“Terror Trading 9/11“ by Lars Schall and Michael Leitner is a video dedicated to the topic of the alleged informed trading activities prior to the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001. Funded through “Pirate My Film”, it shows interviews with Max Keiser, Kevin Ryan and Michael C. Ruppert.
By Kevin Ryan
Posted on April 8, 2012
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are among the leading suspects in the crimes of September 11, 2001. Reasons for this include that they were in the most powerful positions in the U.S. that day, that there is evidence they had foreknowledge of the attacks, and that they did not respond effectively. Other people who were closely associated with Dick and Don should also be investigated if they were in positions to be involved. Richard Armitage and Frank Carlucci are two such people. They both played important roles with respect to the events of September 11, 2001 and, prior to that, both had a colorful history of covert operations which intertwined and was aligned with the careers of Dick and Don. Armitage and Carlucci both also benefited from the War on Terror by way of profits made after the attacks.
For the twelve years prior to the attacks, Frank Carlucci ran the Carlyle Group, an investment firm with close ties to the most powerful members of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and to the Saudi Arabian oil industry. The two major operating subsidiaries of that company were BDM international, for which Carlucci was chairman, and the Vinnell Corporation. Working for Carlucci at BDM from 1989 to 1996 was its vice president, Barry McDaniel, who left to become the Chief Operating Officer for a an alarmingly suspicious company. That was Stratesec, the security company that had contracts for so many of the facilities associated with the 9/11 attacks.
On September 11, 2001, Carlucci was meeting with Carlyle investors at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC, along with the brother of Osama bin Laden.[1] Former president George H.W. Bush had been meeting with them the previous day. Today, McDaniel is business partners with one of Dick Cheney’s closest former colleagues, Bruce Bradley, whose business partner Alan Woods is mentioned below.[2]
Armitage was one of the signatories of a 1998 letter to President Clinton from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), calling for military intervention against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 2001, Armitage was the Deputy Secretary of State reporting to Colin Powell. He was involved in the secure video teleconference run by Richard Clarke that failed to respond to the hijacked airliners. The week of 9/11, in Washington, Armitage met with General Mahmud Ahmed, the head of Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) who ordered $100,000 to be wired to the alleged hijackers. Moreover, Armitage was a director at Choicepoint, which provided DNA testing on 9/11 victims through its subsidiary, Bode Technology.
At the time of the attacks, Armitage was the boss of Marc Grossman, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, and Grant S. Green, Undersecretary of State for Management. It has been reported that Grossman met with General Ahmed as well, prior to 9/11.[3] As Undersecretary of Management, Green was responsible for administration of U.S. embassies abroad as well as coordination with the president on key management issues, and he supervised the State Department’s Office of White House Liaison.
Green’s position in the State Department put him in control of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, which issued visas to foreign nationals. The Bureau’s new express visa program, instituted under the leadership of Armitage and Green, provided visas to five of the alleged 9/11 hijackers. Ten of the other alleged hijackers had previously received their visas in the same U.S. consulate office in Saudi Arabia. The express program made an already bad system worse because the new process was one in which “The issuing officer has no idea whether the person applying for the visa is actually the person (listed) in the documents and application.”[4] That is, in terms of the visas anyone could have taken the place of the alleged hijackers and Armitage and Green were in a position to supervise that dubious process.
Therefore Carlucci, Armitage and Green had interesting connections to 9/11. Furthermore Green’s background recalls the secret history of Armitage and Carlucci, two men who greatly influenced U.S. government policy in the 25 years before 9/11.
By Pepe Escobar
April 6, 2012
Asia Times Online
It was deep into the night, somewhere over Siberia, in a Moscow to Beijing flight (BRIC to BRIC?) when the thought, like a lightning bolt, began to take hold.
What the hell is wrong with those Arabs?
Maybe it was the narcotic effect of that perennially dreadful Terminal F at Sheremetyevo airport – straight out of a Brejnev gulag. Maybe it was the anticipation of finding more about the Russia-China joint naval exercise scheduled for late April.
Or it was simply another case of “you can take the boy out of the Middle East, but you can’t take the Middle East out of the boy”.
With friends like these … It all had to do with that Friends of Syria (fools for war?) meeting in Istanbul. Picture Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal – who seems to have a knack for sending US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton into rapture – feverishly arguing that the House of Saud, those paragons of democracy, had “a duty” to weaponize the Syrian “revolutionary” opposition.
And picture al-Faisal ordering an immediate ceasefire by the Bashar al-Assad government, guilty – according to the House of Saud – not only of cruel repression but crimes against humanity.
No; this was not a Monty Python sketch.
Paul Craig Roberts
Prisonplanet.com
April 7, 2012
General Philip Henry Sheridan
The stagecoach bounced along the uneven trail through Indian lands. A year ago there would have been danger from Indians. But Ulysses Grant had sent General Philip Henry Sheridan, who had brought the horrors of war to Confederate civilians, to annihilate the plains Indians.
In his winter campaign of 1868-69, Sheridan attacked the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes in their winter quarters, killing women and children and taking the Indians’ supplies and livestock. In Congressional testimony, Sheridan advocated the slaughter of the vast herds of bison in order to deprive Indians of food.
Having turned professional hunters loose on Indian lands, Sheridan wrote: “Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated.” For his proficiency in war crimes, Sheridan was made commanding general of the U.S. Army.
March 27, 2012
To the embarrassment of investigators, it has also emerged that the firm used to buy many of the “put” options [related to 9-11] – where a trader, in effect, bets on a share price fall – on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by “Buzzy” Krongard, now executive director of the CIA. Until 1997, Mr Krongard was chairman of Alex Brown Inc, America’s oldest investment banking firm. Alex Brown was acquired by Bankers Trust, which in turn was bought by Deutsche Bank. His last post before resigning to take his senior role in the CIA was to head Bankers Trust – Alex Brown’s private client business, dealing with the accounts and investments of wealthy customers around the world.
- Chris Blackhurst, “Mystery of Terror ‘Insider Dealers’”, The Independent (UK), October 14, 2001
A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 [2001] as part of a strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter…which recommended these trades.
- 9/11 Commission Report, W.W. Norton, 2004, footnote on p. 499
Alvin Bernard “Buzzy” Krongard was Executive Director of the C.I.A. from March 2001 until November 2004. Previously he had served as a consultant to C.I.A. Directors George J. Tenet (1997-2004) and Robert James Woolsey, Jr. (1993-1995).
The informed insider trading of stock options carried out by people with prior knowledge of the terror attacks of 9-11 is once again in the news. Max Keiser of the Keiser Report recently interviewed Lars Schall, a German journalist who has written extensively on the “terror traders” of 9-11. In the center of the discussion of the informed trading done by people who evidently knew the attacks were coming stands one very conspicuous individual, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, then Executive Director of the C.I.A.. Krongard would be considered a “person of interest” in any proper criminal investigation of 9-11 or the insider trading that preceded it.
Krongard has been suspected of being connected to the suspicious trading since October 2001. In one of my first articles about 9-11, “The Profiteers of 9-11″, I wrote the following:
Investigations into the unusually high number of “put” options, betting that the price of United Airlines (UAL) and American Airlines shares would fall, have revealed that Alex Brown Inc., an investment banking firm, purchased many of these option contracts. Alex Brown Inc. was, until 1998, managed by the man who is now the executive director of the Central Intelligence Agency, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard. Krongard, 64, former head of Baltimore-based Alex Brown, America’s oldest investment bank, joined the CIA three years ago as a counselor to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. Krongard switched careers shortly after helping engineer the $2.5 billion merger of Alex Brown and Bankers Trust New York Corp., gaining $71 million in Bankers Trust stock in the process.
Source: Corbett Report
April 5, 2012
Many of us have felt the frustration of trying to counter the cognitive dissonance people have when encountering 9/11 truth for the first time. The short film “Blindfold” presents this struggle in fictional form by portraying the events of a widower father whose pre-teen daughter gives her elementary school class a presentation about the demolition of the twin towers. Tonight on Corbett Report Radio, we discuss the issues raised in the film with the filmmaker, Teace Snyder, and take your calls on the issue of removing the 9/11 blindfold.
Click on link for audio ?powerpress_pinw=4387-podcast
March 31, 2012
From the Corbett Report
If the last three years have taught us anything, it is that the so-called anti-war liberal left can be made to become cheerleaders for the same war agenda that they pretended to deride during the Bush Administration. How was this accomplished? A developing doctrine of international law called “Responsibility to Protect.” Join us this week as we expose the liberal “war is peace” agenda and ponder how best to disarm it.
Click for audio ?powerpress_pinw=4350-podcast
Posted on Apr 2, 2012
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig
The security and surveillance state does not deal in nuance or ambiguity. Its millions of agents, intelligence gatherers, spies, clandestine operatives, analysts and armed paramilitary units live in a binary world of opposites, of good and evil, black and white, opponent and ally. There is nothing between. You are for us or against us. You are a patriot or an enemy of freedom. You either embrace the crusade to physically eradicate evildoers from the face of the Earth or you are an Islamic terrorist, a collaborator or an unwitting tool of terrorists. And now that we have created this monster it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to free ourselves from it. Our 16 national intelligence agencies and army of private contractors feed on paranoia, rumor, rampant careerism, demonization of critical free speech and often invented narratives. They justify their existence, and their consuming of vast governmental resources, by turning even the banal and the mundane into a potential threat. And by the time they finish, the nation will be a gulag.
This is why the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was contested by me and three other plaintiffs before Judge Katherine B. Forrest in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, is so dangerous. This act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last Dec. 31, puts into the hands of people with no discernible understanding of legitimate dissent the power to use the military to deny due process to all deemed to be terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers, and hold them indefinitely in military detention. The deliberate obtuseness of the NDAA’s language, which defines “covered persons” as those who “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces,” makes all Americans, in the eyes of our expanding homeland security apparatus, potential terrorists. It does not differentiate. And the testimony of my fellow plaintiffs, who understand that the NDAA is not about them but about us, repeatedly illustrated this.
Alexa O’Brien, a content strategist and information architect who co-founded the U.S. Day of Rage, an organization created to reform the election process and wrest it back from corporate hands, was the first plaintiff to address the court. She testified that when WikiLeaks released 5 million emails from Stratfor, a private security firm that does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, she discovered that the company was attempting to link her and her organization to Islamic radicals and websites as well as jihadist ideology.
Sunday, 01 April 2012
By Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers & Co.
Most discussion about the “costs of war” focuses on two numbers: dollars spent and American troops who gave their lives. A decade into the war on terror, those official costs are over a trillion dollars and more than 6,000 dead. But as overwhelming as those numbers are, they don’t tell the full story.
In one of the most comprehensive studies available, researchers in the Eisenhower Study Group at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies looked at the human, economic, social and political costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as our military actions in Pakistan. Their complete findings are available at costofwar.org. The numbers below are all from their report, which is dated June 2011. When the study sites both conservative and moderate estimates, we’ve chosen the conservative numbers. It is difficult to find more recent tallies for most of these numbers, but up-to-date totals of U.S. military deaths, along with photos and biographical information, can be found in The Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen collection.
The Dead
6051 U.S. service members
2,300 U.S. contractors
9,922 Iraqi security forces
8,756 Afghan security forces
3,520 Pakistani security forces
1,192 Other allied troops
11,700 Afghan civilians
125,000 Iraqi civilians
35,600 Pakistanis (civilians and insurgents)
10,000 Afghan insurgents
10,000 Members of Saddam Hussein’s army
168 Journalists
266 Humanitarian workers
Total: 224,475 lives lost
The Wounded
99,065 U.S. soldiers
51,031 U.S. contractors
29,766 Iraq security forces
26,268 Afghan security forces
12,332 Other allied troops
17,544 Afghan civilians
109,558 Iraqi civilians
19,819 Pakistani civilians
Total: 365,383 wounded
The Displaced
3,315,000 Afghan civilians
3,500,000 Iraqi civilians
1,000,000 Pakistani civilians
Total: 7,815,000 refugees and internally displaced people
Costs to the American Taxpayer
$1.3 trillion in Congressional War Appropriations to the Pentagon — the official budget for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
$3.7-4.4 trillion estimated total costs to American taxpayers. This includes the official Pentagon budget (above), veterans’ medical and disability costs, homeland security expenses, war-related international aid and the Pentagon’s projected expenditures to 2020.
$1 trillion more in interest payments through 2020 on money the U.S. borrowed for war.
Site Administrator’s comment: This is what’s known as a limited hangout. They expose some lower level patsy in order to hide the real perpetrators behind the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, et al.
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Defector tells how US officials ‘sexed up’ his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion
By Jonathan Owen
The Independent
April 1, 2012
A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.
“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.
He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”
The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.
But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”
US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.