bush & Co. could have said or done which would have really done anything to stop the attack. Didn’t they think that maybe if they had tried to link it to the millennial plots, like saying “just because we stopped them at new years a couple of years ago doesn’t mean they won’t try again.” Well, it didn’t happen.
And to say that the intelligence community had been gutted by the Democrats so they wouldn’t have been able to stop them anyway is also disingenuous, since that same gutted intel community caught the alleged millennial bombers. I will concede that the millenium targets were obviously big and so got more concern, but the assumption that the threat went away when the parties ended is astonishingly asinine. Perhaps it could be argued that the letting down of the guard started under Clinton’s watch, but then, we haven’t been told that Clinton was told about 9/11 beforehand.
But as it stands I think the real political damage (should nothing further of this kind come out, that is) will mainly just be poll damage. That the info about Moussaoui, the flight school students, and whatever else that looks like a smoking gun in hindsight didn’t get the reaction we would like it to have now is more a problem of bureaucracy than of Bush being told everything and him saying “eh… so what?” But I also have little respect for Bush’s intelligence anyway, so the greater sin (if it really exists) would lay on the shoulders of Cheney and whoever else should have known better.
But what looks worse in May 2002, the smattering of information that was presented to Bush last summer (never mind the dealay, just the being informed of it before the attack), or the administration’s “back off bin Laden” order to the CIA in early 2001?
What I would like to know is what happened with all the reports of short selling American and United Airlines, and Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley (both had their headquarters in the WTC) just before the attacks. (Short selling, if you aren’t familiar with the term, means’ more or less, betting that the shares you are dealing with will drop in value.)
This wasn’t some paranoid invention by conspiracy whackos; it was reported in, among many others, der Spiegel, Paris Match, le Figaro, the San Francisco Examiner and Time.
Here are some quotes from the Israeli Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism, entitled “Black Tuesday: The World’s Largest Insider Trading Scam?":
-
" 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." -
" 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." -
" 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!]. "
At least some of these options were purchased through Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, the American investment banking arm of Deutsche Bank. Alex Brown had been managed untill 1998 by A.B. Krongard, whom Dubya appointed Executive Director of the CIA 19 March 2001.
Obviously somebody knew what was going to happen.
Now this isn’t some kind of deep secret; a Google search on “Sell short American Airlines Merrill Lynch 9-11” brings up something like 6000 hits.
The CIA supposedly moniters suspected insider trading all over the world, all the time.
Does anyone have any theories on why no one is raising bloody hell all over the place about who bought these options?
(I got the story, and some the above quotes, originally, from an ex-LA narcotics cop turned whistle blower named Mike Ruppert. His web site is http://www.copvcia.com/.)
Maybe Ruppert is a fruitcake; it’s hard to tell on the internet. But his data seems to be believable.
Comments, anyone?
I think the question is not “Did the U.S. government know about the attacks in advance?” Of course, if U.S. government officials, at whatever level, did know, and deliberately did nothing, they should be taken out and shot, but so far I haven’t seen anything to raise that particular allegation out of tinfoil hat territory. The real question is “Should the U.S. government have known about the attacks in advance?” That is what needs to be investigated; not villainy, but incompetance. (Of course, this should be done, not out of a sense of partisan vindictiveness, or to scapegoat the most junior person it is possible to pin the whole thing on, but to figure out if and how our intelligence and national defense systems failed, so that we can keep them from doing so in the future. There should also be free and fair elections in Afghanistan, and a government which respects the equal rights of women and protects the full religious liberty of all, and everyone in the Middle East should sit down to solve their disputes and seek a just and lasting peace in a spirit of mutual respect and genuine repentance for any past wrongs they have done one another.)
As Sen. Edwards pointed out, if warnings of guys taking flying lessons and all the other things had been connected up enough to prevent one hijacking, that would have been one less plane crashing into a building. You didn’t have to know what the ultimate aim of the hijack was.
Although I can’t stand GW, I don’t see how he can be blamed for the failure to connect the dots. Intelligence analysits are experts at their game, but the the network of possibilities gets so big so fast that it looks to me like just plain luck if you guess the right answer out of so many possibilites.
Just the same, I’d like to see a throrough airing of the thing. Maybe if a few managers get scalded the various anti-terrist factions in our various agencies will start giving each other, or even their own people, a “heads up” now and then.
Of course, there has been plenty of heads up, butt it was up the wrong place.
Couple of links, first of all:
Bush Told in August of Specific Threat to U.S.
and
That 2nd link is from the NY Times, and so will disappear in a couple of days.
As to the stock market: I’ve spent a lot of time staring at charts of the market action, and call me superstitious, but the action just before 9/11 was very, very eerie as far as how weak the market was. As if the market knew something really bad was going to happen. Makes you wonder if there was some kind of inside dope being circulated somewhere that was taking prices down.
Does it seem suspiciously well-timed to anyone else, now that the Bush administration is facing serious questioning of its handling of intelligence and disclosures before and after 9/11, that there is now another credible terrorist threat that’s been known about for several weeks?
Wag the dog, anyone?
We had a thread on this back in September. I spent 8 years on derivatives trading floors in Tokyo and Hong Kong. The second thing that crossed my mind on 11 September was that that bastard Bin Ladin shorted the markets. I am firmly convinced that someone had advanced knowledge and did short the markets. Knowledge was reinforced as I watched the Asian markets nosedive when they opened for trading 12 hours after the attack. The trading pattern is too suspicious.
BTW, your quotes above only look at the US positions, and not the global trading positions. One could go long gold and oil, short other global stocks, hell just short various indexes. The numbers also don’t reflect whether or not there were irregular naked short positions in the index futures or options. No one has looked at the other side of the trades either, remember a short call position would benefit about as much as a long put.
AFAIK, and I have looked for it, nothing has ever come out from the regulators. Certainly, those short positions were generally closed out and the money laundered before the regulators even started asking the question. I think the stuff in the US expired and the positions never closed, suggesting that someone just walked away from the position.
Something else I read once or twice but haven’t seen confirmation on, is that the World Trade Center housed IIRC Citibanks credit card processing facility. The volume of transactions on 9/11 was several magnitude higher than normal, suggesting that someone had advanced knowlegde and laundered up to a billion dollars in transactions that then disappeared without backups.
Why not? Most innocent reason is that most people, including regulators, don’t understand derivatives or short selling. Most damning reason would be the same regulators don’t want to admit by the time they started to investigate, it was too late. The positions closed, and the money laundered.
China Guy: Thanks for the information. I don’t know anything about the intricacies of financial markets, and I’m always glad to learn something new.
But my main point was this:
Spmeone, who obviously does know about finances, knew exactly what was going to happen. They knew that the WTC was going down, and that Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley were going to take massive hits. They weren’t selling Solomon Bros or
Zurich or Madrid dealers short.
They knew that United and American planes were going to be hijacked; they weren’t selling Delta or Continental short.
Is it possible that a very pissed off CIA, FBI, and whoever else is in charge of monitering world financial misdeeds are not capable of pressuring the banks involved to cough up some names?
Proccedural rules be damned. If we can bomb the crap out of an entire country without bothering about prooving responsibility beforehand, surely we can grab a few bank vicepresidents and twist their balls until they give out some answers.
WHY ISN’T ANYONE ASKING THESE QUESTIONS? Forgive the shouting, but sometimes ya gotta yell.
I should probably clarify my position. The trading activity is highly suspicious from what I’ve seen reported in the media. I no longer had access to Bloomberg at that time, so I couldn’t check the positions myself. Until the regulators show that there was nothing nefarious, then I am going to believe there is a smoking gun. This is based on my professional experience and not some conspiracy theory. Believe me, as I watched my completely unrelated Hong Kong positions nosedive on 9/12, the first thing that popped into my head was bin ladin used his knowledge of the financial markets to clean up.
Mapache, I think that you are incorrect about who and who wasn’t shorted. What you have mentioned are the popular examples in the US. One could have shorted any airline stock in the world and made a lot of money off of 9/11. United and American are the two biggest US based carriers, and probably the easier to short than Delta or Continental. There were literally hundreds of ways to make money on 9/11 via the international capital markets if one had foreknowledge.
If one looks at the global activity on benefiting from pre-knowledge of 9/11 via either shorting stuff like airlines and brokers and going long gold and oil. And then look at the level of activity and the variation. The examples all show a big jump in activity from the previous month. I would want to see the variation over time. Look at the global activity rather than shorting Merrills and not Sollies.
Finding the actual end buyer can be tough. A dummy corporation off shore trades through an internet broker. Try to trace that back.