Was There Prior Knowledge of the 9/11 Attacks?

Media survey

by Rodger Herbst

Congressional attention to the issue of "prior knowledge" of the terrorist attacks of Sept 11 2001 picked up rapidly in mid-May, as the result of the disclosure that President Bush had received a classified security briefing on possible hijacking of American airplanes.

In its mid-May revelations, the mainstream media noted that French-Morocan Zacarias Moussaoui was taken into custody in Minnesota as a result of his behavior at flight school; in Arizona, an FBI agent warned that authorities should be on the lookout for al-Qaida-trained operatives using US flight schools; in San Diego two bin Laden associates showed up on a terrorist watch list, and later were among those terrorists crashing airplanes on 9/11.

Also mentioned was an attempted hijacking of a Philippine aircraft in 1995. The attempt was foiled by Philippine police. Information from their investigation was relayed by Philippine authorities to US intelligence, resulting in a public (unclassified) report commissioned by the National Intelligence Council, prepared by the Library of Congress, titled "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism." The report included a picture of the World Trade Center towers and warned the CIA that bin Laden "most likely will retaliate in a spectacular way" for US missile strikes a year earlier on al-Qaida compounds. "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the analysis concluded.

The signs were there, said the mainstream media, but poor communication, coordination, and attention "may have hindered the ability of any one individual or agency to determine their collective significance" (Seattle Times May 17).

Then things began to heat up a bit. On May 23, FBI Director Robert F. Mueller received a 13-page letter from a frustrated FBI agent, Coleen Rowley, an attorney in the Minnesota office that arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001. The letter charged that FBI Headquarters in DC placed roadblocks in the way of the investigation of Moussaoui. Rowley's subsequent testimony on June 6 was conveniently overshadowed by the Bush administration's latest diversion, the announcement of a new Department of Homeland Security on the same day.

But even the mainstream media seems to be waking up. As Frank Rich notes in his June 8 New York Times editorial, "On Thursday morning, just hours before FBI agent Coleen Rowley began to testify about why that blueprint was ignored, the administration announced the creation of yet another new scheme to fix everything the White House had previously claimed to be already on the mend. Is the new Department of Homeland Security an antidote to a broken system? Or is it merely a hastily contrived antidote to Rowley's TV debut, knocking her out of the evening-news lead, lest she wreak damage on [the] Bush administration...?"

European reporting into the matter has long been just as damning as Coleen Rowley's testimony. Months earlier, BBC journalist Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com) concluded that George W. Bush had shut down the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies' investigations into terror networks prior to 9/11, leaving America wide open to the attacks. In an interview appearing on GNN (Guerrilla News Network) Palast said: "We obtained documents from inside the FBI showing that investigations had been shut down on the bin Laden family, the royal family of Saudi Arabia--and that is big because there are 20,000 princes in the royal family--and their connections to the financing of terrorism. There was... one exception. The FBI, the CIA and all the rest of the agencies are allowed to investigate Osama, the so-called black sheep of the family. But what we were finding was that there was an awful lot of gray sheep in this family...."

Asked in the interview why such a prohibition may have been put into place, Palast suggested that the relationship between the Bush and Bin Laden families is cemented by joint business ventures, and the bin Laden family are investors in the Carlyle Group. (www.guerrillanews.com/counter_intelligence/233.html) John O'Neill, a frustrated FBI agent, reached a conclusion similar to that of Palast. He confided in French investigative author Jean-Charles Brisard, complaining that "every answer, every key to dismantling the Osama bin Laden organizations are in Saudi Arabia." O'Neill's frustration about the shutdown of intelligence-gathering on Saudi Arabia was a contributing factor in his decision to retire. Fatefully, he accepted the position of security director of the World Trade Center, and died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Brisard, together with Guillaume Dasquie wrote the book Ben Laden, La Verite Interdite (Bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth), which tells O'Neill's story. The book advances the theory that George Bush's oil-bred administration was worried about alienating Saudi Arabia, and that one of the US government's goals was to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to tap oil fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. (see also New York magazine; "O'Neill Versus Osama," Dec 17 2001, www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id= 5513&position=3)

Alternative and foreign media sources, primarily on the Internet, present a wide range of information of varying quality on prior knowledge. One of the most comprehensive sources of information is The Prior Knowledge Archive: www.propagandamatrix.com/archiveprior_knowledge.html, which contains both mainstream and alternative news media items.

Alternative and foreign news media investigations are typically dismissed by the American mainstream as "conspiracy theories." Two representative works from this group, which are thoughtfully written, approach the question of prior knowledge from different perspectives: Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa Center for Research on Globalisation (CRG), Montreal, considers the activities of Pakistan and American intelligence operations in the days immediately before and after the 9/11 attacks. His study, posted at www.globalresearch.ca on November 2 is titled "The Role of Pakistan's Military Intelligence (ISI) in the September 11 Attacks." The study argues that the Pakistan government may have colluded with entities in the Bush administration to stage the attack for a pretext to declaring war on Afghanistan.

Michael C. Ruppert in "The Case for Bush Administration Advance Knowledge of 9/11 Attacks" (FTW Publications, www.copvcia.com ) considers information presumably available to American Intelligence. It focuses on "four primary areas where the US had information that forewarned of the attacks in sufficient detail to have prompted their prevention. Those areas are: documented warnings received by the US 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 US Naval intelligence officer jailed in Canada at the request of US authorities."

Ruppert is a former LAPD narcotics investigator who discovered CIA drug trafficking in 1977.

Although the Ruppert report makes a number of interesting observations, perhaps its greatest value is in supplying an accumulation of verifiable documentation for the evidence of insider trading. Numerous reports appeared in the days following the 9/11 attack of unusual trading in "put" options. The put option is variously described in the media as "betting the stock price will fall," or as "raising in value when stock prices fall."

For example, CBS online news archives for Sept. 26 noted a surge before the attack involving "put" shares. With American Airlines, the day before the attack the number of put options was 60 times the daily average. For United, (UAL) it was 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack.

William McLucas, former Securities and Exchange Commission Enforcement Director was quoted on CBS online: "It's a horrific notion to conceive of, but it's not at all out of the question. It seems like something we'd read in a Ludlum novel and unfortunately, I think it may well have taken place ".

US authorities aren't yet saying where the trail is leading. But officials in Germany have gone public saying they are now certain that people connected to the terrorists were involved in shady trades there: "We have found movements that could not have been accidental in nature," said Ernst Welteke, the head of Germany's central bank ( www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/26 archive/312663.shtml). The September 19 Montreale Gazette noted Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, Japan and Hong Kong China regulators were probing futures trade irregularities.

An article appeared in Reuters Dec. 19, noting that the German data retrieval company Convar was working to retrieve data from hard drives recovered from the WTC rubble. Company officials noted a high data recovery rate from the disks, and noted possible illegal transactions exceeding $100 million.

One notes in the media reports of the first few months after 9/11 grave determination on the part of financial regulators to pursue such irregularities, yet nothing has come of the insider trading issue. This in spite of the fact that analysts believe the trades can be tracked down. "We can directly work backwards from a trade on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The trader is linked to a brokerage firm. The brokerage firm received the order to buy that 'put' option from either someone within a brokerage firm speculating, or from one of the customers," said Randall Dodd of the Economic Strategy Institute. ( www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/19/evening news/main311834.shtml)

As alternative and foreign inquiry continues, we begin to descend into the nether regions of American government; deeper into "conspiracy theory"; into the realm of the CIA and its connections with high finance, drugs, money laundering and its own terrorist operations. But we will stop here. The conclusion of this survey is simply that a number of significant answers are not being addressed in the current 9/11 investigations. These questions extend also to air defense and airport security failures; the anthrax attacks; encroachment on "guaranteed" Constitutional rights; and most importantly, accountability.

These questions cannot be fully addressed until the mainstream media investigates them. Regrettably, CSPAN backed out of coming to a press conference to be held at the Washington Press Club on June 10. Organized by concerned citizens, this event was intended to call attention to the "unanswered questions" of 9/11. Instead, CSPAN gave coverage that day to the administration's new plans for the Department of Homeland Security.

The American people are not fools. Legitimate questions will not go away until they are adequately answered. The problem is, will the mainstream media simply become part of the ongoing Bush machinery of secrecy, diversion, and obfuscation?