Max Keiser: Regardless of who did it [9/11], we can know that more than a few had advance warning – the trading in the option market makes that clear.
Who Benefited? Insider trading 9/11 … the facts laid bare By Lars Schall
March 20, 2012
Excerpts
Ms Fitts, what are your general thoughts related to the alleged 9/11-insider trading?
Catherine Austin Fitts: Well, I’ve never been able to see concrete evidence that the insider trading has been proved. There’s a lot of anecdotal information from investment bankers and people in the investment community that indicate that there was significant insider trading, particularly in the currency and bond markets, but again it hasn’t been documented.
I think around situations like 9/11 we’ve seen things that can only be explained as insider trading. Therefore, it wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out the allegations are true, because my suspicion is that 9/11 was an extremely profitable covert operation and a lot of the profits came from the trading. It wouldn’t even surprise me if it turns out that the Exchange Stabilization Fund traded it and that some of the funding for the compensation fund for the victims came from the ESF.
Insider trading happens around these kinds of events, but if you really want to produce evidence of insider trading, you need the subpoena powers of the SEC, and of course we know that they haven’t exercised them. If anything, right after 9/11, the government settled a significant amount of cases I presume because a lot of the documents were destroyed by the destruction of WTC building number 7, where the SEC offices and other governmental investigation offices were. [43]
Fitts, who had written a longer essay in 2004 related to this, replied to my question about who had benefited from 9/11:
Catherine Austin Fitts: 9/11 was extraordinarily profitable for Wall Street, they of course got a kind of “Get Out of Jail Free card” as I’ve just described. In addition, the largest broker of government bonds, Cantor Fitzgerald, was destroyed, and there was a great deal of money missing from the federal government in the prior four or five years. If you look at the amount of funds involved, it is hard to come to a conclusion other than massive securities fraud was involved, so I find it very interesting that this happened. [44]
A short explanation: Cantor Fitzgerald’s headquarters were located in the North Tower of the WTC (floors 101-105). On 9/11, the company lost nearly two-thirds of its entire workforce, more than any other tenant in the WTC. (Also two other government bonds brokers, Garbon Inter Capital and Eurobrokers, occupied office space in the WTC towers that were destroyed.) Back to Fitts and the question: “Cui bono 9/11?”
Catherine Austin Fitts: In addition, the federal government took the position that they couldn’t produce audited financial statements after 9/11, because they said the office at the Pentagon that produced financial statements was destroyed. Now given what I know of the federal set up of financial statements, I am skeptical of that statement.
But needless to say, if you take the government on its word, you had another “Get Out of Jail Free card” for four trillion dollars and more missing from the federal government. So if you’re just looking at the financial fraud angle, there were a lot of parties that benefited from 9/11. But then of course what 9/11 did, it staged the passage of the Patriot Act and a whole series of laws and regulations that I collectively refer to as “The Control on Concentration of Cash Flow Act.” It gave incredible powers to centralize.
In addition, if you look at monetary policies right after 9/11 – I remember I was over in the City of London driving around with a money manager and his phone rang and he answered it on his speaker phone. It was somebody on Wall Street who he hadn’t talked to since before 9/11, and he said to him: “Oh Harry, I am so sorry about what has happened, it must have been very traumatic.” And the guy said: “Don’t be ridiculous! We were able to borrow cheap short and invest long, we’re running a huge arbitrage, we’re making a fortune, this is the most profitable thing that ever happened to us!” – So you could tell the monetary policies and sort of insider games were just pumping profits into the bank at that time, so that was very profitable.
But of course the big money was used for a significant movement of the military abroad and into Afghanistan and then into Iraq … You could see that the country was being prepared to go to war. And sure enough, 9/11 was used as a justification to go to war in Afghanistan, to go to war in Iraq, and commit a huge number of actions, and now much of the challenges about the budget are the result of extraordinary expenditures on war including in Afghanistan and Iraq and the costs of moving the army abroad and engaging in this kind of empire building with ground military force.
So I think if you ask Cui Bono on 9/11, one of the big categories was all the people who made money on engineering the popular fear they needed to engineer these wars. I believe whether it was financial fraud, engineering new laws or engineering wars, it was a fantastically profitable covert operation.