Thursday, November 06, 2014

Woah...!

I'll have more to say when I figure out what to say. But Marcy Wheeler has made an amazing catch. Check it out -- but only after you check out my post below. (Commenters: No Rule 2 violations!)

18 comments:

James said...

Maybe it's just my paranoid nature, but I tried to click through to your Emptywheel link from my work computer using both Google Chrome and IE8 and both times I got a warning message indicating that the certificate for that website had been issued to another website. Maybe Marcy has stumbled onto something that she shouldn't have.

Stephen Morgan said...

Rule 2 is insufficiently precise. I'm sure it used to specifically mention CD as forbidden. As it is, you and me would both be considered 9/11 nuts by some people.

Therefore the rule should be clarified.

Dojo Rat said...

Joseph; her link seems to be down right now. I'm dying to see what it is...

Dojo Rat said...

OK, I scrolled across the link and see it is about Alex Brown as a CIA front.
I typed that into Google and it has a short sentence on the description for her post asking if Alex Brown was a CIA front as it shorted stocks during 911.

She must really be on to something if they took it down so fast. Her Twitter feed does not have the same post either...

Anonymous said...

The statistically anomalous nature of the option activity has beebn established by mainstream academics.

Allen M Poteshman: "Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001," published in The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, 2006, Vol. 79, Edition 4, page 1703-1726.

Wing-Keung Wong, Howard E. Thompson und Kweehong Teh: "Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September 11 Attacks", Multinational Finance Journal, Vol. 15, no. 1/2, pp. 1- 46

Marc Chesney, Remo Crameri and Loriano Mancini: "Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the Option Markets", University of Zurich, April 2010

Joseph Cannon said...

The reports that the link is down have me baffled. The link works for me just fine. Marcy got back to me with a further thought about the story but she said nothing about taking the story down.

Gus said...

Well, I just went right to the link, no problem at all. Read through it. Very interesting. I remember reading a lot about the short selling right before 9/11 back in the couple of years immediately following it, but the subject seems to have not gone much of anywhere, even in conspiracy circles. A CIA connection actually doesn't surprise me at all. I'm NOT a CD nut, or truther, or whatever, but I suspect there was some sort of inside knowledge that it was going to happen (at least, CIA knew SOMETHING was going down). Even reading Hopsicker's investigative work leads one to that conclusion (not out right collusion, mind, but more of a "letting it happen" type of mentality.......I think most of the government was kept in the dark, including the President).

Anonymous said...

The emptywheel link works fine for me.

Here's the story done by cbs
http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2014/11/01/wjz-exclusive-baltimore-banker-reveals-his-double-life-as-a-cia-agent/

Is Daniel Hopsicker a 9/11 nut? I don't think so.

b said...

Has anyone come up with a "US intelligence wasn't involved" explanation for why major US news media, for an hour or two after the attacks, reported that a) large bombs had exploded in the Twin Tower basements and b) the State Department had been car-bombed?

(I didn't read that anywhere and it's not my opinion or interpretation. I saw those reports when they were being put out by CNN etc. The remarkable thing is, tens of millions of other people must have done too! It says a lot about the 'truth movement' that they don't make a big thing of that. There again, nor do they make much of the Israeli reoccupation of Ramallah and Jenin in the days following 11 Sep - causing the end of the Oslo process for anyone still stupid enough to have faith in it. And don't expect them to notice the end of 'Vietnam syndrome' either. Are those news reports available on the internet somewhere, or have they been shoved down the memory hole?)

fred said...

Christopher Bollyn has covered this previously.

James said...

Interesting to note, Joe, is that the current big story out of the Baltimore area involving Mayo Shattuck's wife (ex-wife?) seducing a 15-year old kid from her son's private school. I'm sure you know that Mayo Shattuck III was Buzzy Krongard's hand-picked successor to run Alex Brown, the same firm that made all of those very conveniently-timed put option trades on AMR and UAL.

Small world, isn't it?

fred said...

Lars Schall at Asia Times Online also covers the CIA/911 Options links.

Dojo Rat said...

Here's something interesting; I could not get Marcies link on a Windows program (my home computer), but I could get it on my android phone later...

Gus said...

Dojo Rat, I'm on Windows, never had a problem with the link. Sounds like a browser issue or perhaps something was temporarily down when you tried at home? In any case, it seems a lot of people got to the link, and the information is not really new anyway.

Anonymous said...

b, archive.org has the 9/11 TV news coverage.

As to any Israeli exploitation of the 9/11 news shadow, there is no reason to try to exploit it. Israel knew the attacks were coming, and their warning to US intelligence even named names of alleged perps. Israel went to the moon to publicly demonstrate their foreknowledge with their "dancing israelis" and "picture van" stunts.

Joseph Cannon said...

Anon, what did I TELL you? You violated two rules. I let this one slip by because the link was useful.

But seriously -- HEED THE RULES. Sorry to be a hard case, but I've learned that there's only one way to keep a blog from degenerating into the kind of place I hate to visit.

b said...

Trying to obey the rules here...

Remember that the open or bourse-traded part of the market in options and other derivatives is only the tip of the iceberg. The inter-bank market is much bigger, and it isn't subject to much scrutiny by any government agency.

I wonder what options were traded on that, in the run-up to the 11 Sep 2001 attacks.

Makes me wonder whether there isn't already a 'terrorism futures' market, just not an open one under that name, as was backed for a short period of time in 2003 by DARPA under the kookhouse banner of 'Total Information Awareness'. The rich men who rule this world believe there can be a price on everything - not just every thing, but every possibility.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Hale's status as an asset suggests a possible mechanism by which these trades came to pass.

Given that there was so much chatter in the intel community about upcoming attacks (warnings from 13 foreign countries, 4 FBI offices, and multiple CIA briefings) it's possible that Mr. Hale heard something and then felt it was his duty to warn associates about air travel in early September. (The California politician Willie Brown was allegedly warned not to fly on 9/11.) Perhaps someone who got Mr. Hale's warning or heard about it placed a bet based on the tip.

Many people reject the put option story by simply declaring "but that makes no sense! Why would the CIA expose their foreknowledge to make a few million dollars?"

Discarding facts (i.e., the statistical anomalies of the put options) on the basis of the undesirability of your jumped-to conclusions about their implications is an irrational and all too common habit of humans.

Asking a mystery to make sense before you will deign to investigate it is lazy and equally irrational.