9/11 at WTC: Somebody Made a Killing

Yankee Doodle came to Wall Street
Investigating terror;
Checked the books, surprised to see:
The killers made an error!

Yankee Doodle, keep it up!
Yankee Doodle dandy...
Mind the theory and the facts,
And with the truth be handy!

From Revealing 9-11 Stock Trades Could Expose The Terrorist Masterminds, by Christopher Bollyn, American Free Press, April 2004; www.globalresearch.ca 18 December 2004. The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BOL412B.html.

Manipulators with inside information made huge profits on sophisticated trades as the stocks of the airline and insurance companies plummeted in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 disaster. The inside information was so precise that experts have concluded that it could have only come from those who masterminded the terror attacks.

This money trail is the closest investigators have come to “a smoking gun” and could lead directly to those who planned the attacks. But with the notable exception of Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D.-Ga.), Congress has yet to demand a thorough and open investigation.

In the days following the terror attacks, suspicious and unusual stock trading activity indicated that people used inside information to make huge profits. The money made from the trades done with apparent inside information has been estimated at up to $15 billion worldwide.

No wonder why Bin Laden was so patient in preparing 9/11. It was more than just a matter of having his hijackers steal some planes; somebody had to coordinate things with the stockbrokers, too.

The American exchanges that handle options and derivatives trades, primarily the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE) and the NYSE [New York Stock Exchange], know on a daily basis what levels of put options are purchased.

“Put options” are highly leveraged bets that a given stock’s share price will fall.

Conspicuous spikes

Among the most conspicuous spikes in trading activity were the huge increases in “put options” placed on the two airlines involved in the hijackings of Sept. 11, United Airlines (UAL) and American Airlines.

There was a 9,000 percent jump in United Air Lines (UAL) put options between Sept. 6 and Sept. 10, with a huge spike 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack.

American Airlines saw a 6,000 percent jump in put options above normal the day before the attacks. However, there was no similar trading activity on any other airlines, according to market reports.

Interesting how those two airlines were singled out as ones whose stock was about to go down.

The brokerage houses that had offices in the WTC, Morgan Stanley and Merrill-Lynch, saw 27-fold and 12-fold increases in the purchases of put options on their respective shares between Sept. 7 and Sept. 10.

“The afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market,” the CBS program 60 Minutes reported on Sept. 19. As investigator Michael C. Ruppert of From the Wilderness, an Internet news site, says: “These trades were certainly noticed after the attacks.”

Stock brokerage business was good all of a sudden. Investments were made betting on not just which airlines would make unscheduled flight plan deviations, but where they would divert to.

Peter Henschel, director of Convar, said: “not only the volume, but the size of the transactions was far higher than usual for a day like that.”

Henschel told AFP that “up to the last moment,” between the time that the first tower was hit until the second tower collapsed, there was an “unusual” increase in trading volume of “between 5 and 10 times the normal volume.”

One data recovery expert, Richard Wagner, has estimated that more than $100 million in illegal transactions appeared to have rushed through the WTC computers before and during the disaster.

Some brokerages found themselves very busy, much busier than others; too busy, perhaps, for their brokers to think about the ramifications of the trades they were having to make.

And somebody made sure those brokers didn't live long enough for that to change.

But that somebody didn't bet on new laser technology that could harvest even deleted information from hard discs that had been physically damaged.

Experts from the Convar Company in Pirmasens, Germany, are using their “blue laser scanning” technology to retrieve data from the damaged computers of banks, telecommunication companies, and other tenants from the WTC. This technology can even retrieve the original data from hard discs that have been deleted and written over five times.

(See also: Computer disk drives from WTC could yield clues; The myth of WTC.)

And, consequently, somebody's trail isn't as well covered as somebody might have hoped.

No U.S. or foreign agency has announced arrests or developments in the investigation of these trades, the most telling evidence of foreknowledge, Ruppert wrote April 22. The former chief of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, William Mc Lucas, said regulators would “certainly be able to track down every trade, where the trade cleared, where the trade was directed from.”

Thus far, this is old news. The new news will follow shortly....