topic by
carol
4/24/2002 (13:07) |
|
Briefing Paper
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.'
'...even the president of the United States
must sometimes have to stand naked...'
-Dylan
|
|