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What Did Our Government Know About 9/11? Interview by Bruce David and Dan Kapelovitz According to investigator Michael Ruppert, millions—if not billions—of dollars were made from insider trading by people who knew what was going to occur on September 11, 2001. More disturbingly, Ruppert accuses factions of our own government of allowing the terrorist attacks to succeed.  Michael Ruppert is a former LAPD narcotics
investigator who resigned in 1978 after attempting to expose CIA drug trafficking. Since then, Ruppert has published and edited From the Wilderness (www.FromTheWilderness.com), a newsletter that sheds light on government corruption and counts 35 members of the U.S. Congress among its subscribers. Ruppert’s video, The Truth and Lies of 9-11, and his latest book, Crossing the Rubicon: America’s Descent Into Fascism at the End of the Age of Oil, present compelling evidence (derived from government documents, official statements and reliable news organizations) of CIA foreknowledge and insider trading related to 9/11. Many of Ruppert’s findings are extremely con-troversial and, in some cases, even hard to believe. However, we feel it is important to give our readers this information, especially given the fact that the Bush Administration is thwarting investigations into the events surrounding America’s darkest day. * * * HUSTLER: The story you tell concerning 9/11 and insider trading is deeply disturbing. RUPPERT: The put options are one of the most glaring anomalies of everything that stands out about 9/11. HUSTLER: Explain exactly what put options are. RUPPERT: They’re basically a bet that the price of a given stock is going to fall dramatically. Let’s say that I buy a put option to sell United Airlines at $100 a share, and the stock goes down to $25 a share tomorrow. I can go out and buy the stock at $25 a share, exercise the put option, and the person holding the other end of the put option is required to pay me $100 a share. I can make enormous amounts of money if I know that the stock price is going to fall. HUSTLER: So if people were aware of what was going to happen on 9/11, there was an easy way for them to make some quick money on the stock market? RUPPERT: Yes. It happened not only in the U.S. and not only on UAL [United Airlines]; it happened all over the world. The press reports, not only from the United States, but especially from Germany, England and Japan, indicated that the insider trading pre-9/11 was worldwide. Estimates from Europe have said that as many as hundreds of billions of dollars could have been made. Of course, all the results of those investigations are secret. HUSTLER: Reliable news organizations, at first, reported this story, but they dropped it. RUPPERT: CBS was saying there was an increase in UAL put options. I think it was 285 times—not percent, but 285 times—above normal and that the imbalances were absolutely unmistakable. CBS News said the trades were setting off alarm bells the day before the attacks. HUSTLER: People who are critical of your claims contend that there will be normal spikes in put options from time to time. RUPPERT: The true key is not just the number of put options but also the drastic imbalance between puts and calls. A call is just the reverse. A call’s a bet that the stock price is going to rise. It’s when you see these huge imbalances that you know there is insider trading. In other research I have done over the years, I document clearly that all major intelligence services always track stock trades in real time for just such reasons, to warn of economic or other kinds of attacks. HUSTLER: Based on this research, we can be pretty certain that there were people all around the planet who knew what was going to happen on September 11. RUPPERT: Right. HUSTLER: Isn’t it true that there’s $2 million unclaimed by someone who put in put options? RUPPERT: It was about $2 1/2 million, and that’s only one of the many put options made on UAL that went unclaimed. HUSTLER: Are they still unclaimed? RUPPERT: That I don’t know. Again, all this information was locked up tighter than a drum right after 9/11. What really shut up all the investigations was a story that I wrote right after 9/11, in which I disclosed that most of the UAL put options had been purchased through the Alex. Brown unit of Deutsche Bank, which had been headed, until 1998, by a guy named A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard. Today, Krongard is the executive director—that’s the number three guy—at the CIA. As soon as I broke that story, everything around the planet went dead-silent about the insider trading. HUSTLER: So there’s a link between the insider trading and the CIA? RUPPERT: Yes, and not only that; a guy by the name of Mayo Shattuck III, who was the head of the Alex. Brown unit, resigned on September 12, suddenly, right after the attacks. HUSTLER: You’re speculating he resigned because he was tainted by this? RUPPERT: Absolutely, and he’s very good friends with Krongard, who went to the CIA in ’98. HUSTLER: Is Krongard still with the CIA? RUPPERT: Yes, sir. The point that I made very early on, which was since corroborated, was that there is absolutely no way on God’s green earth that Osama bin Laden or anyone connected with al Qaeda could have or would have made these trades. It would have been an absolute warning signal that, “We’re coming to make attacks.” It’s ludicrous to presume that, if the attacks were, as the government said, three to four years in the planning in the most strict secrecy, Bin Laden would have tipped his hand. The only people who really could have made these trades would have been people connected to or in the intelligence community who would have known that the attacks were going to occur, that the attacks were going to be successful, and that there was definite money to be made. The trades were not just United and American Airlines; they included Axa Reinsurance and Munich Reinsurance [which covered insurance companies that had clients in the World Trade Center], Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley [which had offices in or right next to the World Trade Center], and so on and so forth. People who knew that these attacks were going to take place and succeed were the ones who made the trades. It could have been guys in the intelligence community, in some cases, saying, “I’m just going to go out and make a few million, ha ha,” but it also could have been intelligence agencies [in an institutional manner] who wanted to increase their cash flow. That’s what they do. HUSTLER: Can’t they track who made these put options? RUPPERT: Oh, absolutely. A high-ranking guy at the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] said, “We can find out within hours who made these trades.” HUSTLER: Yet we’ve heard nothing? RUPPERT: Right, and oil is critical to all this. In the past 100 years, we have used up half of the planet’s oil supply. We have passed the peak of production; we’re at a point where demand is going to increase continually as supplies decrease. That is the reason for 9/11, and that is the reason for everything that’s happened. It’s why I was able to predict and describe accurately our moves into Central Asia, and, boy, I was on West Africa a year ago saying, “We are going to have to go to West Africa,” and look at what’s happening now. Nigeria is in worse shape than Liberia; it’s just not being covered by mainstream press. There have been major revolts with hundreds dead, oil-shipping facilities have been overrun, British and American oil workers have been taken hostage and released, and the U.S. Navy is giving warships to Nigeria. HUSTLER: Is it your thesis that we let 9/11 happen so we’d have an excuse to go into the other countries and grab their oil? RUPPERT: Absolutely. Not only did we let it happen; we opened the door and held it wide open. Aside from the insider trading, there’s other extremely compelling evidence of that. The U.S. fighter response was interfered with on 9/11. In the calendar year prior to 9/11, we had 56 documentable instances where fighters were scrambled and flying beside aircraft that had merely gone off course or lost radio contact, not even been hijacked. Yet on 9/11, in the middle of four hijackings, we had 90-minute delays before any fighters were scrambled. I have a six-foot-long, pull-out chart that’s fully footnoted in my book that shows the contravention of normal Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] U.S. Air Force operating procedures on 9/11. Not only from news sources, but I also have the FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command [NORAD] records. HUSTLER: Isn’t there a big dispute between the FAA and NORAD as to who was responsible for not scrambling the jets? RUPPERT: Right. There were major discrepancies in their statements, and I lay these out in a flow chart that just hits you in the face so hard you can’t even breathe. HUSTLER: What other evidence do you have in terms of our government knowing about 9/11 beforehand? RUPPERT: I established this early on, and this forms a basis of statements made by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who’s a very good friend of mine. I think she’s a wonderfully courageous woman who’s being vindicated on a daily basis. Shortly after the attacks—and I’m in touch with many members of Congress who are my subscribers—I was in touch with her office, and I said, “Wait a minute. I have all of these foreign stories from major respected publications showing that the intelligence services of Germany, France, Russia and Israel had delivered very specific warnings to the highest levels.” In the case of Russia, President Putin sent personal emissaries to warn President Bush. Putin even said so on MSNBC right after the attacks. You take all [of the reports] together, [and you have knowledge that] suicide hijackers in the week of September 9 were going to hijack airliners and crash them into the World Trade Center. HUSTLER: So there was so much information that they would have had to look the other way to ignore it. RUPPERT: Absolutely. Now this is part of the stuff that’s classified in the new 9/11 report. When I gave information to McKinney, she said, “Jesus, Mike, I don’t get this. I went to my Congressional intelligence contacts and laid out all this stuff for them, and they won’t talk to me. They won’t answer.” She said, “The only time that they never get back to me is when it’s right.” HUSTLER: There seems to have been ample information that Arabs with al Qaeda ties were learning how to fly planes in schools in the United States. RUPPERT: Oh, absolutely. Mohammed Atta received flight training at Maxwell Air Force Base; a couple others had received training at Pensacola [Florida]. We had an Air Force lieutenant colonel who came out and disclosed that several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers had received foreign-language training at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. HUSTLER: Then, you would say that what we’re faced with is either a conspiracy within the government or an incredible amount of incompetence. RUPPERT: Well, I cannot buy the incompetence theory because there’s too much systematic action that took place, which allowed the attacks to happen. For example, Coleen Rowley of the Minneapolis FBI Office, one of Time’s 2002 Persons of the Year, wrote a memorandum, which she sent to Dianne Feinstein and a couple other senators. It was a blistering memo about how FBI headquarters had suppressed the Minneapolis office’s investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui—denying search warrants of his computer to the point where you had FBI agents in Minneapolis going, “My God, Bin Laden must have a mole in FBI headquarters.” “Bin Laden’s going to crash planes into the World Trade Center”: Those were notes from the FBI field office. The FBI supervisory agent, in her case, who suppressed her investigation was a guy named Dave Frasca. Frasca also was the guy who sat on the Williams Memorandum from Phoenix, which [detailed] all the al Qaeda guys in flight school, but I have tied Dave Frasca to three other 9/11 investigations that were suppressed, including a Carnivore wiretap of al Qaeda e-mails and a direct order from the White House to the FBI in January 2001 to stop investigating two of Osama bin Laden’s cousins who were living in Falls Church, Virginia, right outside of CIA headquarters. That order quite likely went through Dave Frasca. Since Frasca is the head of the bureau’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit, it’s reasonable to infer this one guy inside the FBI sat on five separate investigations, each one of which could have prevented the attacks. HUSTLER: So someone higher up must have told him, “Don’t go there.” RUPPERT: Not only that; he’s still at the FBI, and he got promoted right after 9/11. HUSTLER: Do you believe that the intelligence agencies planned 9/11, or rather that they just knew about it and didn’t do anything to prevent it? RUPPERT: Plan is a difficult word here. Intelligence agencies succeed by running “assets”—in other words, somebody who does the intelligence agency’s bidding without necessarily knowing who’s running them or what the motive is. T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, was a classic case. He was used by British intelligence, sent out on a mission, believed he was doing something when in fact he was being used to do something else. We have huge documented evidence now. I’ve got a long trail—the penetration, the relationship and the protection of al Qaeda by U.S. State Department and CIA officials. One of the most damaging pieces of information is that the head of the Pakistani Intelligence Service wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta about a week before the attacks, and yet he was meeting in Washington with Cheney, Rumsfeld, all these people, on the day of the attacks. So we were using cutouts to support and protect al Qaeda. We have a clear record that many of the 9/11 hijackers could have been rounded up before the attacks, like the two who were living in San Diego. So the government didn’t necessarily plan. It’s more like they held the doors open, and they knew exactly what was going to take place and how. They facilitated by, in effect, being the unseen door openers. HUSTLER: Much of this sounds incredible. Yet with the suppressing and redacting of the 9/11 report, the government isn’t offering much of an explanation. RUPPERT: In my book, I’ll be filling in some of the blanked-out pages that are in that 9/11 report. We have to fully understand that we’re facing a huge problem here that’s not being addressed in any way that’s beneficial to the human race. Without transparency, we’re all screwed. Bottom line: No matter what the cost, we have to put all the cards on the table, and we have to be willing to face whatever they tell us. ******************************************************* ****** A DISTURBING TIMELINE What do you do when your country is under attack? If you're the leader of the free world, you read a kids' book. 8:46: Flight 11 smashes into the World Trade Center’s north tower. 8:48: The first news accounts of the crash are televised. Shortly after 8:48: According to an ABC report, as Bush is preparing for his photo-op at the Emma Booker Elementary school in Florida, a reporter asks him, “Do you know what’s going on in New York?” He says he does. 8:51: Bush arrives at Booker Elementary. 9:00: Bush is taken to a holding room and briefed over the phone by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. This is how Bush later recalled the events: “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’ I said, ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’ But I was whisked off there—I didn’t have much time to think about it.” Bush is mistaken; there was no footage of the first plane hitting the tower until later that day, and the second plane had yet to hit the south tower. More disturbingly, the President decides to read to the children while there are two (possibly three) confirmed hijackings. 9:02 to (approximately) 9:23: Bush listens to students read a story about a pet goat when he should be making decisions whether or not to shoot down the hijacked planes, since only the President can order the shooting down of civilian aircraft. In fact, jet fighters had not even been scrambled to intercept the aircraft, contradictory to standard operating procedures . 9:03: Flight 175 hits the World Trade Center’s south tower. 9:05: Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispers in Bush’s ear that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. Bush continues to read with the children, allegedly because he didn’t want to scare them. If he was composed enough to carry on a photo-op, couldn’t the President have calmly told the kids, “I’m sorry, but I have to attend to some important business”? 9:41: Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is in his Pentagon office watching TV. 10:03: Flight 93 crashes in southern Pennsylvania. |