Prior Knowledge

Discussion in 'Politics' started by AMT4SWA, Nov 3, 2008.

  1. Senior Corporate Executives Warned to Leave N.Y. on 9/11

    Jeremy R. Hammond
    Foreign Policy Journal
    November 3, 2008

    Foreign Policy Journal has learned that senior executives of a major U.S. international corporation may have been warned to leave New York on September 11, 2001.

    According to an inside source, one of the senior executives of the corporation told him beforehand that “something big” was going to occur and so other corporate executives would be travelling out of New York.

    The source, who spoke to the Journal on the condition of anonymity, worked at a European branch of the media giant Warner Bros. He served as the number two under the managing director of that office, a man with whom he had developed a close personal friendship. His boss was also friends with one of the senior executives at the head office in Los Angeles. According to the source, he had been told by his director that the executive in L.A. had formerly worked for the CIA and still kept in touch with the agency.

    It is not an uncommon practice for the CIA to recruit business executives, particularly individuals who do a lot of international travelling and might be able to use their business contacts to gather information.

    The CIA is also known to have recruited journalists and media executives. According to Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter who worked with Bob Woodward breaking open the Watergate story during the Nixon administration, executives who lent their cooperation to the CIA included Henry Luce of Time Inc., founder of Time and Life magazines. C.D. Jackson, a Time Inc. vice-president and publisher of Life magazine until his death in 1964, approved arrangements to provide the CIA with cover under Time-Life, according to an article Bernstein wrote for Rolling Stone magazine in 1977.

    When the managing director of the overseas Warner Bros. office passed away, the individual who spoke with the Journal was contacted by the senior executive from L.A. about the plans for the memorial service. Senior executives from the company would attend, including from the Warner Bros. parent corporation, Time Warner, headquartered in New York.

    When he answered that one of the potential dates for the service was September 11, he was told that would be no good because “something big is happening that day” and the top executives from the New York office would all be travelling out of the city.

    When asked further about this big event, the executive replied that it was a confidential matter and disclosed no further details, except to say that it was “not corporate”.

    The source told the Journal, “I had no reason to think that the ‘event’ could be anything more than perhaps a junket, an out of town think tank exercise or whatever – I remember that these possibilities ran through my mind.”

    But after 9/11, thinking back upon the conversation, he grew more curious and tried to ascertain where the board members had been that day. They had indeed been out of New York, he says, travelling not to one location, but each to their own destination. Destinations included overseas locations such as Paris, London, and Amsterdam.

    Foreign Policy Journal has not been able to verify the location of individuals on 9/11 or other aspects of the story concerning any potential warning received or given by any Time Warner executives, but did confirm the source’s position at the foreign branch office, the name and position of that office’s managing director, and the name and position of the senior executive from the Los Angeles office.

    There have been numerous other indications that individuals within the U.S. had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

    One such indication was the evidence of insider trading in the days just prior. Short selling and trading in put options, which are essentially bets that stock will drop, skyrocketed over a period of days before 9/11 only in companies that were directly affected.

    For instance, purchases were made on 4,744 put options for United Airlines between September 6 and 7. On September 10, purchases were placed on 4,516 put options for American Airlines. United and American were the two airlines that had planes hijacked and destroyed in the attacks. There was no similarly unusual trading in other airlines.

    Other companies directly affected also experienced a spike in the purchase of put options, such as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Merril Lynch, both of which had offices in the World Trade Center.

    Numerous countries around the world, including the U.S., Japan, Germany, the U.K., France, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Spain, opened investigations into what had apparently been insider trading based on foreknowledge of the attacks.

    Together, these purchases were worth millions. Yet with the reports of insider trading and foreknowledge circulating in the media, whoever was responsible chose not to collect the money.

    One of the banks involved in the purchases was Alex Brown, the U.S. branch of the German Deutsche Bank, which was headed until 1998 by A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard. He afterwards joined the CIA, and was Executive Director of the agency at the time of the attacks.

    Trading is monitored through special software in real time by the CIA, so the agency would have been aware of the suspicious activity in the days just prior to the attacks.

    Despite all this, the FBI announced that its own investigation had turned up no evidence that anyone had tried to profit from inside knowledge that the attacks would occur.

    According to the 9/11 Commission Report, which echoed the conclusion of the FBI, 95 percent of the purchases on United and American Airlines shares on September 6 and 10, respectively, were made by a single U.S. based institutional investor.

    Robert Baer is a former CIA case officer and author of “Sleeping with the Devil” and “See No Evil”, which served as the basis for the film “Syriana” starring George Clooney. Baer told Stewart Howe and Jeremy Rothe-Kushel of the L.A. branch of the organization We Are Change, “I know the guy that went into his broker in San Diego and said ‘cash me out, it’s going down tomorrow.’” Baer added that “his brother worked at the White House.”

    Baer also indicated that the 9/11 Commission Report had been a cover-up of what really happened and questioned why certain other oddities about 9/11 had not been investigated, such as “the famous white van”, which he said was “an intriguing story” that “deserves a book”.

    continues....... http://www.infowars.com/?p=5711&page=2