One Sucker's Saga, Part V: Informational Asymmetry
History is the version of past events
that people have decided to agree upon.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
This should be the shortest of the Sucker's Saga, though it covers just about all you readers need to know about the attacks of September 11, 2001. I'm not going to dredge up "proof" about demolition techniques based on videos of exploding windows. I'm not going to take an NPR reporter's extemporaneous on-the-scene observation literally and try to spin a case from that. Heck, I'm not even going to recap what happened that day, simply because it's not necessary.
That's right, folks, all the proof that something was amiss in the months leading up to those attacks would have -- not should have -- been obvious to any intelligence agency worth its salt . . . and likely was.
To paraphrase Napoleon, history is largely information asymmetry, the difference between what actually happened and what was recorded as having happened. To correct history -- even the histories we need to be true emotionally -- we don't need official stories and conclusions, we need facts.
Some histories can be found in criminal investigations. Investigators (good ones, at least) use as much information as they can find to try and piece together events perhaps obscured by misleading information and deceptive testimony. These crimes need not be bloody and dramatic to be important, of course. For example, Martha Stewart was famously convicted of acting on information asymmetry when she sold stocks based on a "tip" given to her by her friend the president of a company in which she had invested. She spent time in jail simply because that information was not generally available to the public. This made her an "inside trader," one who illegally exercises an informational advantage.
One need not sell a stock before a damaging incident to capitalize on its fall, though. The most common ways to profit from advanced knowledge are known on Wall St. are called "short trading" and "put options." In this From the Wilderness article, Michael Ruppert explains the planning needed for profit::
"Selling Short" is the borrowing of stock, selling it at current market prices, but not being required to actually produce the stock for some time. If the stock falls precipitously after the short contract is entered, the seller can then fulfill the contract by buying the stock after the price has fallen and complete the contract at the pre-crash price. These contracts often have a window of as long as four months.
"Put Options," are contracts giving the buyer the option to sell stocks at a later date. Purchased at nominal prices of, for example, $1.00 per share, they are sold in blocks of 100 shares. If exercised, they give the holder the option of selling selected stocks at a future date at a price set when the contract is issued. Thus, for an investment of $10,000 it might be possible to tie up 10,000 shares of United or American Airlines at $100 per share, and the seller of the option is then obligated to buy them if the option is executed. If the stock has fallen to $50 when the contract matures, the holder of the option can purchase the shares for $50 and immediately sell them for $100 - regardless of where the market then stands. A call option is the reverse of a put option, which is, in effect, a derivatives bet that the stock price will go up.
Wall St. traders have long used these tools to their advantage, many times illegally. How this can happen is long and widely known, but the basic elements boil down to certain information asymmetries, where those that exercise these tools either know something in advance (as Martha did) or cause something to be known that simply isn't true. We are a creature built on rumor, after all. For example, here's Part 2 of a now somewhat famous Jon Stewart interview with Jim Cramer, where Stewart confronts Cramer with the ugly reality of how these tools can be combined with carefully fomented rumors about a secretive company that rarely corrects the record:
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cJim Cramer Pt. 2www.thedailyshow.comDaily Show
Full EpisodesPolitical HumorHealth Care Crisis
"I want the Jim Cramer on CNBC to protect me from that Jim Cramer."
-- Jon Stewart
The meat starts at timepoint 1:45 concerning short selling and continues to the end. Cramer gives the viewer a recipe for committing securities fraud, then brags about how the "regulators" are too daft to do much about it. Oh, sure, he does throw in the obligatory disclaimers about not "fomenting" 'cause that's blatantly illegal. But it's for show only. Bottom line: This is done a lot, and only those who don't know what they're doing get caught.
I explained in Part IV of this saga that vast amounts of drug money is laundered through Wall St. bankers with connections both past and present to the intelligence community. *One would expect such assets have, as the phrase goes, their ears to the ground when it comes to suspicious trades. One might further expect that some of this information might be sent higher up the intelligence scrotum pole for analysts to ruminate, perhaps automatically through electronic notifications.* Going back to the Ruppert article, here's what happened to the stocks for the doomed airliners whose planes later struck the towers and Pentagon:
- Between September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options. Assuming that 4,000 of the options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the imminent attacks, these "insiders" would have profited by almost $5 million.
- On September 10, 4,516 put options on American Airlines were bought on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 748 calls. Again, there was no news at that point to justify this imbalance; Again, assuming that 4,000 of these options trades represent "insiders," they would represent a gain of about $4 million. (I emphasized.)
". . . no news at that point to justify this imbalance." That's critical. Any intelligence agency, especially one with so many known and intimate connections with large investment banks, would have been alerted by its agents keeping an eye out for such trades. Oh, and this post-attack tidbit should drive any doubts far away as a clear indicator of a guilty party knowing that such blood money is frowned upon by, well, everyone:
On September 29, 2001 - in a vital story that has gone unnoticed by the major media - the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data.
"The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors - whose identities and nationalities have not been made public - had advance knowledge of the strikes. . . .
"October series options for UAL Corp. were purchased in highly unusual volumes three trading days before the terrorist attacks for a total outlay of $2,070; investors bought the option contracts, each representing 100 shares, for 90 cents each. [This represents 230,000 shares]. Those options are now selling at more than $12 each. There are still 2,313 so-called "put" options outstanding [valued at $2.77 million and representing 231,300 shares] according to the Options Clearinghouse Corp."
$2.77 million in unclaimed money. To me, that smacks of guilt.
There's another form of information asymmetry that might have helped our intelligence community more directly, without having to interpret suspicious market activity: a whistle blower, someone who had heard about the attacks and knew something about what was to pass. All that person would have to do was contact just about any official in the US with his knowledge and everything could have been averted. Right?
The problem was, it happened. Read on.
Delmart Edward "Mike" Vreeland, an American citizen whose claims to being a US Naval Lieutenant assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) are being increasingly corroborated in open court, has been in a Canadian jail since December 6, 2000. On August 11 or 12 of 2001, the date is uncertain, after trying to verbally alert his Canadian jailers to the coming World Trade Center attacks, he wrote down key information and sealed it in an envelope which he then had placed in jailers’ custody. This event is not disputed by Canadian authorities. The letter specifically listed a number of targets including The Sears Towers, The World Trade Center, The White House, The Pentagon, The World Bank, The Canadian parliament building in Ottawa and the Royal Bank in Toronto.
A chilling sentence follows the list of targets, "Let one happen. Stop the rest!!!"
When the envelope was opened on September 14th it set off alarms in the US and Canada.
I'll bet there were alarm bells! Ah, but here's the weird part: He's not being invited to the US to testify before congress: "The US wants Vreeland back in the States on a Michigan warrant for credit card fraud - using his own credit card. Vreeland, convinced that a return to the US means certain death, wants to stay in Canada in a witness protection program." (I emphasized yet again.)
Crossing the Rubicon compiles many of the From the Wilderness articles in a compelling chapter of this man's saga, one still largely -- and strangely -- unknown to the mainstream media in the United States.
According to an interview Michael Ruppert conducted with Vreeland in jail, Vreeland got the information off documents he was sent to retrieve in Russia. These documents were sealed in a diplomatic pouch and have not been seen, but what Vreeland says of them is, if true, quite interesting:
6. When did you first learn details of the attacks that were to happen on Sept. 11?
In the first week of December 2000.
7. How did you learn of the details?
One document was written in English by a U.S. agent, who had picked up a copy of a document that had been sent to V. Putin by K. Hussein, Saddam Hussein's son. This is what the translation of the doc indicates.
This means both Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin (at the time in charge of Russian intelligence) both knew of the planned attacks over a year before they happened.
I'll let Ruppert and Rubicon describe what became of Vreeland. I'll further let you read a copy of the scribbled warning Vreeland had sealed in his personal effects a month before the attacks after he realized both Canadian and US authorities were giving him the silent treatment . . . and knew enough about his profession to realize what that meant. Ruppert has done the leg work on this story. I'm just passing it on.
The informational asymmetry displayed in both the airline stock gaming and the Vreeland case would provide a court of law enough evidence to at least investigate further. Neither lead was pursued with any vigor by the 9/11 commission, let alone by the mainstream media. Perhaps they were both chastened by what happened to the numerous whistle blowers and investigators that bothered to look into past intelligence misdeeds. The list is long.
Such avoidance would be prudent and healthy of them, true; but it wouldn't help any of us come to terms with the fact that people with quite a bit of drug and investment money, weapons, political power and no oversight whatsoever have some kind of plan up their sleeve, one that I doubt has my best interests, at least, at heart. 9/11 solidified this power, instilling the necessary fear in the people that allowed them a fatter budget and even more room to make moves that still chill me to the bone.
*Sentences between asterisks added later for clarification. See comments.
that people have decided to agree upon.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
This should be the shortest of the Sucker's Saga, though it covers just about all you readers need to know about the attacks of September 11, 2001. I'm not going to dredge up "proof" about demolition techniques based on videos of exploding windows. I'm not going to take an NPR reporter's extemporaneous on-the-scene observation literally and try to spin a case from that. Heck, I'm not even going to recap what happened that day, simply because it's not necessary.
That's right, folks, all the proof that something was amiss in the months leading up to those attacks would have -- not should have -- been obvious to any intelligence agency worth its salt . . . and likely was.
To paraphrase Napoleon, history is largely information asymmetry, the difference between what actually happened and what was recorded as having happened. To correct history -- even the histories we need to be true emotionally -- we don't need official stories and conclusions, we need facts.
Some histories can be found in criminal investigations. Investigators (good ones, at least) use as much information as they can find to try and piece together events perhaps obscured by misleading information and deceptive testimony. These crimes need not be bloody and dramatic to be important, of course. For example, Martha Stewart was famously convicted of acting on information asymmetry when she sold stocks based on a "tip" given to her by her friend the president of a company in which she had invested. She spent time in jail simply because that information was not generally available to the public. This made her an "inside trader," one who illegally exercises an informational advantage.
One need not sell a stock before a damaging incident to capitalize on its fall, though. The most common ways to profit from advanced knowledge are known on Wall St. are called "short trading" and "put options." In this From the Wilderness article, Michael Ruppert explains the planning needed for profit::
"Selling Short" is the borrowing of stock, selling it at current market prices, but not being required to actually produce the stock for some time. If the stock falls precipitously after the short contract is entered, the seller can then fulfill the contract by buying the stock after the price has fallen and complete the contract at the pre-crash price. These contracts often have a window of as long as four months.
"Put Options," are contracts giving the buyer the option to sell stocks at a later date. Purchased at nominal prices of, for example, $1.00 per share, they are sold in blocks of 100 shares. If exercised, they give the holder the option of selling selected stocks at a future date at a price set when the contract is issued. Thus, for an investment of $10,000 it might be possible to tie up 10,000 shares of United or American Airlines at $100 per share, and the seller of the option is then obligated to buy them if the option is executed. If the stock has fallen to $50 when the contract matures, the holder of the option can purchase the shares for $50 and immediately sell them for $100 - regardless of where the market then stands. A call option is the reverse of a put option, which is, in effect, a derivatives bet that the stock price will go up.
Wall St. traders have long used these tools to their advantage, many times illegally. How this can happen is long and widely known, but the basic elements boil down to certain information asymmetries, where those that exercise these tools either know something in advance (as Martha did) or cause something to be known that simply isn't true. We are a creature built on rumor, after all. For example, here's Part 2 of a now somewhat famous Jon Stewart interview with Jim Cramer, where Stewart confronts Cramer with the ugly reality of how these tools can be combined with carefully fomented rumors about a secretive company that rarely corrects the record:
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cJim Cramer Pt. 2www.thedailyshow.comDaily Show
Full EpisodesPolitical HumorHealth Care Crisis
"I want the Jim Cramer on CNBC to protect me from that Jim Cramer."
-- Jon Stewart
The meat starts at timepoint 1:45 concerning short selling and continues to the end. Cramer gives the viewer a recipe for committing securities fraud, then brags about how the "regulators" are too daft to do much about it. Oh, sure, he does throw in the obligatory disclaimers about not "fomenting" 'cause that's blatantly illegal. But it's for show only. Bottom line: This is done a lot, and only those who don't know what they're doing get caught.
I explained in Part IV of this saga that vast amounts of drug money is laundered through Wall St. bankers with connections both past and present to the intelligence community. *One would expect such assets have, as the phrase goes, their ears to the ground when it comes to suspicious trades. One might further expect that some of this information might be sent higher up the intelligence scrotum pole for analysts to ruminate, perhaps automatically through electronic notifications.* Going back to the Ruppert article, here's what happened to the stocks for the doomed airliners whose planes later struck the towers and Pentagon:
- Between September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options. Assuming that 4,000 of the options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the imminent attacks, these "insiders" would have profited by almost $5 million.
- On September 10, 4,516 put options on American Airlines were bought on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 748 calls. Again, there was no news at that point to justify this imbalance; Again, assuming that 4,000 of these options trades represent "insiders," they would represent a gain of about $4 million. (I emphasized.)
". . . no news at that point to justify this imbalance." That's critical. Any intelligence agency, especially one with so many known and intimate connections with large investment banks, would have been alerted by its agents keeping an eye out for such trades. Oh, and this post-attack tidbit should drive any doubts far away as a clear indicator of a guilty party knowing that such blood money is frowned upon by, well, everyone:
On September 29, 2001 - in a vital story that has gone unnoticed by the major media - the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data.
"The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors - whose identities and nationalities have not been made public - had advance knowledge of the strikes. . . .
"October series options for UAL Corp. were purchased in highly unusual volumes three trading days before the terrorist attacks for a total outlay of $2,070; investors bought the option contracts, each representing 100 shares, for 90 cents each. [This represents 230,000 shares]. Those options are now selling at more than $12 each. There are still 2,313 so-called "put" options outstanding [valued at $2.77 million and representing 231,300 shares] according to the Options Clearinghouse Corp."
$2.77 million in unclaimed money. To me, that smacks of guilt.
There's another form of information asymmetry that might have helped our intelligence community more directly, without having to interpret suspicious market activity: a whistle blower, someone who had heard about the attacks and knew something about what was to pass. All that person would have to do was contact just about any official in the US with his knowledge and everything could have been averted. Right?
The problem was, it happened. Read on.
Delmart Edward "Mike" Vreeland, an American citizen whose claims to being a US Naval Lieutenant assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) are being increasingly corroborated in open court, has been in a Canadian jail since December 6, 2000. On August 11 or 12 of 2001, the date is uncertain, after trying to verbally alert his Canadian jailers to the coming World Trade Center attacks, he wrote down key information and sealed it in an envelope which he then had placed in jailers’ custody. This event is not disputed by Canadian authorities. The letter specifically listed a number of targets including The Sears Towers, The World Trade Center, The White House, The Pentagon, The World Bank, The Canadian parliament building in Ottawa and the Royal Bank in Toronto.
A chilling sentence follows the list of targets, "Let one happen. Stop the rest!!!"
When the envelope was opened on September 14th it set off alarms in the US and Canada.
I'll bet there were alarm bells! Ah, but here's the weird part: He's not being invited to the US to testify before congress: "The US wants Vreeland back in the States on a Michigan warrant for credit card fraud - using his own credit card. Vreeland, convinced that a return to the US means certain death, wants to stay in Canada in a witness protection program." (I emphasized yet again.)
Crossing the Rubicon compiles many of the From the Wilderness articles in a compelling chapter of this man's saga, one still largely -- and strangely -- unknown to the mainstream media in the United States.
According to an interview Michael Ruppert conducted with Vreeland in jail, Vreeland got the information off documents he was sent to retrieve in Russia. These documents were sealed in a diplomatic pouch and have not been seen, but what Vreeland says of them is, if true, quite interesting:
6. When did you first learn details of the attacks that were to happen on Sept. 11?
In the first week of December 2000.
7. How did you learn of the details?
One document was written in English by a U.S. agent, who had picked up a copy of a document that had been sent to V. Putin by K. Hussein, Saddam Hussein's son. This is what the translation of the doc indicates.
This means both Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin (at the time in charge of Russian intelligence) both knew of the planned attacks over a year before they happened.
I'll let Ruppert and Rubicon describe what became of Vreeland. I'll further let you read a copy of the scribbled warning Vreeland had sealed in his personal effects a month before the attacks after he realized both Canadian and US authorities were giving him the silent treatment . . . and knew enough about his profession to realize what that meant. Ruppert has done the leg work on this story. I'm just passing it on.
The informational asymmetry displayed in both the airline stock gaming and the Vreeland case would provide a court of law enough evidence to at least investigate further. Neither lead was pursued with any vigor by the 9/11 commission, let alone by the mainstream media. Perhaps they were both chastened by what happened to the numerous whistle blowers and investigators that bothered to look into past intelligence misdeeds. The list is long.
Such avoidance would be prudent and healthy of them, true; but it wouldn't help any of us come to terms with the fact that people with quite a bit of drug and investment money, weapons, political power and no oversight whatsoever have some kind of plan up their sleeve, one that I doubt has my best interests, at least, at heart. 9/11 solidified this power, instilling the necessary fear in the people that allowed them a fatter budget and even more room to make moves that still chill me to the bone.
*Sentences between asterisks added later for clarification. See comments.