The Case for Bush Administration:
Advance Knowledge of 911 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 recent ly
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 athttp://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 atwww.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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