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The Case for Bush Administration
Advance Knowledge of 9-11 Attacks
by Michael C. Ruppert
© COPYRIGHT 2002, Michael C. Ruppert and FTW
Publications, www.copvcia.com all rights reserved. May be reprinted ,
distributed or posted on web sites for non-profit purposes only.]
April 22, 2002, 1200 PDT (FTW) -- A dispassionate
examination of existing reliable, open-source evidence on advance warnings
of the Sept. 11 attacks provides strong and sustainable grounds to
conclude the Bush Administration was in possession of sufficient advance
intelligence to have prevented the attacks, had it wished to do so. With a
known intelligence budget of approximately $30 billion, it must be assumed
there are classified files that only add to the weight of the available
data presented here. Is it reasonable to assume that what is presented
here is the only intelligence the U.S. possessed?
This article will focus on four primary areas where the
U.S. had information that forewarned of the attacks in sufficient detail
to have prompted their prevention. Those areas are: Documented warnings
received by the United States Government (USG) from foreign intelligence
services; Obvious and large scale insider stock trading in the days before
the attacks; Known intelligence successes achieved by the USG in its
penetrations of Al Qaeda; and, the case of Delmart "Mike"
Vreeland, a U.S. Naval intelligence officer jailed in Canada at the
request of U.S. authorities, who -- with his attorneys -- spent months
attempting to warn USG and Canadian intelligence officials of the pending
attacks, only to be rebuffed and ignored.
This article will not focus on a number of well-known
and documented instances where the Bush Administration actively interfered
with or curtailed investigations into Al Qaeda-linked groups that could
have provided even more intelligence. Included in this category are
reports by the BBC's Gregg Palast, the French book "The Forbidden
Truth," and a lawsuit/OPR complaint filed by an active FBI agent
alleging investigations that could have prevented the attacks were
derailed by superiors, in some cases on orders from the White House.
WARNINGS FROM FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
This section focuses on known advance warnings received
by the U.S. government from foreign intelligence services that proved to
be specific enough to have identified the date (within one week), method,
targets, and perpetrators of the attacks. It will not include warnings
issued to the USG that could be considered vague or non-specific. The
latter includes documented warnings sent by the governments of Egypt and
Israel. However, in light of the specific warnings, these additional
warnings add greater weight to the argument that the Administration was in
possession of sufficient information to have prevented the attacks.
As reported in the respected German daily Frankfurter
Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Sept. 14, 2001 the German intelligence service,
the BND, warned both the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists
were "planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to
attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture." The story
specifically referred to an electronic eavesdropping system known as
Echelon, wherein a number of countries tap cell phone and electronic
communications in partner countries and then pool the information. The BND
warnings were also passed to the United Kingdom.
No known denial by the BND of the accuracy of this
story exists, and the FAZ story indicates that the information was
received directly from BND sources.
According to a Sept. 14 report in the Internet newswire
online.de, German police, monitoring the phone calls of a jailed Iranian
man, learned the man was telephoning USG intelligence agencies in summer
2001 to warn of an imminent attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) in the
week of Sept. 9. German officials confirmed the calls to the USG for the
story but refused to discuss additional details.
In August 2000 French intelligence sources confirmed a
man recently arrested in Boston by the FBI was an Islamic militant and a
key member of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. The FBI knew the man had
been taking flying lessons at the time of his arrest and was in possession
of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals, as
reported by Reuters on Sept. 13.
According to a story in Izveztia on Sept. 12, Russian
intelligence warned the USG that as many as 25 suicide pilots were
training for missions involving the crashing of airliners into important
targets.
In an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, Russian President
Vladimir Putin stated that he had ordered Russian intelligence to warn the
USG "in the strongest possible terms" of imminent assaults on
airports and government buildings before the attacks on Sept. 11.
As reported by CNN's Daniel Seberg on Sept. 28,
Newsbytes' Brian McWilliams on Sept. 27 and the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz,
Odigo, the Israeli instant messaging company located in Herzliyya, Israel,
received telephone calls stating that attacks on the WTC were imminent.
The calls came less than two hours before the first plane hit the WTC.
This information was immediately forwarded to Israeli and U.S.
intelligence.
Conclusion: From just these six press stories, then,
the USG had received credible advance warnings, some from heads of state,
that commercial aircraft would be hijacked by as many as 25 suicide pilots
at airports, with Boston a strong candidate, during the week of Sept. 9.
The call to Odigo would have signaled the exact day.
No known preventive measures were taken.
INSIDER TRADING
The documented pre-Sept. 11 insider trading that
occurred before the attacks involved only companies hit hard by the
attacks. They include United Airlines, American Airlines, Morgan Stanley,
Merrill-Lynch, Axa Reinsurance, Marsh & McLennan, Munich Reinsurance,
Swiss Reinsurance, and Citigroup.
In order to argue that the massive and well-documented
insider trading that occurred in at least seven countries immediately
before the attacks of Sept. 11 did not serve as a warning to intelligence
agencies, then it is necessary to argue that no one was aware of the
trades as they were occurring, and that intelligence and law enforcement
agencies of most industrialized nations do not monitor stock trades in
real time to warn of impending attacks. Both assertions are false. Both
assertions would also ignore the fact that the current executive vice
president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for enforcement is David
Doherty, a retired CIA general counsel. And also ignored is the fact that
the trading in United Airlines stock -- one of the most glaring clues --
was placed through the firm Deutschebank/Alex Brown, which was headed
until 1998 by the man who is now the executive director of the CIA, A.B.
"Buzzy" Krongard.
One wonders if it was a coincidence then, that Mayo
Shattuck III, the head of the Alex Brown unit of Deutschebank -- which had
its offices in the WTC -- suddenly resigned from a $30 million, three-year
contract on Sept. 12, as reported by the New York Times and other papers.
The American exchanges that handle these trades,
primarily the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE) and the NYSE, know
on a daily basis what levels of put options are purchased. "Put
options" are highly leveraged bets, tying up blocks of stock, that a
given stock's share price will fall dramatically. To quote 60 Minutes from
Sept. 19, "Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the
attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock
options market."
It is hard to believe that they missed:
- A jump in UAL put options 90 times (not 90
percent) above normal between Sept. 6 and Sept.10, and 285 times higher
than average on the Thursday before the attack– [CBS News, Sept. 26]
- A jump in American Airlines put options 60 times
(not 60 percent) above normal on the day before the attacks. [CBS News,
Sept. 26]
- No similar trading occurred on any other
airlines. [Bloomberg Business Report, the Institute for Counterterrorism
(ICT), Herzliyya, Israel citing data from the CBOE]
- Morgan Stanley saw, between Sept. 7 and Sept.10,
an increase of 27 times (not 27 percent) in the purchase of put options
on its shares. [ICT Report, Mechanics of Possible Bin-Laden Insider
Trading Scam, Sept. 21, citing data from the CBOE].
- Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than 12 times
the normal level of put options in the four trading days before the
attacks. [Ibid]
These trades were certainly noticed after the
attacks.
"This could very well be insider trading at the
worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire
life…This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the
history of mankind if it was a coincidence," said Dylan Ratigan of
Bloomberg Business News, interviewed on Good Morning Texas on Sept. 20.
"'I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever
seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options
markets,' said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research, as quoted
in the San Francisco Chronicle," reported the Montreal Gazette on
Sept. 19. The paper also wrote, "Agence France Presse, on Sept. 22,
reported, ‘And Germany's Bundesbank chief, Ernst Weltke, said on the
sidelines of the meeting that a report of the investigation showed
"bizarre" fiscal transactions prior to the attacks that could
not have been chalked up to coincidence.
"Weltke said the transactions, ‘could not have
been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge,' particularly
heavy trading in oil and gold futures."
ABC World News reported on Sept. 20, "Jonathan
Winer, an ABC News consultant said, ‘it's absolutely unprecedented to
see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan, to the
U.S., to North America, to Europe."
How much money was involved? Andreas von Bulow, a
former member of the German Parliament responsible for oversight of
Germany's intelligence services estimated the worldwide amount at $15
billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13. Other experts have
estimated the amount at $12 billion. CBS News gave a conservative estimate
of $100 million.
Not a single U.S. or foreign investigative agency has
announced any arrests or developments in the investigation of these
trades, the most telling evidence of foreknowledge of the attacks. This,
in spite of the fact that former Security and Exchange Commission
enforcement chief William McLucas told Bloomberg News that regulators
would "certainly be able to track down every trade."
What is striking is that a National Public Radio report
on Oct. 16 reported Britain's Financial Services Authority had cleared bin
Laden and his henchmen of insider trading. If not bin Laden, then who else
had advance knowledge? Who else had certainty that the attacks would
succeed to give them confidence to make millions of dollars in stock
purchases?
It has been standard and established USG policy to be
alert and responsive to anything even remotely resembling an attack on
U.S. companies and/or the economy. The word "remote" does not
apply here. The possible claim by the Bush Administration that, ‘Gee, we
just happened to miss this,' becomes even more implausible when
considering the lengths intelligence agencies go to in order to track
stock trades.
Note that the Israeli Institute for Counter-Terrorism
was the first entity to release a detailed report on the insider trading.
That alone is prima facie evidence of a direct relationship between the
financial markets and terrorist investigations.
CIA and the Markets
We can thank Fox News on Oct. 16 for breaking post 9-11
stories disclosing the use of sophisticated PROMIS software by the FBI and
the Justice Department. A multitude of court records and investigative
reports have established not only the reality, but the versatility of a
program initially designed to incorporate data from a variety of data
bases in different languages into one readable format. PROMIS has since
been refined to include artificial intelligence and "back doors"
inserted by intelligence agencies to allow for surreptitious retrieval
and/or removal and alteration of data.
The Fox stories clearly confirmed, especially when
added to stories from last summer by the Washington Times which were based
on interviews with Justice Department officials, that PROMIS was used to
monitor banking and financial transactions in a virtual real-time
environment.
This writer has written extensively on the software.
More information can be found on the Web site at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/
ww3/index.html.
However, one point is critical to this report. In the
Autumn of 2000 I was visited in Los Angeles by two members of the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) national security staff. They were
conducting a major investigation inside the U.S. to determine whether or
not the RCMP's version of the software had been compromised. During
discussions with the Mounties, I confirmed several times that the software
was used to monitor stock trades in real time. A subsequent investigation
led me to contact several people in Canada who had been interviewed in the
same investigation. They were stockbrokers.
In a taped panel discussion, which aired March 14 on
Canada's Vision-TV, I faced a panel of three Canadian experts on the issue
of U.S. foreknowledge of, and possible complicity in, the 9-11 attacks.
Among them was Ron Atkey, former Canadian Solicitor-General and the former
parliamentary head of the committee charged with oversight of Canada's
military and intelligence operations. Over the course of the program I
made specific statements, relying not only on the RCMP interactions but
also on previous investigations, in which it was documented that
intelligence services track stock trades in real time. On camera, I
produced the business cards of the two RCMP agents. Atkey, who had not
hesitated to challenge me on other points during the show, went silent.
INTELLIGENCE SUCCESSES
Four basic intelligence successes need to be
acknowledged here. These admitted successes, while not addressing any
other still secret penetrations of the Al Qaeda network, further diminish
any Bush Administration assertion that it did not know of the attacks.
On Feb. 13 United Press International terrorism
correspondent Richard Sale, while covering a Manhattan trial of one of
Osama bin Laden's followers, reported that the National Security Agency
had broken bin Laden's encrypted communications. Even if that prompted an
immediate change in bin Laden's methods of communication, just six months
before the attacks, the administration has consistently maintained -- and
military and covert experience dictates -- that the attacks were planned
for at least several years.
The FAZ story indicates that the secret eavesdropping
program Echelon had been successful in securing details of the pending
attacks. Echelon employs highly sophisticated computer programs capable of
both voice and word recognition to filter billions of telephone
conversations and locate specific targets. Assuming, as some sources
indicate, Al Qaeda stopped using encrypted communications after it was
known that their system was compromised, why was the NSA not able to pick
up any cell phone calls or e-mails? Mohammed Atta and other alleged
hijackers were known to have used cell phones. The FAZ story establishes
that as late as June, Al Qaeda operatives were being tracked in this
manner.
In the trial of a former Deutschebank executive Kevin
Ingram, who pled guilty to laundering drug money to finance terrorist
operations linked to Al Qaeda just two weeks before the 9-11 attacks,
indications surfaced that the Justice Department had penetrated the
terrorists' financial networks. A Nov. 16 Associated Press story by
Catherine Wilson stated, "Numerous promised wire transfers never
arrived, but there were discussions of foreign bankers taking payoffs to
move the money to purchase weapons into the United States, said prosecutor
Rolando Garcia."
Two questions are begged but unanswered. How were the
wire transfers blocked and how was the Justice Department able to monitor
the money flows without alerting either the bankers or the suspects?
Finally, as reported by the German paper Die Welt on
Dec. 6 and by Agence France Presse on Dec. 7, Western intelligence
services, including the CIA, learned after arrests in the Philippines,
that Al Qaeda operatives had planned to crash commercial airliners into
the WTC. Details of the plan, as reported by a number of American press
outlets, were found on a computer seized during the arrests. The plan was
called "operation Bojinka."
Details of the plot were disclosed publicly in 1997 in
the New York trial of Ramsi Youssef for his involvement in the 1993 WTC
bombing.
DELMART "MIKE" VREELAND
"I believe that, from the information I have
seen, Mike Vreeland tried to pass information to the Canadian government
that should have been passed to the U.S. government. That information had
to do with the attacks of Sept. 11. Whatever other attempts were made by
Vreeland and his attorneys to alert U.S. and Canadian officials of the
attacks, it is clear that he did pass information about the pending
attacks to his guards in August. I am willing to go to the Secretary of
the Navy to determine whether or not he was actually a Navy officer.
"I know that there have been other U.S.
citizens with a similar background used on missions similar to what has
been alleged by Vreeland. This man fits a pattern. I would like for the
Secret Service to put him on a polygraph." -- Mike Osborne, a
veteran former CIA case officer with 26 years of experience in
counter-terrorism.
With a court record now estimated to approach 10,000
pages, the case of Delmart "Mike" Vreeland is starting to
attract worldwide attention. Vreeland, with a growing amount of evidence
admitted into court record in Toronto, Canada, claims to be a former U.S.
Naval lieutenant assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence. He was
jailed in Canada -- at the request of U.S. authorities -- in December 2000
after returning from Moscow.
Although Canadian authorities initially alleged vague
fraud charges against him and also held him on an extradition warrant
alleging credit card fraud in Michigan, the actual motive for his arrest
now seems to be something quite different. All Canadian charges against
Vreeland were dropped this March and he has been granted political refugee
status in Canada until the extradition issues are resolved.
Vreeland's position is that he returned from Russia to
meet with a Canadian and a Russian intelligence operative, and had
intended to hand over a sealed pouch containing intelligence documents.
When the handoff was compromised and the Canadian did not show for the
Toronto meet, Vreeland opened the pouch and looked at some of the
documents. Those documents, which he later had translated, gave specific
warnings of the pending WTC attacks that were to take place nine months
later. Again, on its face, since these documents were in a sealed
intelligence pouch, this indicates that intelligence operatives were aware
of the contents because they had placed them there originally.
According to both Vreeland and his lawyers, as reported
in numerous interviews with this writer and other members of the FTW
staff, immediately after his arrest Vreeland began making urgent attempts
to alert both Canadian and U.S. intelligence officials of the coming
danger.
After eight months of unsuccessful attempts to have
either Canadian or U.S. intelligence services debrief him, Vreeland wrote
a desperate, last-ditch warning in August. Through means he will not
disclose, he acquired two high-tech Pilot water-based pens with light blue
ink and used them to write the letter. The only pens permitted by Canadian
jail authorities were oil-based, dark blue Bic pens.
Immediately after writing the letter, Vreeland notified
his jailers that he had pens which might be considered contraband. A Sept.
17 letter from the Ministry of Correctional Services was entered as
Exhibit "M" into court records on Oct. 7, along with Vreeland's
warning letter which had been opened on Sept. 14 and entered as Exhibit
"N." The letter states, "On August 13, 2001 inmate
Vreeland's corridor #2 was searched and as far as we know 2 blue ink pens
were removed from his cell because they were considered contraband. There
is no written record of them being placed in his personal property. He did
submit a request to have them returned to him on August 14, 2001, but was
denied."
Since the ink on the warning letter, if tested, will
match the ink in the confiscated pens, there can be no doubt that the
letter was written a month before the attacks.
In an interview with this writer published on April 4,
Vreeland clearly stated his belief that Al Qaeda operations had been
completely penetrated by U.S. intelligence services. That belief is
supported by a statement in his warning letter.
The statement, following a list of potential targets
that included the WTC, the Pentagon and the White House said, "Let
one happen, stop the rest." Such a statement could only imply
complete penetration or compromise of the terrorist cells perpetrating the
attacks.
Compelling evidence continues to grow that Vreeland
was, in fact, a U.S. Navy officer. On Jan. 10 from open court with a court
reporter recording the conversation, his attorneys placed a speaker-phone
call to the Pentagon. A Pentagon operator, after checking a back-up
military database, confirmed Vreeland was a U.S. Navy officer and provided
an office listing and a telephone number for his office. The primary
database had been disabled, according to Vreeland, on 9-11. In addition,
redacted and incomplete military records provided by the Pentagon to the
Canadian courts indicate Vreeland had a service record of more than 1,200
pages.
This is difficult to reconcile with the U.S. Navy's
assertion that Vreeland was discharged as a Seaman Recruit after four
months of unsatisfactory service in 1986.
No press entity has covered the Vreeland case more than
FTW. This writer has traveled twice to Toronto, sat in on
court proceedings, and retained the services of a Canadian correspondent
to cover the case. I have interviewed Vreeland personally and conducted
numerous interviews with his attorneys. Greta Knutzen, FTW's
Canadian correspondent, has also interviewed Vreeland and his attorneys,
as well as Vreeland's mother. Knutzen has attended every court proceeding
since January, 2002. All of our previous reporting on the case can be
located on the Internet at www.copvcia.com.
Mike Vreeland believes that if he is successfully
extradited to the U.S., he will be assassinated. Previous press stories
concerning Vreeland's criminal past and a criminal arrest record fail to
account for the fact that, as an undercover operative who targeted
organized crime and terrorist organizations, a criminal record would have
been necessary to give him credibility with organizations that have
previously demonstrated capabilities to retrieve law enforcement records.
They also fail to account for an Oct. 2, 1986 Los Angeles Times story that
lists Vreeland as a non-criminal witness to a major cocaine bust carried
out by LAPD investigators known to have contacts with USG intelligence
services.
There is much about Vreeland's past that is
objectionable, questionable, or both. But even in a worst-case scenario,
nothing in his past explains how he was able to write a detailed warning
of the attacks before they occurred, and why the intelligence services of
both Canada and the U.S. ignored attempts to warn them while both Vreeland
and his attorneys were banging down their doors.
CONCLUSION
There is clear and substantial evidence to suggest that
the Bush Administration had sufficient foreknowledge of the attacks of
Sept. 11 to have prevented them. Rather than viewing each of the four
listed areas as a separate piece of evidence, they should be considered as
a body, in the exact same way exhibits presented to a jury in a criminal
trial are viewed as a body. By viewing the evidence in this manner, an
unavoidable conclusion is reached -- the USG knew 25 suicide hijackers
during the week of Sept. 9 were going to use United and American airlines
commercial planes, some of them likely originating in Boston, to attack
the WTC and the Pentagon. A multitude of press stories and intelligence
reports indicate the WTC would have been the primary target.
Given the financial commitments made during insider
trading activity that occurred immediately before the attacks involving
businesses that were directly damaged by the attacks, the threats had
clearly moved from the realm of speculation to reality. Why else would
mysterious investors have risked millions of dollars to purchase the put
options? There is compelling evidence to suggest these trades were noted
by the CIA and other USG entities.
Recently, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., has been widely
criticized in the mainstream press for raising the need for a
Congressional investigation to answer some of these obvious questions.
This, in spite of the fact that popular reaction indicates a different
sentiment. An opinion poll, conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
just a day after McKinney's remarks received wide public attention in a
Washington Post story dated April 12, was pulled after poll numbers showed
that 51 percent of the respondents agreed with McKinney.
The people seem to recognize and agree with the
opinion of former CIA officer Mike Osborne who says, "I think that
the U.S. government needs to get behind McKinney's questions because her
agenda is truth and justice, and nothing else."
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