September 11 Prior Knowledge?

The tragic events of September 11 will be remembered for as long as this world exists. The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crash in Pennsylvania have been called such things as the “Attack on America,” “Day of Infamy 2001, ” and “Pearl Harbor 2.” It is obvious that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorists were the main perpetrators of this assault, but other questions still remain. Did the Federal Government, or anyone else for that matter, have any prior knowledge that an attack, especially one of this magnitude, was imminent? Prior to September 11, the CIA had issued a general terrorism warning. There is a jailed Navy spy who claimed he warned authorities of the upcoming attacks, and even the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned that “something would happen” twelve days before the attacks (Associated Press 1).

Then there are the groups which apparently knew in advance, but didn’t warn anyone, such as FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue Team, which arrived in NYC on Monday (Sept. 10); investors who bought tremendous amounts of American and United Airlines stock “put” options in the week prior to the attack (Turner 1), and even Israeli spies in the U.S. who may have known beforehand (Cameron 1). There are also reports that the U.S. and Russia were planning military strikes in Afghanistan as far back as June of 2001, months before the terrorist attacks. It is very obvious that someone in the U.S. Government had prior knowledge of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Delmart Vreeland claimed that he warned about the impending disaster. He is an ex-Navy intelligence officer who is in a Canadian jail fighting extradition to the U.S. on credit card fraud (Pron 1). He wrote out a warning a month before the attacks and handed it to the jail guards, who forwarded it to Canadian government officials. He also filed a sworn affidavit stating that he told the officials about potential terrorist attacks in New York and on the Pentagon, and even in Ottawa and in Toronto (Pron 1). The officials didn’t believe his warnings.

Is Delmart Vreeland’s story believable? Well, he also claims that Marc Bastien, an official in the Canadian Moscow embassy who died in December 2000, was murdered (Pron, 1). Initially, Bastien’s death was considered of natural causes (“Was Embassy Worker Poisoned” 1), but a recent report released by the Quebec Coroner’s Bureau showed that he had a mixture of alcohol and clozapine in his system (Towhey 1). Clozapine is a drug for treating severe schizophrenia, but he did not have a prescription for it or even a history of mental illness. The clozapine may have been slipped into his drink at a bar. This mixture “could have put [him] into a coma, followed by respiratory failure” (Towhey 1). Vsevoled Martemyanov, deputy chief of Moscow’s Dorogomilovsky district prosecutors office, said the case could be reclassified a murder if new evidence is found (Towhey 1). Vreeland said that Bastein was murdered, and now that it is apparent that he may have been poisoned, Vreeland may have been right all along. This also makes Vreeland more credible when he says that he warned of the upcoming terrorist attacks.

The Egyptian President warned the U.S. that an attack was coming before 9-11. President Hosni Mubarak claimed in an interview with the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir that he warned the U.S. twelve days before the attacks that “something would happen” (“Egypt Leader Says He Warned America” 1). He didn’t expect the attacks to be of the magnitude that they were, and he was shocked at them.

There were groups that apparently knew that the attacks were coming, but didn’t bother to alert anybody. There were sixty Israeli spies caught in the U.S. who may have known about the attacks but didn’t warn the authorities (Cameron 1). Some of these spies were suspected to be spying on a group of Arabs in California who are being investigated for connections to terrorist activity (Cameron 1). They may have known about any terrorism that was being planned by this group. The Israeli Embassy denied that Israel was conducting espionage in the U.S. (Cameron 1)

FEMA’s search and rescue team arrived in NYC the day before the attacks! In an interview with CBS news anchor Dan Rather, Tom Kennedy, a member of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Urban Search and Rescue Team accidentally said that his team arrived on Monday night (Sept. 10). In the interview, Kennedy tells Rather, “We’re currently one of the first teams that was deployed to support the City of New York in this disaster. We arrived late Monday night, and went right into action Tuesday morning” (Turner 1). Kennedy said that his team arrived on Monday night, and that they were “one of the first teams deployed.” Some people think that this means that he arrived on the Monday after the attacks. Turner says “Surely it did not take an entire additional week… …to send the Urban Search and Rescue Unit to help New York?” (1). If they had arrived on Monday, Sept 17, they could not claim to have been one of the first to be deployed. But this interview was conducted on Sept. 13 (Patru 1). This means that the ‘Monday’ that Kennedy is referring to is definitely not the 17th. It obviously has to mean the 10th, the day before the attacks. Since they arrived the night before the attacks, someone evidently knew that the attacks were imminent. These members of the Search and Rescue Team probably did not know in advance, but someone above them sure did.

There were many unusual stock transactions in the days just prior to the attacks in United Airlines, and American Airlines, the airlines whose planes were used in the attacks, and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co, and Merril Lynch & Co, both of which had large offices (22 floors each) in the World Trade Center (Turner 1). These stock transactions entailed the sale of excessive amounts of “put” options in stock of all four of these companies. A “Put” option is a contract giving the buyer the option to sell stocks back to the seller at a later date. If, after the contract period is up, the stock prices have fallen, the buyer can sell back the stocks, and the seller is obligated to buy them at a price set previously by the contract. Thus, the buyer can make a profit even if the stock prices fall (Ruppert, 1). A “call” option is just the opposite of a “put” option, where buyers anticipate a rise in stock prices. A “put” option is basically a bet that stock prices will go down, and a “call” option is a bet that stock prices will rise (Ruppert 1). Ruppert included documentation of the actual stock transactions which was originally published in an article by the Israeli Herzliyya International Policy Institute entitled “Black Tuesday: The World’s Largest Insider Trading Scam?” and dated Sept. 21. On September 10th, there were 4,516 American Airlines put options bought on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, but only 748 call options. On September 6 and 7, there were purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 396 call options during that same time period (Ruppert 1). Of these 4,744 UAL options, 2,313 have yet to be claimed (Berthelsen and Winokur 1). The owners of these options stand to make $2.5 million in profits, but they seem reluctant to cash in on them (Berthelsen and Winokur 1). They may have known of the attacks in advance, but had not thought that the stock market would be closed for four days after them, said a source, which spoke anonymously to the San Francisco Chronicle (Berthelsen and Winokur 1). The source speculated that these investors originally thought that the money could be collected without being noticed, but since the stock market closure exposed their transactions, they are afraid that they will be caught and prosecuted (Berthelsen and Winokur 1).

The Israeli Herzliyya International Policy Institute article mentions that the numbers of put options purchased in these airlines was more than six times what would be considered normal, and that no trading similar to this had occurred in the other airlines in the period just before September 11 (Ruppert 1). The article also listed the unusual stock transactions for two securities firms that had offices in the WTC. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. had 2,175 October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before the attacks. This would make for an average of 719 options bought per day, compared to the pre September 6 average of 27 put options per day! Merril Lynch & Co. had 12,215 put options bought in the four days prior to the attacks, making for an average of 3054 options per day. The pre-September 5 average is 252 put options per day! Assuming that most of these transactions were due to prior knowledge of the attacks, these investors would have made a total of about $1.2 million in Morgan Stanley, and about $5.5 million in Merril Lynch (Ruppert 1).

The U.S. planned a military strike on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden months before the September 11 attacks. An article on indiareacts.com dated June 26, 2001 entitled “India in anti-Taliban Military Plan” states that the U.S. and Russia were planning “limited military action” against the Taliban. The Taliban controlled ninety percent of Afghanistan at the time, but they banned the UN from the areas they controlled (“India in anti-Taliban Military Plan” 1). These actions were planned in case tough new sanctions against them couldn’t force them to change. The UN was planning military strikes against the Taliban because the Taliban wouldn’t let them into the areas of Afghanistan that they controlled. Why should the Taliban have to let the UN into Afghanistan if Afghanistan wasn’t a member of the UN? This makes no sense. Well, now the UN controls Afghanistan, so the UN got their wish. The U.S. was also demanding extradition of Osama bin Laden to face trial for the African embassy bombings. Bin Laden may have taken this threat seriously, and launched the September 11 attacks as “a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as U.S. threats” (Steele et al 1). Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by American officials that military action against the Taliban would commence before mid October (Arney 1). This just happens to be when the strikes actually transpired. Naik also stated that he doubted that Washington would drop its attack plan even if bin Laden was handed over immediately (Arney 1). They wouldn’t cancel their planned military strikes even if bin Laden was handed over. Perhaps this was more about the UN having control over Afghanistan than it was about stopping terrorists.

Were the September 11 attacks intended to provoke a war against the Taliban? Back in the ‘60s, the NSA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff developed plans to provoke a war with Cuba. They planned on staging airline shoot downs, sinking ships, staging a terrorist attack on Miami, Washington, and even members of the British Commonwealth, sinking boatloads of Cuban refugees, and starting uprisings in the U.S. using friendly Cubans posing as the Communists. This plan had the approval of all the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) (Bamford 82). The JCS and the NSA would blame it all on Cuba to justify their “military intervention.” This project was codenamed “Operation Northwoods” and its goal was to portray the Cuban government as being “rash and irresponsible” (Bamford 82) to provide “[j]ustification for U.S. [m]ilitary [i]ntervention in Cuba” (Joint Chiefs of Staff 1). They wanted the American public and world opinion to support them in their war against Cuba. These incidents would involve using Cubans who were “friendly” to the U.S., possibly Cuban refugees posing as the Communists Cubans.

Some of the actions recommended involved the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some of their recommended incidents included using “friendly” Cubans to stage an attack on the base; pose as saboteurs at the base, and possibly even burn planes on the base; start riots near the main gate of the base and pose as a militia group and storm the base. (Joint Chiefs of Staff 10,11) They even recommended sinking a ship near the harbor entrance: “we could blow up a ship and blame Cuba” (JCS 11). The JCS suggested creating an “incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack” (14) and even an event that will make it look like the Cuban Communists have shot down a civilian aircraft enroute from the U.S. to Venezuela, Jamaica, Guatemala, or Panama (13). The JCS even suggested staging ‘Communist’ Cuban terrorist atrocities in Miami and other Florida cities, and even in Washington. Some of these attacks would have involved “…exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement…” (12) They were planning on exploding bombs, then arresting supposed Cuban agents for the bombing, and then releasing fabricated documents proving Cuban involvement.

All of these incidents would be highly published for maximum exposure. The JCS even suggested having “mock funerals” for the supposed victims. The whole goal of Operation Northwoods was to lead the public to support their “ill-conceived” war on Cuba, and this publicly would have been highly needed. Operation Northwoods was never commenced, but that doesn’t mean that such corrupt ideas have never been used since. The U.S. was planning military strikes against Afghanistan and the Taliban months before the September 11 attacks. If the attacks had not had occurred would the American public have supported them?

Did the United States Government know about the September 11th terrorist attacks before they came to pass? They were warned by multiple sources that attacks were possible. They were even planning the removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan before the attacks. There should be a full investigation of this apparent pre-knowledge of the attacks. Everyone who claims that they knew in advance should be questioned and investigated. The investors involved in the unusual stock transactions and whoever was responsible for FEMA’s early arrival should be investigated and the culprits prosecuted and imprisoned and possibly executed if necessary, even if they are top government officials. No one who is guilty should get away, no matter who they are. We are supposedly engaged in a “war on terrorism,” and we should first deal with the terrorists at home. Anyone who profits in any way from their pre-knowledge of terrorist activity is just as bad as the terrorists themselves.