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.”
©
COPYRIGHT 2002, FTW Publications,
www.copvcia.com
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