China Guy: yours truly made enough off of a gold investment to cancel losses in everything else at that time, which given the magnitude of the losses we’re talking about here, is saying something. So I can see how someone could have really cleaned up if he knew to forget everything else and just go long gold, for instance.
The intelligence agencies have a lot to answer for from this point of view:
Moussauoi was jailed in August because of his suspicious flight school activity. The FBI asked him some questions, and wrote a memo.
Meantime, an agent in Pheonix was noticing something suspicious too about flight schools.
Now, given that, it should have been simple and straightforward for someone to decide to do a search of all students in all flight schools around the country for names of known Al Qaeda operatives. This is a very simple investigative technique. In NYC, it’s standard procedure for the cops to canvass the entire neighborhood for witnesses to a major crime when they’re investigating. This would have been analogous. Such a search, unless I’m mistaken, should have turned up Mohammed Atta’s name. Unless he didn’t use his real name?
Tedious? Time consuming? 20/20 hindsight? Yes, yes and no. Remember, the Feds were frantic in the summer, looking for a threat because of the heightened Al Qaeda activity they were sensing. Under such conditions, such a search should have been standard procedure.
Of course, one reason why the Feds could be so silent as to who, or if anyone had insider info on 9/11 and was using it for profit is that they don’t want the bad guys to know they’re on to them. After all, if Bin Laden’s network is sophisticated enough launder billions of dollars of money, you’re not going to shut it down just by going after the middle men. By seizing the assets and closing down the charitable organizations which operated as fronts for Bin Laden and Co., you force them to use other means of raising money. If you want to catch those behind the money launderers, it seems to me that the best way to do it is by forcing them to use that method more than they would like.
I’m also sceptical of this because one thing I’ve read several places is that all the financial houses located in the World Trade Center had very advanced real-time backup systems that basically mirrored everything in the building at offsite facilities. Very little digital information was lost in the attack.
Like I said, I haven’t seen confirmation of this one. Just I read it in one financial report after 9/11. Perhaps there was good real-time back up. Would be perfectly happy if someone debunks this.
However, shorting the markets, long gold has raised a massive blip on the radar screen. I have not seen anything anywhere that shows this has been investigated thoroughly in the US let alone on a global scale. In one day, by just having full access to a bloomberg terminal on 9/11, I could have proven whether or not there was highly suspicious trading activity on exchange traded markets. This is not a difficult task if you know the biz.
Obviously there was some high activity in usually moribund put options, but haven’t seen any evidence if this still fell within normal trading probabilities. Also, we will never know about the OTC trades that may have been undertaken unless the iBanks fully divulge their counterparties, and then the counterparties are investigated to find the true end clients.
If there was a direct connection between shorting the financial markets and 9/11, then it behooves some regulator to watch that for advanced warning indicators for next time.
The financial markets angle is something I’ve been wondering about as well. It was in the media for a couple days after 9/11, then fell off the radar.
CG, is there a way to investigate this without one of those “Bloomberg terminals”? Have any of your colleagues checked this out? Could you use another hobby?