Honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy , 911 = Operation Gladio

[Len Colby]

You keeo repeating that but have yet to provide a citation, it's not in the link you possted. // END COLBY

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xxxx xxxx PANTS ON FIRE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ALL CITATIONS GIVEN AT LINK POST #9 (SHOWN BELOW)

POST #9

As previously noted you stoop to insults when you can't come up with evidence. Get back to us with the quote which "indicated that there was AT LEAST a hundred to one statistical odds that there was foreknowlege in purchasing these 911 related put options"

Edited September 21, 2012 by Len Colby

[Steven Gaal]

As previously noted you stoop to insults when you can't come up with evidence. Get back to us with the quote which "indicated that there was AT LEAST a hundred to one statistical odds that there was foreknowlege in purchasing these 911 related put options" // end Colby

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xxxx xxxx PANTS ON FIRE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ITS RIGHT THERE AS I POSTED (my post # 15) right above ODE TO COLBY

Evidence of Insider Trading before September 11th Re-examined

by Paul Zarembka

Department of Economics

State University of New York at Buffalo

September 9, 2011

International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001

September 8-11, 2011, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

http://torontohearings.org/

This report addresses evidence of insider trading before September 11th, sometimes referred to by a broader phrase, informed trading. Insider trading refers to using private

knowledge of an anticipated event in order to profit financially by engaging in financial market transactions. In the first weeks after September 11, 2001 a number of financial publications called attention to substantial insider trading in put-options occurring before the attacks. Some of these early examples have been surveyed in Zarembka (2008, pp. 64-66, 69-71), while this book chapter also commented on certain exaggerations (e.g., an incorrect doubling of the put-option volumes). Quickly, commentary died out.

Purchasing a put option entitles the owner to sell a stock at a contractually stated price, the “strike price”, any time until the contract expires. If the market price of the stock goes down below the “strike price”, the owner of the put-option can buy the stock (if not already owned) and simultaneously sell the same stock at that “strike price”, making a profit if the cost of the option itself does not exceed the net revenue.

This report deals with evidence of insider trading only. It does not deal with speculations. Nor does it deal with certain open questions about financial issues surrounding September 11th that otherwise deserve investigations:

• Large increases in the M1 money supply in the United States have been reported for July and August 2001 and explanations have been sought.
  
• Huge financial transactions have been reported to have taken place at computers at the World Trade Center minutes before the attacks.
  
• Selling short (borrowing a stock and selling it, then returning it later through purchasing).
  
• Markets outside the United States.
  
• Disappearances of gold and securities from the World Trade Center.
  
• The specific financial firms directly hit by planes, and the financial investigations sabotaged by the WTC or Pentagon attacks.
  
• Insurance payoffs, particularly to the owner of destroyed buildings, particularly to Larry Silverstein.
  

This is not a complete list of issues deserving investigation and our contribution can be considered modest at best, compared to these additional questions. However, some of the above seem to have only one testimonial behind them. And we are addressing what the 9/11 Commission, however imperfectly, addressed.

In 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report (http://www.9-11commi...t/911Report.pdf, p. 499, fn. 130) stated that the government’s investigations had produced no evidence of insider trading before the attacks. Yet, it offered little of its evidence to the public. When a FOIA request asked for the documentary evidence behind that Commission footnote we just mentioned, the SEC even replied on December 23, 2009 that “the potentially responsive records have been destroyed” (http://maxkeiser.com...esponseGIF1.gif). Such a response is all the more curious, given documents we report below that were made public on January 14, 2009, documents that would have provided at least a partial response to the request made.

• A scholarly article by Poteshman (2006) in the Journal of Business, using econometric modeling, claimed high probability of insider trading for American Airlines and United Airlines put-option purchasing shortly before September 11th. Were they random, the American purchases had only a 1% probability of occurrence; the United Airlines put-option purchasing was less improbable, but on September 6 had only a 4% probability of occurrence (both measures obtained by comparisons of the airline values reported on p. 1720, Table 4, to the benchmark values reported on p. 1713, Table 1).
  

Since the government had provided so little evidence of its position, some sharp criticism and reference to Poteshman’s results ensued (e.g., Griffin, 2005, pp. 52-57 and Zarembka, pp. 67-69).

Limited SEC Investigative Evidence Made Public

On January 14, 2009, two post-September 11th SEC investigating memos were finally made publicly available. ¹`

The simpler one, prepared on May 11, 2004 for the 9/11 Commission, stated that the volume of put-option trades for United on September 6, 2001 (for a $30 strike price with expiration on October 20, 2001) had been erroneously reported in the SEC data: the correct value should have been 1500 – i.e., for 150,000 shares – not 2000. The memo explained that the SEC had missed the actual cancellation of an intended 500 put sale (included, but not a purchase). The Option Clearing House (OCC) had the correct number (http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00138.pdf ²

Still, judging by the reported change the next day in open interest (open interest is the amount of the put contract remaining unexercised), a 500 purchase did indeed occur on September 7. In other words, a volume of 2000 occurred over two days, not one day (1500, then 500). This would not seem to affect Poteshman’s work since he used the change in open interest for his measure rather than volume data, but it does raise a general concern about the SEC data. A volume level of 2000 for the first day does appear both in Zarembka (p. 66) and in Chesney, et al. (2010, p. 35, Table 2) and is implicitly retained in the Commission’s own report despite that 2004 memo it had received (Zarembka, p. 68).

Much more important, another memo was simultaneously released that had been prepared back on September 17-18, 2003 and had named the Options Hotline newsletterand its editor Steve Sarnoff as responsible for faxing on September 9, 2001 some 2000 subscribers the recommendation to buy put options on American Airlines (http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00139.pdf, p. 14). The memo further stated that the SEC interviewed 28 people who purchased these options and 26 had said that they had done so because of the newsletter. This memo reported 27 additional subscribers, not interviewed, as additional purchasers of that put option.

The same memo went on to report that an unnamed large institutional investor in hedge funds had undertaken the 2000 United put-option purchases – i.e., for 200,000 shares – but was explained away by the fact that the same investor had also purchased 115,000 shares of American stock on September 10. This information does appear in the Commission’s report, p. 499, fn. 130.

A third memo for the 9/11 Commission, this one dated April 24, 2004, reported an interview with Ken Breen, Deputy Chief, Business and Securities Fraud Section, Department of Justice. It is also important. It reports that Breen “was not sure about potential trading in index futures (because the volume is so great that analysis proved impossible)” (http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00074.pdf). In other words, the exhaustive governmental investigation was not so exhaustive after all, by its own admission.

A Contradiction and Its Deepening

Through the above, we have arrived at a contradiction: an econometric result of high probability of insider trading in American Airlines stock and somewhat less for United stock goes against the government’s September 2003 memo (released in 2009). This contradiction could be resolved by simply claiming that Poteshman himself never claimed certainty and then to assert that an event of low probability had been all that had occurred. Were such simplicity available!

Two other econometric studies have since been added to the scientific literature.

• Wong, et al. (2011) examined put options on the S&P 500 and found additional econometric evidence of insider trading before September 11th, now for the index the government had reported in April 2004, “analysis proved impossible”. Furthermore, the result is significant because some have speculated that option trading was heightened in the period before September 11th because of a falling market. As we will explain below, Wong obtained their results, even after trying to account for a falling market.
  

• Chesney, et al. (2010, yet unpublished) have studied about 1.5 million put-option trades for 14 companies: 5 airline companies including American and United, 5 bank stocks, and 4 others, for the period of January 1996 to April 2006. They report, with high probability, informed trading before September 11th in each of the put options for Boeing, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, United, American, Bank of America, Delta, and KLM (ordered here from the highest calculated gains downward).
  

In sum, ten financial instruments, including the S&P 500 option, are each exhibiting, with high statistical probability, evidence of insider trading before September 11th, sometimes more than once. American and United are identified by separate methodologies, seven additional companies are identified by Chesney, and the S&P 500 is identified by Wong. The joint probability of all of these being nothing more than random outliners seems astronomically low.

The government, however, had deepened its position. In that September 17-18, 2003 memo, the SEC refers to investigations of “103 companies and 38 index products and broad-based funds” (p. 3). It finds no evidence of any insider trading. It dismissed dramatic comments shortly after September 11th, even by a person as well positioned as the German Central Bank President Ernest Welteke (pp. 10-12). The report definitively concludes with the SEC’s lead investigator Joseph J. Cella, III, Chief of Market Surveillance, Division of Enforcement, SEC, saying that “he has no questions about any trade and is confident there was no illicit trading pre 9/11 in the United States” (p. 19).

The sharp contradiction between the scientific results and the government’s position is too great to ignore. Can it be resolved? On the one hand, are three distinct econometric methodologies implemented with option trading data each erroneous in some manner? Is the competence of the econometricians, including two articles having been screened through peer review evaluations, to be in question? On the other hand, if the SEC is accurately reporting the motivating factors about American and United put-option purchases, could the SEC be erroneous about many or all of the other financial instruments for which no evidence has been made public? Having repeatedly said that the attacks were a complete surprise, has the government been influenced to avoid acknowledging any insider trading before September 11th? Worse, is it aware of insider trading and is it lying?

Analysis: The SEC Evidence regarding One Named Financial Advisor

The tip that Steve Sarnoff, editor of Options Hotline, offered subscribers on September 9 for placing put options on American Airlines is reported by Mike Williams. ³ Nothing appears unusual with the recommendation itself. From the government’s memo, somewhat more than 50 of 2000 subscribers seem to have acted upon the recommendation – i.e., about two and one-half percent. Nothing appears unusual with this outcome. The 1312 change in open interest on September 10th (Chesney, p. 35, Table 2) represents an average of a bit less than 26 put-options purchases per subscriber who purchased, representing 2600 shares each. Yet, consider the implications of taking this at face value.

Joe Duarte, another financial advisor, lists ten newsletters dealing with option trading (www.joe-duarte.com/free/directory/options-newsletters.asp). Options Hotline does not happen to be one of them, perhaps suggesting that Sarnoff has no dominance. Search the web and get many more. Recommendations are being made by newsletters daily, weekly, monthly. If two to three percent of subscribers are following recommendations to buy put options on stocks, we should see many, many examples similar to what occurred for American on September 10, 2001. Therefore, what happened that day for American would be a rather common event, not a very unlikely one. That volume on American put options would not have shown up as unlikely, as a statistical matter.

Absent informed trading, newsletters should be nothing more than instruments, rather than causes,of these market behaviors being analyzed.

It is not only American, but, as we have seen, nine other put options showing spikes before September 11th. Chesney find only 37 such examples in a decade of some 1.5 million pieces of put-option data on fourteen companies, 13 of which were related to September 11th. These spikes should have been innocent of ex post shock events because spikes are to be always expected in random statistical outcomes. Instead, most are centered prior to shock events.

Two Caveats

Let me put one consideration to rest. Some critics of the 9/11 truth movement, such as Kay (2011), claim that the entire movement is filled with people who go down a rabbit hole, never willing to leave it. In this case, the suggested claim could be that Sarnoff himself should be added to a conspiracy about 9/11, added as soon as the government released in January 2009 its evidence as to who made what recommendation and with what effect regarding American on September 10. Such an approach would address the contradiction we have identified. But it would be at the expense of having no evidence for such an assertion.

We wish to stay with evidence, evidence from the econometricians, the government, and anywhere else obtainable. In other words, we wish to push into the contradiction.

Regarding evidence we have to be careful. For Boeing, Mike Williams, seeking to expose myths among skeptics of the official story of September 11th,, cites a Dutch article of September 11, 2006 placed on the site physics911.net (www.911myths.com/index.php/Put_Options#Boeing, accessed August 4, 2011). This article had made only a tangential mention to this airline manufacturer, thus representing no more the proverbial “straw man” – a data source is not even provided. Williams then provides a news report referring to one analyst’s public downgrading of Boeing on September 7th, apparently being unaware that put-options purchases cited by Poteshman were on United occurred on September 6th (as well as in Chesney as we shall see below).⁴

Among known skeptics of the official 9/11 story, discussion of option transactions at a site hosted by Jim Hoffman (http://911research.w.../stockputs.html, accessed August 4, 2011) is embarrassingly out of date, mostly refers to 2001 stories, even though claiming an August 2007 update. Kevin Ryan (2010), followed by Mark Gaffney (2011) whose book Black 9/11 is due for release shortly, each attempt a recent survey, but seem unaware of the Commission documentation on insider trading released in January 2009.

Discerning Evidence of Insider Trading before September 11th

We now proceed to describe each of the econometric studies, the first being single-authored and the following two being triple-authored. The two first have been peer-reviewed and published in well-established journals, the third is planned for submission shortly, and has been a lengthy work-in-progress.

The article by Poteshman in the Journal of Business well describes the problem at hand, and is applicable to all three works. Hinting at the end about his two-pronged approach that we will mention later, Poteshman writes that, in general, option market activity

is motivated by a number of factors such as uninformed speculation (i.e., noise trading), hedging, trading on public information, and trading on private information. Consequently, when a statistic obtains a value that is extreme relative to its historical distribution, one can infer that there was an unusual amount of activity related to one or more of the option trading motivations. Although the statistics do not distinguish between trading motivations, if an extreme value is observed just before an important piece of news becomes public, then it is reasonable to infer that there was option market trading based on private information rather than a shock to the trading from one of the other motivations. Indeed, the fact that the statistic has obtained an extreme value indicates that a shock to trading from another motivation would have to be unusually large to account for the observed option market trading. Of course, it is possible that the typical option trading from the other motivations varies systematically with changes in the state of the option or underlying security market. This is the reason that conditional as well as unconditional distributions for the statistics will be computed in the next section. (Poteshman, 2006, pp. 1711-12)

Analysis: The Econometric Evidence in Poteshman

Each of the papers we cite has reference to data as quantiles. Quantiles are defined by the accumulation of the probabilities of occurrences of a random variable. A quantile at 50% would say that one half of the occurrences of random variable had already occurred over the frequency distribution and one half have yet to occur. A quantile at 95% would say that 19 out of 20 occurrences of the random variable had already occurred with 1 in 20 yet to occur; a quantile at 99% would report 99 out of 100 had already taken place. Thus, an event at a quantile of 95% would be rare, while at 99% would be quite rare.

Poteshman’s work examines several measures for the probabilities of insider trading occurring, while addressing market options for American Airlines, United Airlines, the index for airline stocks, and the S&P 500. I summarize the easiest one of three to understand and the one he seems most comfortable exploring, i.e., the evidence regarding volumes of put-option contracts. This is measured by the change in a contract’s open interest from one day to the next day (purchases less sales less exercises of options) compared to the average of such change measured by a 126 trading day period, going backwards in time from 22 trading days before the date in question. This is also normalized for the standard deviations of those 126 trading days. The statistical results for the four trading days before September 11th are reported in Table 1.

Table 1: Put-Option Market Volume Statistics before September 11th

Volume Statistics

Sept. 5

Sept. 6

Sept. 7

Sept. 10

AMR

-.02

.08

.65

3.83

UAL

-.12

1.45

1.23

.15

Airline Index

-.13

.63

.66

.85

S&P 500

-.07

.25

.54

-.09

Source: Poteshman (2006, pp. 1720, Table 4)

Poteshman compares these AMR and UAL statistics to his benchmark data for the 1,000 largest market capitalization firms for the dates from January 2, 1990 through September 4, 2001. Compared to the historical record of the large companies, the AMR datum for September 10th in the table has only a 1% probability of occurrence and the UAL datum of September 6 has a 4% probability of occurrence. The airline index datum for September 6th has a 6% probability of occurrence and the S&P datum for September 7th, a 5% probability.

Poteshman also considers a four-trading day interval in addition to the daily values we report in Table 1. For those who consider this measure to be more appropriate, probabilities are somewhat less unlikely. In any case, the above results are not conditional upon any underlying factors and so Poteshman also introduces four conditioning factors, “total option volume, the return on the underlying asset, the abnormal trading volume of the underlying asset, and the return on the overall stock market” (p. 1716). He undertakes quantile regressions for these four factors. He obtains very similar results.

Analysis: The Econometric Evidence in Wong, et al.

The article by Wong et al. (2011, pp. 7-9) has the most detailed discussion of executions of option trading generally. It then undertakes a complex statistical investigation regarding S&P 500 option trading before September 11th, centering not only upon put options – whether they were purchased in-the-money (above the market, and thus costing a higher price), at-the-money (at the market level), or out-of-the-money (below the market). They also consider the type of strategy used, and also call options. Calls are the contractual right to purchase stocks for a determined “strike price” before an expiration date. They are a less obvious strategy for anticipating a decline in an asset price.

Wong, et al., first contrast the 2001 period for contracts expiring on September 22, 2001 with the same September expiration in 2000, both being in declining market environments: for the period between January 1 and June 30, 2000, the S&P 500 declined 15 points, while for the period January 1 to June 30, 2001, the S&P 500 declined 96 points. They consider these as “control periods” (pp. 15-16). They find that “the trading volume for the SPX index put options during the control periods [i.e., January 1 to June 30] is not significantly different between 2001 and 2000 … the years 2000 and 2001 being similar in regard to option activity in a time period before intense trading began in September index put options” (p. 37).

Furthering the comparison of 2001 to 2000, they examine a short sub-period after the S&P 500 closed at 1134 on August 31 to September 10, 2001 when it closed at 1093, a decline of 39 points in five trading days. A year earlier, the S&P 500 had closed at 1518 on August 31, 2000, while on September 8 (September 10 was a Sunday) it had closed at 1495, a decline of 23 points, also in five trading days. They find that “the mean and the standard deviation of the trading volumes for September 2001 contracts were more than double those for September 2000 contracts during sub-period [september 1 to September 10] for both call and put, but not so much during the other sub-periods” (p. 20). They also find many more extreme volumes in the 2001 period.

They then investigate the various types of puts and calls able to be utilized, and also consider alternative strategies. Studying statistical results, they conclude that their findings show

a significant abnormal increase in the trading volume in the option market just before 9-11 attacks in contrast with the absence of abnormal trading volume far before the attacks. This only constitutes circumstantial evidence that there were insiders who tried to profit from the options market in anticipation of the 9-11 attacks. More conclusive evidence is needed to prove definitively that insiders were indeed active in the market. Although we have discredited the possibility of abnormal volume due to declining market, such investigative work would still be a very involved exercise in view of the multitude of other confounding factors e.g. coincidence, confusing trading strategies intentionally employed by the insiders, noises from the activities of non-insiders. (p. 44)

They do not claim definitive results, but rather significant statistical evidence of insider trading. Their procedure attempts to abstract from the fact of a declining overall market, an element that some have attempted as a basis for a counter-claim against evidence of insider trading. A counter-argument could begin by observing that August was an up-market in 2000 and down-market in 2001. We have not yet found relevant evidence about option market behaviors in down markets compared to up markets, so we merely state that no presumptions should be made without evidence.

Wong et al. do not attempt to compare their results with Poteshman’s regarding the S&P 500. Poteshman had noted the fact that “the option volume on SPX options was more than 100 times greater than that on either AMR or UAL options. Consequently, it would be much more difficult to detect an option market bet …” (p. 1723). Wong, et al., concur: “any 9-11 insider would not trade directly the airline options in large volume to avoid drawing attention after the 9-11 attacks”.Since Wong et al. is a much more elaborate analysis for the S&P 500, we are entitled to infer that theirs is a more discriminating analysis.

Analysis: The Econometric Evidence in Chesney, et al.

Chesney, et al., offer the most detailed pieces of evidence. To understand what they are offering, first consider American Airlines (AMR) for the authors’ time period of January 1996 to April 2006. It is representative of their general methodology and they provide details for this particular example of so much concern within the 9/11 movement. Technical details are placed in footnotes as we move toward our Table 2 presentation of their results.

Chesney, et al., start with the 137,000 AMR put-option contracts, i.e., about 54 possibilities per trading day over the ten-plus years of data they analyze (about 250 trading days per year). They first identify for each day that put-option contract across strike prices and expiration dates with largest increment in open interest. These 2560 data points are the more unusual. After accounting for intraday speculation , they record the prior two years of data for each time t, beginning in January 1998 and ending in April 2006. This leads to a measure qt, that denotes, for date t, the frequency such a value occurred based upon the prior historical record. They are referred to as probabilities(p. 9). For the AMR option on September 10, as one example, qt is reported as 1.2% (p. 35). This reflects 6 occurrences in the two years of 500 data points on and before that day. Generally for their study, qt must refer to data that had occurred no more than 5% of the time, i.e., no more than 25 times for the prior two years .

A second, additional criterion attempts to account for hedging transactions – buying a put option to guard against a fall in an existing stock position, or buying stock to guard against a fall in a put-option’s value as the stock rises. They offer a rather complicated procedure, not elaborated here. The two criteria, as they report, reduce the considered spikes for AMR put options down to 141 instances (p. 17), still fairly considerable.

Instead of stopping here, as a third criterion, Chesney, et al., focus upon the most profitable, using ex post information on the behavior of the stock price. Let rt be the option’s return at time t. The maximum return over the available contracts after time t is then represented by rtmax. AMR on September 10th had a put-option contract price of $2.15 for a $30 strike price and October 20, 2001 expiry. The maximum gain for that contract therefore turned out to be that exercised on September 17 as the stock price fell to a $18 close and the option price rose to $12, a $12 gain per contract on $2.15 invested, or 453%. That particular rtmax is reported in Chesney (p. 35, Table 2; also, p. 22 with a typo of 458%).

Now, this third criterion is formulated as a pair of conditions that are presented here in a footnote . The introduction of this third criterion leads to only 5 incidents for AMR: May 10 and May 11, 2000, August 31 and September 10, 2001, and August 24, 2005, rather than 141 without this third criterion.

For the entire set of fourteen companies studied, only 37 incidents are identified: 13 spikes identifiable before September 11th as reported in Table 2, 14 associated with earnings announcements (all but 4 beforehand, 2 on same day, 2 after), 6 associated with mergers and acquisitions (4 beforehand, 2 same day), and 4 not identified. In other words, spikes are being shown to relate to real events, most frequently anticipating them.

The gains from exercising put options, reported in Table 2 for the 13 identified cases of informed trading before September 11th, do not depend upon the econometric procedure, but rather are factually based, close to the maximum possible. As seen, American purchases on September 10th are by no means the most profitable. The Merrill Lynch put-option purchase generated almost four times the subsequent gains as that for American. The extensive put purchases for Boeing were even more profitable. It could have been background for Sarnoff’s September 9th recommendation to his subscribers regarding American. That is, an option advisor’s knowledge of prior airline put-option purchases by others may be suggestive for his or her own recommendations. If the advisor turns out to be wrong, an explanation is at hand: “I was not alone”. In other words, evidence on American such as Poteshman’s and Chesney, et al.’s may not itself represent of insider trading at all. If correct, those other put options trades require the particularly careful investigations. Indeed, if a person actually had prior information about what was to happen on September 11th, why would he or she engage in put-option purchasing for the most obvious of choices, American and United, and subject himself or herself to easy detection?

Table 2: Evidence of Informed Put-Option Purchases before September 11th

Put Option

2001 Date

Change in open interest

Gain from exercising the put options

Proxy for probability as an informed trade

Boeing

29 Aug

2828

$1,972,534

0.998

Boeing

5 Sep

1499

1,805,929

0.998

Boeing

6 Sep

7105

2,704,701

0.998

Merrill Lynch

10 Sep

5615

4,407,171

0.998

J.P. Morgan

30 Aug

3145

1,318,638

0.998

J.P. Morgan

6 Sep

4778

1,415,825

0.998

Citigrroup

30 Aug

4373

2,045,940

0.998

United

6 Sep

1494

1,980,387

0.998

American

31 Aug

473

662,200

0.984

American

10 Sep

1312

1,179,171

0.998

Bank of America

7 Sep

3380

1,774,525

0.994

Delta

29 Aug

202

328,200

0.998

KLM

5 Sep

100

53,976

0.998

Source: Chesney, et al. (2010, p. 35, Table 2 and p. 38, Table 4)

What the prior paragraph is suggesting is that spikes in put-option purchases are not independent events, but, in actuality, can be interrelated. We would thus have to pull back from a conclusion of having ten random pieces of data and then claiming the joint probability of their occurrences to be “astronomically low”. The joint probability would still be very low, but not “astronomically low”. In this case, Boeing put-option purchasing moves to the center of attention, not just for the magnitude of profits reported in the table, but as possible background leading to put-option purchasing on American a few days later.

As to the United put-option purchasing, the SEC reports that it was related to a large stock purchase of American stock by the same investor. Poteshman did not find the option purchase to be highly improbable on a random basis. Chesney, et al.’s procedure for delimiting hedging transactions would not capture such an example of purchasing American stock while also purchasing put-options on United.

In sum, we are willing to accept the SEC’s reporting about American and United Airlines and not consider them to represent evidence of insider trading. Nothing else do we accept, as these have been the only pieces of evidence on the issue of insider trading put forward publicly from SEC investigations. Specifically, Boeing as well as Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Bank of America deserve careful attention as a result of Chesney, et al.’s work.Nevertheless, we have been warned regarding what can be held back by the government and then released years later (cf. American). Should the movement for discovering the truth about September 11th jump too quickly with accusations, it can backfire.

The total gains without United and American reported in Table 2, and then also including other individual stocks not yet analyzed by Chesney, should fall short of $30 million in total. This level is reported in order to keep in mind the maximum potential of insider put-option trading benefits before September 11th. We are not claiming that that much actually occurred. Insider trading could have occurred in individual stocks as Chesney, et al., find, and also served as unsuspecting background to investors and their advisors for United and American put-option purchases.

Boeing, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Bank of America

For Boeing, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Bank of America we have been unable to find public news motivating large put-option purchases for them before the dates found in Chesney, et al.’s research. Note that the cited downgrade of Boeing (see http://community.sea...8&slug=boeing08, accessed August 20, 2011) came after the dates cited.

In any case, research work by Chesney, et al., fails to suggest spikes in put-option trading occurring merely due to rating changes by analysts of corporations. Indeed, 33 of theirs are associated with September 11th, or earnings announcements, or mergers and acquisitions; only 4 remain unidentified.

Concluding Recommendations

• United and American ought not be recognized as direct insider trading. Nevertheless, by themselves, they convey little of the larger question.
  
• Ken Breen, Department of Justice, reported to the Commission in another interview released in 2009 that, for put-options on indexes, “the volume is so great that analysis proved impossible”. Therefore, Wong’s result regarding the S&P 500 is not contested in the background reports to the 9/11 Commission, despite what the Commission asserted. This fact needs to be asserted.
  
• To the best of my knowledge, none of the three econometric methodologies and results has been contested in the professional literature. Typically, controversial results generate opposition. We have attempted to convey enough of three separate methodologies to be convincing that they are solid scientific works. Therefore, accept the econometric research results as meritorious.
  
• Demand that the SEC publicly report the details of its findings on Boeing, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Delta, and S&P 500 index put-option trading before September 11th. This reporting should be at least as detailed as that already released for American and United.
  
• Add to that demand of the SEC any additional corporations exhibiting evidence of insider trading before September 11th, e.g., in the expanded material Chesney, et al., plan to release shortly.
  

In addition:

• Promote an independent investigation into the events of September 11th, inclusive of subpoena powers, that includes investigations of put-option purchasing.
  
• Incorporate into that independent investigation the financial issues we have cited, but not examined, in our introduction, most of them having billions of dollars at stake.
  

References

Arvedlund, Erin E. (2001), “Follow the Money: Terrorist conspirators could have profited more from fall of entire market than single stocks”, Barron’s, October 8.

Chesney, Marc (2010), Remo Crameri, and Loriano Mancini, “Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the Options Markets”, April 15, 2010, at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1522157.

Gaffney, Mark H. (2011), “Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side” (Second in a series), Foreign Policy Journal, March 2, at www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/03/02/black-911-a-walk-on-the-dark-side-2/0/, accessed August 5, 2011.

Griffin, David R. (2005), The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Northampton, MA: Interlink.

Kay, Jonathan (2011), Among the Truthers, Toronto: HarperCollins.

Poteshman, Allen M. (2006), “Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001”, Journal of Business, Vol. 79, pp. 1703-1726.

Ryan, Kevin (2010), “Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11”, Foreign Policy Journal, November 18 , at www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/11/18/evidence-for-informed-trading-on-the-attacks-of-september-11/, accessed August 5, 2011.

Wong, Wing-Keung, Howard E. Thompson, and Kweehong The (2011), “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 at http://mfs.rutgers.e...df/V15N12p1.pdf.

Zarembka, Paul (2008), “Initiation of the 9-11 Operation, with Evidence of Insider Trading Beforehand”, The Hidden History of 9-11, P. Zarembka, editor, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2nd edition, pp. 47-74 (1st edition, Amsterdam: Elsevier Press, 2006).

¹ The January 14, 2009 date was reported to this author on July 25, 2011 by Kristen Wilhelm of the Center for Legislative Archives as follows: “The 9/11 Commission's Joseph Cella Memoranda for the Record were scanned and uploaded to the NARA Archival Research Catalog for the opening of the 9/11 Commission records on Jan. 14, 2009.” See also the NARA prior notice of the general opening at www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2009/nr09-41.html. It may be of some interest that attention was drawn to this release on the very day of January 14 (see the January 15 posting at http://screwloosecha...ut-options.html, and its link to postings on January 14 at http://forums.randi.......<br /><br /><a href="http://ithp.org/articles/septemberinsidertrading.html#twoone">² Another 75 trade is also cited for another contract not in contention.

³ This recommendation was for the put-option contract with a $30 strike price to expire on October 20, 2001. It read as follows:

September 9, 2001

Vol. 12, No. 28

Stocks Skid On A Jump In The Jobless Rate. This Week, We Take To The Air

This past week, stocks were pressed to the downside – with the highlight being Friday's blue chip decline. Wall Street was surprised by a spike, to a four-year high, in the jobless rate. And the market took its lumps. This week, I see opportunity for you to have fun and profit with an airline play. So, without further ado, here's…

This Week's Option Recommendation

Buy the AMR October $30 put for $170 [100 shares for $1.70 per share, P.Z.], or less, good this week.

Shares of AMR Corp. trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "AMR". The symbol for this option reco is "AMRVF". American Airlines closed the week at $30.15. The 52-week range for AMR is $27.62-$43.93. My downside price target is $22-$26.

The major airline is under pressure. At $25, each $30 put would have $500 of intrinsic value. If AMR is at or above $30 on the third Friday in October, your option will expire worthless. That is your risk. Set your stop-loss at $100, to preserve capital, in case my expectations go awry.

That's buy the AMR October $30 put for $170, or less, good this week.

– www.911myths.com/index.php/Put_Options#Options_Hotline , accessed 719/2011

⁴Within the same discussion, Williams cites many reports of put-option volumes without those using accurate data. Some reported data are about double the actual levels, presumably due to author errors in understanding Optionmetric data which considers the buy and sell sides of one transaction to be distinct. If one is going to criticize, focusing upon those arguing for insider trading using correct data to make their cases seems preferable.

“The main motivation for considering increments in open interests is the following. Large volumes do not necessarily imply that large buy orders are executed because the same put option could be traded several times during the day. In contrast large increments in open interest are originated by large buy orders. These increments also imply that other long investors are unwilling to close their positions forcing the market maker to issue new put options.” (Chesney, et al., pp. 8-9)

In order to abstract from intraday speculation, they compare daily changes in open interest to the reported volumes of transactions (the difference between the two should be small). In other words, purchases are to dominant, with sales or exercises of options small.

This calculation could seem to suggest 103 times in eight and one-quarter years beginning in January 1998. But a stock like AMR stock price fell considerably from April 2002 to a low of $1.25 within one year thereafter implying much higher volumes then required for similar dollar option positions.

Actually, AMR closed at $17.90 on both September 21 and 27 before the October 20 option expiration; the $18.00 on September 17 was not quite the lowest. However, presumably the option price was the highest on September 17.

Let Gt be the cumulative gains achieved through the exercises of the selected option in the shortest time available from the day of the calculated maximum up to ten trading days thereafter. Chesney’s third criterion is then offered as a pair of conditions for the option trade in question, that is,

• rtmax ≥ q0.90(rtmax)
  

and

• Gt ≥ q0.98(Gt).
  

The quantiles at day t for the rtmax and Gt distributions – q0.90(rtmax ) and q0.98(Gt) – are computed using the preceding two years of data. These criteria are the quantiles for the top 10% of initial profiting and top 2% of total gains.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Difference Between Odds and Probability

Odds and Probability Conversion Calculator

http://www.had2know....robability.html

#######################

49 to one ODDS per ONE STOCK AMR

When you calculate the 13 related stocks (13 of which were related to September 11th.,above quote) (49 x 49 (13 times) ect) answer = foreknowledge

(9.387480337647754e+21 =astronomical number)

foreknowledge

foreknowledge

foreknowledge

foreknowledge

foreknowledge

Edited September 21, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

Here's the money quote

Were they random, the American purchases had only a 1% probability of occurrence; the United Airlines put-option purchasing was less improbable, but on September 6 had only a 4% probability of occurrence (both measures obtained by comparisons of the airline values reported on p. 1720, Table 4, to the benchmark values reported on p. 1713, Table 1).

If you had simply posted that instead of resorting to your typical infantile behaviour we could have moved this along several posts ago. Please show where Posterman, rather than Zarembeka reached this conclusion. The key part of the later's claim above was "were they random" they weren't see the previously cited 9/11 Myths link.

Edited September 22, 2012 by Len Colby

[Steven Gaal]

^{FOREKNOWLEDGE}

^{- THE PUT OPTIONS}

------------------------------------------------------------

^{FOREKNOWLEDGE}

^{THE FBI SHUT DOWN OF ARAB MUSLIM WEB SITES}

^{IN THE DAYS LEADING UP TO 9/11.}

^{http://whatreallyhap...ES/fbishut.html}

^{+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++}

^{FBI Raids Surround Attack}

^{Agents Yank Muslim Websites, Confiscate Videos}

^{Six days before the attack the FBI and 80-member task force descended on InfoCom Corporation in Richardson, Texas to shut it down, including its webservers, removing 500 websites serving largely Arab and Muslim communities. The FBI occupied the building for days, copying documents. 1}

^{The FBI also promptly scoured the surroundings of the Pentagon to make sure there would be no public airing of any video of the attack. Agents reportedly seized video from both the nearby Sheraton National Hotel and NexComm/Citgo gas station within minutes of the attack. Helicopter footage not seized by the FBI shows an organized group of well-dressed people combing the Pentagon's lawn, also within minutes of the attack.}

^{--------------------------------------------------------------------------------}

^References

^{1. US pulls the plug on Muslim websites, Guardian Unlimited, 9/10/01 [cached]}

^{http://911research.w...1/fbiraids.html}

^{###############}

FOREKNOWLEDGE

Why Were U.S. Intelligence Facilities in an 'Information Void' During the 9/11 Attacks?

http://911blogger.co...ing-911-attacks

--------------------------------------------------

When the terrorist attacks began on September 11, 2001, numerous U.S. intelligence agencies and facilities that should have been closely following the catastrophic events taking place in the skies over America were unaware that anything was wrong. Because of their particular responsibilities and their advanced capabilities, agencies such as the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) should have been among the first to learn the details of the crisis. But, instead, they were apparently in an information blackout, and their knowledge of the attacks was limited to what they could learn from television reports.

The fact that key intelligence agencies and facilities experienced this problem, and all at the same time, suggests that the information blackout may have been intentional--an act of sabotage committed by the perpetrators of the attacks. Such an act could have been intended to render these agencies and facilities useless when their services were urgently needed, thereby helping to ensure that the attacks were successful.

MILITARY OFFICERS UNSUCCESSFULLY SOUGHT INFORMATION ABOUT THE ATTACKS

The lack of awareness of the crisis on September 11 is highlighted in the accounts of two military officers who contacted numerous facilities in their attempts to learn more about the attacks. These officers were Lieutenant Colonel Mark Stuart, an intelligence officer at NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), and Major David McNulty, the senior intelligence officer of the 113th Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard at Andrews Air Force Base. [1]

Stuart and McNulty's units had crucial roles to play on September 11. NEADS, based in Rome, New York, was responsible for coordinating the U.S. military's response to the hijackings. [2] And "air defense around Washington, DC," according to Knight Ridder, was provided "mainly by fighter planes from Andrews Air Force Base," which is just 10 miles from the capital. [3] The DC Air National Guard was in fact known as the "Capital Guardians." [4] It was therefore essential that Stuart and McNulty be provided with up-to-the-minute information on the attacks. That, however, did not happen.

NEADS was alerted to the first hijacking--that of American Airlines Flight 11--just before 8:38 a.m. on September 11, when an air traffic controller called to report the incident and request military assistance. [5] Beginning at around 8:48 a.m., Mark Stuart contacted several facilities to see if they had any information on the hijacking, beyond what he had already learned. These facilities included the FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center, the National Military Joint Intelligence Center, and the 1st Air Force headquarters. None of them could provide any additional information. A colleague of Stuart's checked the SIPRNET--the U.S. military Internet system--for relevant information, but also without success. [6]

At Andrews Air Force Base, about five minutes or so after he learned that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center (the crash occurred at 9:03 a.m.), McNulty went to his "intel vault" and began seeking relevant information. He too checked the SIPRNET. He called agencies such as the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA. He also called units such as the Air Combat Command Intelligence Squadron and the 609th Air Intelligence Squadron. But he was unable to find out anything more than he had already learned from television reports. [7]

Other accounts provide further details of the lack of awareness of the catastrophic events within the military and other government agencies. Indeed, the information blackout appears to have been almost universal. One government official commented that the U.S. was "deaf, dumb, and blind" for much of September 11. [8]

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS NOTICED EARLY SIGNS OF THE CRISIS

Although many key facilities were unaware of what was happening at the time the WTC towers were hit, indications of the crisis had been evident much earlier on. These indications were received or noticed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is responsible for operating the U.S. air traffic control system, or by American Airlines.

The first sign that something was wrong came nearly 33 minutes before Flight 11 crashed into the WTC, when communication with the plane was lost. Just before 8:14 a.m., the plane's crew failed to respond to an instruction to climb to 35,000 feet. The air traffic controller at the FAA's Boston Center who was handling Flight 11 tried repeatedly to contact the plane over the next 10 minutes, but without success. [9]

Boston Center controllers noticed a further indication of the emergency at 8:21 a.m., when Flight 11's transponder--the equipment that transmits identifying information about a plane to radar screens--was turned off. This, according to the Christian Science Monitor, was "something more worrisome" than the loss of radio contact. [10]

Then, at around 8:25 a.m., the controller handling Flight 11 heard a couple of suspicious radio transmissions, apparently made by a hijacker on Flight 11, which led him to conclude that the plane had been hijacked. At that point, the Boston Center began notifying its chain of command within the FAA of the suspected hijacking. [11]

A minute later, at 8:26 a.m., Boston Center controllers noticed Flight 11 drastically changing course, turning sharply to the south. [12] This was a significant development. Darrel Smith, an intelligence officer working at FAA headquarters that morning, has commented that he was particularly alarmed when he learned about it, because such a deviation was like "changing directions off I-95 north and heading south." Flight 11's change of course "jeopardized the other flights in the surrounding airspace," he said. [13]

AIRLINE RECEIVED EARLY NOTIFICATION OF THE EMERGENCY IN CALLS FROM FLIGHT ATTENDANTS

American Airlines, like the FAA, was aware of the crisis well before the first plane hit the WTC. At 8:19 a.m., Betty Ong, one of the flight attendants on Flight 11, contacted the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in Cary, North Carolina, and, in a 25-minute phone call, relayed crucial information about what was happening on her plane. A couple of minutes after Ong's call began, a supervisor at the reservations office called the American Airlines System Operations Control Center in Fort Worth, Texas, and alerted it to the information that Ong was providing. And at 8:32 a.m., Amy Sweeney, another of the plane's flight attendants, reached the American Airlines flight services office in Boston. In a 12-minute phone call, she provided details of the crisis to the manager there.

In their calls, Ong and Sweeney made clear the seriousness of the situation. They reported that Flight 11 had been hijacked and that the hijackers were in the cockpit; two flight attendants had been stabbed; one passenger had his throat slashed and died as a result; and there was a bomb in the cockpit. [14]

But while American Airlines and the FAA knew details of the emergency early on, other agencies and facilities that should also have been closely following the crisis were unaware that anything was wrong. So when Mark Stuart, at NEADS, contacted a number of intelligence facilities, beginning shortly after the first plane hit the WTC, he found they had no information beyond what he already knew. [15] And David McNulty, at Andrews Air Force Base, has recalled that when he did the same, beginning several minutes after the second plane hit the WTC, he felt like he was "waking up the national agencies" and found that the agencies he called "had nothing to report." [16]

FBI'S OPERATIONS CENTER HAD KEY ROLE IN U.S. RESPONSE TO TERRORISM

Mark Stuart called the FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) to report the hijacking of Flight 11. Stuart told the 9/11 Commission that he made the call at around 8:48 a.m. This was two minutes after Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. [17]

The SIOC should have been well suited to handling the 9/11 attacks. The United States Government Interagency Domestic Terrorism Concept of Operations Plan of January 2001 stated that the SIOC's role was "to coordinate and manage the national level support to a terrorism incident." [18] The purpose of the center, according to FBI officials, was "to keep the FBI updated on any crisis through sophisticated computers and communications equipment."

The SIOC, which opened in 1998, was a 40,000-square-foot facility on the fifth floor of the FBI's headquarters in Washington. It was designed to handle up to five crises at the same time, and, during a major emergency, could accommodate up to 450 people. [19]

The SIOC functioned as a 24-hour watch post and crisis management center. [20] It had 10-member watch teams on duty at all times. These teams included a representative from the NSA's Cryptologic Security Group, who could provide information from the government's worldwide electronic eavesdropping. [21] The center's 225 computer terminals had access to three types of local area networks: the regular FBI network that could connect to the networks of outside agencies; a classified network that operated at the level of Top Secret; and an even more highly classified Special Compartmented Information network. [22]

FBI agents and top officials, along with representatives from many other government agencies, went to the SIOC on September 11 in response to the terrorist attacks. [23] John Ashcroft, the attorney general at the time, told the 9/11 Commission that "the SIOC was the place to be to get information and so everyone wanted to be there." [24]

SOPHISTICATED OPERATIONS CENTER 'HAD NOTHING' ON THE ATTACKS

And yet, despite the center's key responsibilities and its advanced capabilities, personnel in this state-of-the-art command post were apparently no better informed about the 9/11 attacks than members of the public watching the events on television. Stuart has recalled that when he called the SIOC, the center "had no information to pass that could shed light on the nature of the American Air 11 hijacking." Stuart was handed off to two or three individuals at the center. He explained to them what was happening and asked for law enforcement information. But, Stuart has said, "They had nothing." One of the people that Stuart spoke to said to him, "Oh xxxx, I have to go," and then hung up. [25]

Fred Stremmel, an FBI counterterrorism analyst, was in the SIOC when the attacks began and has described events there. According to his account, those in the center only realized the U.S. was under terrorist attack when they saw the second plane hitting the WTC on television.

Stremmel learned of the crisis that morning when a colleague in the SIOC told him about the first plane hitting the WTC. A crowd was watching the television coverage of the crash on a giant video screen, and Stremmel saw the second plane hitting the WTC when it was broadcast live, at 9:03 a.m. According to journalist and author Garrett Graff, at that time, "Everyone in the operations center stood there stunned." Stremmel has commented that after seeing the second crash on TV, those in the SIOC "probably knew it was terrorism, but we were in denial. It's like being told you have cancer. You want to deny it for as long as possible." [26]

Even the FBI's top officials were apparently no more aware of what was happening than members of the public were. FBI Director Robert Mueller was holding his daily briefing in his conference room at the FBI headquarters when the attacks began. All of the bureau's assistant directors were with him, including Dale Watson, the head of counterterrorism. They all learned of the crisis when someone interrupted the briefing and told them a plane had crashed into the WTC. However, they were initially unclear about whether this was a terrorist attack. "How could a plane not see the tower? It's so clear out today," Mueller reportedly said. Some of the group then went to the office of Deputy Director Thomas Pickard. There they saw the second crash live on television and realized for certain that this was terrorism. Only then did Watson go to his office and activate the SIOC for crisis mode, and Pickard and Mueller quickly made their way to the SIOC. [27]

Agents at the FBI's Washington, DC, field office were just as poorly informed. The Washington field office was one of the facilities David McNulty called after the second hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower of the WTC. However, it could provide him with no additional information on the crisis. "It was a fruitless effort," McNulty has commented. [28]

PENTAGON INTELLIGENCE CENTER HAD 'NO ADDITIONAL RELEVANT INFORMATION'

After calling the SIOC, Mark Stuart called the National Military Joint Intelligence Center (NMJIC) about the hijacking of Flight 11. [29] The NMJIC, which is located in the Joint Staff area of the Pentagon, constantly monitors worldwide developments for any looming crisis that might require U.S. involvement. [30] Agencies such as the CIA and the NSA have full-time representatives there. According to James Clapper, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, "During actual crises, NMJIC serves as a clearinghouse for all requests for national-level intelligence information." [31]

The NMJIC should presumably, therefore, have been aware of the crisis on September 11 from the outset. But when Stuart called the Air Force desk there, he found that the NMJIC "had no additional relevant information" it could provide him with. [32] Furthermore, personnel in the NMJIC appear to have remained poorly informed about the unfolding emergency after Stuart contacted them, and they were even unaware that their building had been hit when it was attacked at 9:37 a.m.

Marc Garlasco, a senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, was in the NMJIC on September 11. Garlasco has recalled that he was in a meeting that morning and only learned of the crisis when a colleague said to him, "Oh, you know, [the World Trade Center has] been hit." He then started watching the television coverage of the crash and therefore saw Flight 175 hitting the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.

However, when the Pentagon was attacked over 30 minutes later, Garlasco was unaware that his building had been hit. The NMJIC is on the opposite side of the Pentagon to where the impact occurred, so Garlasco did not feel or hear the explosion from the attack. More significantly, considering that the NMJIC presumably had advanced capabilities and also had a key role to play during an event like 9/11, those in the center apparently were not immediately informed of the attack on the Pentagon by any other means. Garlasco has recalled that he "was really still surprised when the boys in black pajamas ran into the office with their submachine guns and screamed, 'Evacuate, we've just been hit.'" (Presumably "the boys in black pajamas" were members of the Defense Protective Service--the law enforcement agency that guards the Pentagon.) [33]

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY LEARNED OF THE ATTACKS FROM CNN

Another agency we might reasonably expect to have been following the 9/11 attacks from the outset is the National Security Agency. This is one of the facilities that David McNulty contacted in his search for information. [34]

The NSA, at Fort Meade, Maryland, is responsible for collecting and analyzing foreign communications, and protecting U.S. government communications and information systems. Author James Bamford, an expert on the agency, called it "the largest, most secret, and most advanced spy organization on the planet." In 2001, it had around 38,000 employees, which was more than the CIA and FBI combined. [35]

And yet McNulty has recalled that when he phoned the NSA's "24-hour information desk" at some time after the second plane hit the WTC, "they knew nothing more than I did." McNulty has commented, "We were all getting our information from CNN." [36]

Even Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA at the time, was unaware of the crisis when the WTC towers were hit. Hayden was in his office, holding a routine meeting with a few senior agency officials, when he received his first notification of what was happening. His executive assistant came in and told him a plane had hit the World Trade Center. [37] Hayden thought the crash was probably a "horrible accident." [38] "The immediate image I had was a light plane, off course, bad flying," he has said.

Hayden walked over to his desk, on which a television was showing the coverage of the burning WTC. Hayden "thought that was a big fire for a small plane," he has recalled. All the same, he continued with his meeting. [39] Hayden only realized the U.S. was under terrorist attack when his executive assistant came in again, shortly after 9:00 a.m., and told him about the second plane hitting the WTC. At that point, he has recalled, "it removed all doubt from me ... that this had to be an attack." [40]

NSA'S 'WARNING BELL FOR A PLANNED ATTACK' LEARNED OF THE CRISIS FROM TV

The NSA's lack of awareness is particularly notable because the agency has a facility that is meant to detect when an attack is about to take place. The Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center (DEFSMAC), located in the NSA's main operations building, is intended to serve as "the nation's chief warning bell for a planned attack on America," according to Bamford.

DEFSMAC "serves as the focal point for 'all-source' intelligence--listening posts, early-warning satellites, human agents, and seismic detectors," and its analysts spend their time "closely monitoring all intercepts flooding in; examining the latest overhead photography; and analyzing data from early-warning satellites 22,300 miles above the equator." The center will then "flash the intelligence to the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, and other emergency command centers."

A former NSA official explained that DEFSMAC "has all the inputs from all the assets and is a warning activity. They probably have a better feel for any worldwide threat to this country from missiles, aircraft, or overt military activities, better and more timely, at instant fingertip availability, than any group in the United States."

And yet DEFSMAC failed to pick up the signs of the 9/11 attacks. Bamford noted, "On the morning of September 11, DEFSMAC learned of the massive airborne attacks after the fact--not from America's multibillion-dollar spy satellites or its worldwide network of advanced listening posts, or its army of human spies, but from a dusty, off-the-shelf TV set."

DEFSMAC's failure would have had serious consequences. According to Bamford, "Upon receiving indicators that an attack was imminent, DEFSMAC officials would immediately send out near-real-time and in-depth, all-source intelligence alerts to almost 200 'customers,' including the White House Situation Room, the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, the DIA Alert Center, and listening posts around the world." [41] But because DEFSMAC failed to pick up signs of the 9/11 attacks, these "customers" would have lacked the early warning the center should have provided.

MILITARY INTERNET SYSTEM HAD NO RELEVANT INFORMATION

While they were seeking information on the terrorist attacks, an intelligence officer at NEADS and David McNulty at Andrews Air Force Base checked the "SIPRNET." [42] This is the U.S. Department of Defense's version of the Internet, which can handle classified information, up to the secret level. [43]

The SIPRNET should have been a valuable tool for keeping military personnel updated with the latest information on the attacks. Colonel Brian Meenan, the director of the military cell at the FAA's Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, explained the benefits of his unit having a SIPRNET terminal installed shortly before 9/11. He said that having the terminal meant "we could immediately look at NORAD and [Defense Department] plans as they evolved; filter, package, and format them, then walk out to the [FAA] national operations manager--who had control of the entire national airspace system--and give him current visibility into ... fighter, tanker, and support aircraft activities." [44]

And yet McNulty was unable to find out anything more from the SIPRNET than what he had learned from television. [45] At NEADS, Mark Stuart instructed a colleague to search the SIPRNET for information relating to the attacks. But Stuart has recalled that his colleague "found none that morning or afternoon." [46]

OTHER MILITARY UNITS HAD 'NO FURTHER INFORMATION'

Stuart and McNulty contacted several military units as they sought information about the attacks, but without success. McNulty called the Air Combat Command Intelligence Squadron at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, and the 609th Air Intelligence Squadron at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, but both were unable to provide him with any new information. [47] And Stuart, after contacting the NMJIC, called an intelligence officer with the 1st Air Force at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida. But, Stuart has recalled, the 1st Air Force had "no further information" on the attacks. [48]

Other accounts reveal that personnel in the NORAD operations center in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado--another key facility--were similarly unaware of what was happening. The Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC), according to NORAD, collected data "from a worldwide system of satellites, radars, and other sensors, and processes that information on sophisticated computer systems to support critical NORAD and U.S. Space Command missions." [49] The Toronto Star reported that the center's role was "to fuse every critical piece of information NORAD has into a concise and crystalline snapshot." [50] Airman described CMOC personnel as "the eyes and ears of North America," and stated that "nothing escapes their unsleeping watch." [51]

And since NORAD is the military organization responsible for monitoring and defending U.S. airspace, we might reasonably expect personnel in its operations center to have been very much aware of the crisis taking place in the skies over America on September 11. But, as officers who were on duty in the CMOC that day have made clear, this was not the case.

Lieutenant Colonel William Glover said that the morning of September 11 was his "first time ... thinking about the fog of war, because we didn't know what was going on." [52] Lieutenant Colonel Steven Armstrong recalled that those in the CMOC "were out there in an information void, just looking for anything that we could find." [53] Armstrong said, "The majority of the information we're getting at the time is literally off the TV." [54] And Major General Rick Findley commented, "We were a little bit behind the power curve most of that morning as we were trying to figure out exactly what transpired." [55]

WAS THE INFORMATION BLACKOUT CAUSED BY SABOTAGE?

The evidence described above raises many questions that require serious investigation. Other facilities, besides those discussed here, were presumably in the same "information void" during the 9/11 attacks. Investigators and researchers should determine if this was the case. If it was, which facilities were affected, and what problems did they experience?

We also need to know when key facilities and agencies, such as those contacted by Mark Stuart and David McNulty, finally gained a greater awareness of the crisis and became able to make use of their own capabilities, rather than having to rely on television reports as their main source of information. And we need to determine what caused the information blackout. Have previous investigations looked into this? If so, what did they find?

If, as previously suggested, the lack of awareness within the U.S. government and military of the catastrophic events on September 11 was due to sabotage, this would have serious implications. The 19 young Arabs accused of hijacking four planes and carrying out the attacks would surely have lacked the capability to cause an information blackout across numerous intelligence facilities. Highly skilled individuals with knowledge and experience of how the military and intelligence agencies operate must presumably have been involved. If this was the case, it would mean that men who had worked for the U.S. military or U.S. intelligence agencies likely helped plan and carry out the 9/11 attacks.

--------------------------

NOTES

[1] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart, USAF, Intelligence Officer, Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS)." 9/11 Commission, October 30, 2003; "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Major David McNulty, Chief of Intelligence, 121st Fighter Squadron, Air National Guard, Andrews Air Force Base." 9/11 Commission, March 11, 2004.

[2] Michael Bronner, "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes." Vanity Fair, August 2006; Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. New York: Twelve, 2008, p. 203.

[3] Steve Goldstein, "Focus of Training for Terrorist Attacks Has Been Chemical, Biological Warfare." Knight Ridder, September 11, 2001; "Andrews AFB, Maryland." GlobalSecurity.org, May 7, 2011.

[4] Lynn Spencer, Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11. New York: Free Press, 2008, p. 122; Andrew Wackerfuss, "'We Did What Guardsmen Always Do': The Air National Guard Responds on 9/11." New Patriot, July/August 2011.

[5] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, p. 20.

[6] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart."

[7] Leslie Filson, Air War Over America: Sept. 11 Alters Face of Air Defense Mission. Tyndall Air Force Base, FL: 1st Air Force, 2003, p. 79; "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Major David McNulty"; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 155-156.

[8] Dan Verton, Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyber-Terrorism. Emeryville, CA: McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2003, p. 151.

[9] "Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events: September 11, 2001." Federal Aviation Administration, September 17, 2001; "Transcript American Airlines Flight 11." New York Times, October 16, 2001; "Flight Path Study: American Airlines Flight 11." National Transportation Safety Board, February 19, 2002.

[10] Mark Clayton, "Controllers' Tale of Flight 11." Christian Science Monitor, September 13, 2001; Staff Report: The Four Flights. 9/11 Commission, August 26, 2004, p. 9.

[11] "Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events"; 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 19.

[12] "Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events"; "Flight Path Study: American Airlines Flight 11"; "The Skies Over America: The Air Traffic Controllers on 9/11 Saw the Nightmare Coming." Dateline, NBC, September 9, 2006.

[13] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Darrel Smith." 9/11 Commission, July 13, 2004.

[14] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 5-6; Staff Report: The Four Flights, pp. 8-12.

[15] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart."

[16] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Major David McNulty."

[17] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart."

[18] United States Government Interagency Domestic Terrorism Concept of Operations Plan. Washington, DC: Federal Emergency Management Agency, January 2001, p. 20.

[19] "FBI Opens High-Tech Crisis Center." CNN, November 20, 1998.

[20] "Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) Fact Sheet." Federal Bureau of Investigation, January 18, 2004.

[21] "FBI Opens High-Tech Crisis Center."

[22] Jim McGee, "In Federal Law Enforcement, 'All the Walls Are Down.'" Washington Post, October 14, 2001; "Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) Fact Sheet."

[23] Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002, p. 5.

[24] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Attorney General John D. Ashcroft." 9/11 Commission, December 17, 2003.

[25] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart."

[26] Jim McGee, "In Federal Law Enforcement, 'All the Walls Are Down'"; Garrett M. Graff, The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011, p. 317.

[27] "September 11, 2001." New Yorker, September 24, 2001; Ronald Kessler, The Bureau, pp. 419-420; Garrett M. Graff, The Threat Matrix, pp. 314-315.

[28] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Major David McNulty"; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 155-156.

[29] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart."

[30] Ernest Blazar, "Inside the Ring." Washington Times, September 25, 1997; "National Military Joint Intelligence Alert Center." Joint Chiefs of Staff, February 6, 2006.

[31] James R. Clapper Jr., "Challenging Joint Military Intelligence." Joint Force Quarterly, Spring 1994.

[32] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart."

[33] "The Pentagon on Sept. 11: One Survivor's Account." Fresh Air, NPR, May 22, 2008.

[34] Leslie Filson, Air War Over America, p. 79.

[35] James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. New York: Doubleday, 2001, pp. 4, 482; George Cahlink, "Breaking the Code." Government Executive, September 1, 2001.

[36] Leslie Filson, Air War Over America, p. 79; "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Major David McNulty."

[37] James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies. New York: Doubleday, 2004, pp. 18, 20; Sara Sorcher, "Former, Current Officials Reflect on Bin Laden Hunt a Decade After 9/11: Video." National Journal, September 8, 2011.

[38] Ariel Sabar, "General Goes a Little Public to Enhance Image of NSA." Baltimore Sun, April 19, 2002; "9/11 10 Years After: Interview With Andy Card; Interview With Michael Hayden." Live Event/Special, CNN, September 11, 2011.

[39] James Bamford, A Pretext for War, pp. 18, 20.

[40] Ibid., p. 33; "9/11 10 Years After: Interview With Andy Card; Interview With Michael Hayden."

[41] James Bamford, A Pretext for War, pp. 33-35.

[42] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart"; "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Major David McNulty."

[43] Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 155; Sharon Weinberger, "What is SIPRNET?" Popular Mechanics, December 1, 2010.

[44] William B. Scott, "Command Cells Speed Airspace Reactivation." Aviation Week & Space Technology, June 10, 2002.

[45] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Major David McNulty"; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 155-156.

[46] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart."

[47] Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 155-156.

[48] "Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Lt. Col. Mark E. Stuart."

[49] "Cheyenne Mountain." North American Aerospace Defense Command, November 27, 1999.

[50] Scott Simmie, "The Scene at NORAD on Sept. 11: Playing Russian War Games ... and Then Someone Shouted to Look at the Monitor." Toronto Star, December 9, 2001.

[51] Pat McKenna, "The Border Guards." Airman, January 1996.

[52] "NORAD." The Early Edition, CBC, September 8, 2011.

[53] "In Their Own Words--NORAD Members Recall September 11, Part 3: Steve Armstrong." North American Aerospace Defense Command, September 9, 2011.

[54] Kevin Simpson, "Rearmed Forces: 9/11 Changed Military Life in Colorado." Denver Post, August 28, 2011.

[55] Steve Mertl, "Canadian General Who Led NORAD on 9/11 Praises its Performance, Considering." Canadian Press, September 10, 2006.

Edited September 22, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

^{FOREKNOWLEDGE}

^{- THE PUT OPTIONS}

------------------------------------------------------------

^{FOREKNOWLEDGE}

^{THE FBI SHUT DOWN OF ARAB MUSLIM WEB SITES}

^{IN THE DAYS LEADING UP TO 9/11.}

^{http://whatreallyhap...ES/fbishut.html}

^{+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++}

^{FBI Raids Surround Attack}

^{Agents Yank Muslim Websites, Confiscate Videos}

^{Six days before the attack the FBI and 80-member task force descended on InfoCom Corporation in Richardson, Texas to shut it down, including its}

^[...]

So they supposedly closed some websites. what does that prove or even hint at?

Why Were U.S. Intelligence Facilities in an 'Information Void' During the 9/11 Attacks?

http://911blogger.co...ing-911-attacks

--------------------------------------------------

When the terrorist attacks began on September 11, 2001, numerous U.S. intelligence agencies and facilities that should have been closely following the catastrophic events taking place in the skies over America were unaware that anything was wrong. Because of their particular responsibilities and their advanced capabilities, agencies such as the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) should have been among the first to learn the details of the crisis. But, instead, they were apparently in an

I missed where the author despite all his huffing and puffing showed how the supposed lack of information delayed attempts to intercept the jets or otherwise furthured the plot.

I asked you for some specific info in my previous post, see if you can provide it.

Edited September 23, 2012 by Len Colby

[Steven Gaal]

So they supposedly closed some websites. what does that prove or even hint at? // END Colby

FOREKNOWLEDGE

Please show where Posterman, rather than // END COLBY

I asked you for some specific info in my previous post, see if you can provide it. //end COLBY

======================

POSTERMAN ???????????

[Len Colby]

So they supposedly closed some websites. what does that prove or even hint at? // END Colby

FOREKNOWLEDGE

Please show where Posterman, rather than // END COLBY

I asked you for some specific info in my previous post, see if you can provide it. //end COLBY

======================

POSTERMAN ???????????

Poteshman. You don't know how to spell xxxx but wanna be a smart ass because I misspelled an unusual surname?!

[Steven Gaal]

Here's the money quote

Steven Gaal, on 21 September 2012 - 05:43 PM, said:

Were they random, the American purchases had only a 1% probability of occurrence; the United Airlines put-option purchasing was less improbable, but on September 6 had only a 4% probability of occurrence (both measures obtained by comparisons of the airline values reported on p. 1720, Table 4, to the benchmark values reported on p. 1713, Table 1).

If you had simply posted that instead of resorting to your typical infantile behaviour we could have moved this along several posts ago. Please show where Posterman, rather than Zarembeka reached this conclusion. The key part of the later's claim above was "were they random" they weren't see the previously cited 9/11 Myths link.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Poteshman. You don't know how to spell xxxx but wanna be a smart ass because I misspelled an unusual surname?!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Did you fail 1st grade?

lier

   [lahy-er] noun

a person or thing that lies, as in wait or in ambush.

xxxx

   [lahy-er] noun

a person who tells lies.

lyre

   [lahy^uhr] noun

a musical instrument of ancient Greece consisting of a soundbox made typically from a turtle shell

MR COLBY AKA MR DOUBLE STANDARD

==========================================

Poteshman.didnt have all the data. THE OTHERS DID.

Limited SEC Investigative Evidence Made Public

On January 14, 2009, two post-September 11th SEC investigating memos were finally made publicly available. ¹`

The simpler one, prepared on May 11, 2004 for the 9/11 Commission, stated that the volume of put-option trades for United on September 6, 2001 (for a $30 strike price with expiration on October 20, 2001) had been erroneously reported in the SEC data: the correct value should have been 1500 – i.e., for 150,000 shares – not 2000. The memo explained that the SEC had missed the actual cancellation of an intended 500 put sale (included, but not a purchase). The Option Clearing House (OCC) had the correct number (http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00138.pdf ²

Still, judging by the reported change the next day in open interest (open interest is the amount of the put contract remaining unexercised), a 500 purchase did indeed occur on September 7. In other words, a volume of 2000 occurred over two days, not one day (1500, then 500). This would not seem to affect Poteshman’s work since he used the change in open interest for his measure rather than volume data, but it does raise a general concern about the SEC data. A volume level of 2000 for the first day does appear both in Zarembka (p. 66) and in Chesney, et al. (2010, p. 35, Table 2) and is implicitly retained in the Commission’s own report despite that 2004 memo it had received (Zarembka, p. 68).

Much more important, another memo was simultaneously released that had been prepared back on September 17-18, 2003 and had named the Options Hotline newsletterand its editor Steve Sarnoff as responsible for faxing on September 9, 2001 some 2000 subscribers the recommendation to buy put options on American Airlines (http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00139.pdf, p. 14). The memo further stated that the SEC interviewed 28 people who purchased these options and 26 had said that they had done so because of the newsletter. This memo reported 27 additional subscribers, not interviewed, as additional purchasers of that put option.

The same memo went on to report that an unnamed large institutional investor in hedge funds had undertaken the 2000 United put-option purchases – i.e., for 200,000 shares – but was explained away by the fact that the same investor had also purchased 115,000 shares of American stock on September 10. This information does appear in the Commission’s report, p. 499, fn. 130.

A third memo for the 9/11 Commission, this one dated April 24, 2004, reported an interview with Ken Breen, Deputy Chief, Business and Securities Fraud Section, Department of Justice. It is also important. It reports that Breen “was not sure about potential trading in index futures (because the volume is so great that analysis proved impossible)” (http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00074.pdf). In other words, the exhaustive governmental investigation was not so exhaustive after all, by its own admission.

Edited September 24, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

Here's the money quote

Steven Gaal, on 21 September 2012 - 05:43 PM, said:

Were they random, the American purchases had only a 1% probability of occurrence; the United Airlines put-option purchasing was less improbable, but on September 6 had only a 4% probability of occurrence (both measures obtained by comparisons of the airline values reported on p. 1720, Table 4, to the benchmark values reported on p. 1713, Table 1).

If you had simply posted that instead of resorting to your typical infantile behaviour we could have moved this along several posts ago. Please show where Posterman, rather than Zarembeka reached this conclusion. The key part of the later's claim above was "were they random" they weren't see the previously cited 9/11 Myths link.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Poteshman. You don't know how to spell xxxx but wanna be a smart ass because I misspelled an unusual surname?!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Did you fail 1st grade?

lier

   [lahy-er] noun

a person or thing that lies, as in wait or in ambush.

xxxx

   [lahy-er] noun

a person who tells lies.

lyre

   [lahy^uhr] noun

a musical instrument of ancient Greece consisting of a soundbox made typically from a turtle shell

MR COLBY AKA MR DOUBLE STANDARD

What are you ranting about? What double standard?

==========================================

Poteshman.didnt have all the data. THE OTHERS DID.

Limited SEC Investigative Evidence Made Public

On January 14, 2009, two post-September 11th SEC investigating memos were finally made publicly available. ¹`

The simpler one, prepared on May 11, 2004 for the 9/11 Commission, stated that the volume of put-option trades for United on September 6, 2001 (for a $30 strike price with expiration on October 20, 2001) had been erroneously reported in the SEC data: the correct value should have been 1500 – i.e., for 150,000 shares – not 2000. The memo explained that the SEC had missed the actual cancellation of an intended 500 put sale (included, but not a purchase). The Option Clearing House (OCC) had the correct number (http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00138.pdf ²

Still, judging by the reported change the next day in open interest (open interest is the amount of the put contract remaining unexercised), a 500 purchase did indeed occur on September 7. In other words, a volume of 2000 occurred over two days, not one day (1500, then 500). This would not seem to affect Poteshman’s work since he used the change in open interest for his measure rather than volume data, but it does raise a general concern about the SEC data. A volume level of 2000 for the first day does appear both in Zarembka (p. 66) and in Chesney, et al. (2010, p. 35, Table 2) and is implicitly retained in the Commission’s own report despite that 2004 memo it had received (Zarembka, p. 68).

Much more important, another memo was simultaneously released that had been prepared back on September 17-18, 2003 and had named the Options Hotline newsletterand its editor Steve Sarnoff as responsible for faxing on September 9, 2001 some 2000 subscribers the recommendation to buy put options on American Airlines (http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00139.pdf, p. 14). The memo further stated that the SEC interviewed 28 people who purchased these options and 26 had said that they had done so because of the newsletter. This memo reported 27 additional subscribers, not interviewed, as additional purchasers of that put option.

The same memo went on to report that an unnamed large institutional investor in hedge funds had undertaken the 2000 United put-option purchases – i.e., for 200,000 shares – but was explained away by the fact that the same investor had also purchased 115,000 shares of American stock on September 10. This information does appear in the Commission’s report, p. 499, fn. 130.

A third memo for the 9/11 Commission, this one dated April 24, 2004, reported an interview with Ken Breen, Deputy Chief, Business and Securities Fraud Section, Department of Justice. It is also important. It reports that Breen “was not sure about potential trading in index futures (because the volume is so great that analysis proved impossible)” (http://media.nara.go...11MFR-00074.pdf). In other words, the exhaustive governmental investigation was not so exhaustive after all, by its own admission.

What are you ranting about? There was nothing about 100 to 1 odds in the parts you quoted.

[Steven Gaal]

The Hundred to one came from the KPFA radio program ,no longer archived. The Article post # 17 give the figure 0.984 probability informed trade (per calculator conversion probabilty to odds ,link given) this is 49 to one odds. HOWEVER there are simultaneously contiguous 12 other stocks (911 related stocks with put options) with these odds. In probabilty analysis simultaneous contiguous events are multiplied. THUS its 49 to one 13 times ,this odds are equal to 9.387 times 10 to the 21st power to one , an astronomical number. CASE CLOSED

49 to one ODDS per ONE STOCK AMR

When you calculate the 13 related stocks (13 of which were related to September 11th.,above quote) (49 x 49 (13 times) ect) answer = foreknowledge

(9.387480337647754e+21 =astronomical number)

foreknowledge

foreknowledge

foreknowledge

foreknowledge

foreknowledge

Edited September 25, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

The Hundred to one came from the KPFA radio program ,no longer archived.

LOL You insisted various times on this thread I was a xxxx (or 'lier') because I said I couldn't find the 100 to 1 stat. in your posts and now you tell us it "came from the KPFA radio program ,no longer archived"

HOWEVER there are simultaneously contiguous 12 other stocks (911 related stocks with put options) with these odds. In probabilty analysis simultaneous contiguous events are multiplied. THUS its 49 to one 13 times ,this odds are equal to 9.387 times 10 to the 21st power to one , an astronomical number.

Logically flawed the puts cited in the chart only involved 9 companies were were either aircraft manufacturers (Boeing), airlines (AA, UA, Delta & KLM) or investment banks (Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan) it is quite normal for the fortunes of various companies to rise and fall together. Also Chesney, et al seem only to have calculated the mathematical odds without taking external factors into consideration. American's stock price fall 12% Oct. 24 - Sep. 9 '01 and on Sept. 7 it announced various problems which were reported in the press. One news report started "AMR Corp. warned investors Friday that it would lose a lot more money this quarter than last quarter and would have a "significant" fourth-quarter deficit. If the losses materialize as expected, it will mark the first time since 1993 that AMR has posted a full-year loss..." To make a long story short there were a few reasons to short AMR stock. The situation was much the same with the other companies involved.

http://911myths.com/index.php/Put_Options#American_Airlines

[Steven Gaal]

LOL You insisted various times on this thread I was a xxxx (or 'lier') because I said I couldn't find the 100 to 1 stat. in your posts and now you tell us it "came from the KPFA radio program ,no longer archived" // END Colby

FOUND IT

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=18904&st=0&p=249650&hl=kpfaentry249650

POST # 7

INSIDER TRADING BEFORE 911 (that FOREKNOWLEDGE)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/76605 audio talk

=============================

Guns and Butter, for January 4, 2012 - 1:00pm

Click to Play:

Download this clip (mp3, 10.28 megabytes)

Play this clip in your Computer's media player

Link:

Embed:

Guns and Butter

"Evidence of Insider Trading Before 9/11" with Paul Zarembka. Informed Trading; Insider Trading; Put Options; The Journal of Business; The 9/11 Commission Report; three scientific studies on insider trading; Professor Potasman Study from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Open Interest; Exercising Put Options; Quintile; Hedging; University of Wisconsin, Madison Study; Chesney Study; Conclusion.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Logically flawed the puts cited in the chart only involved 9 companies were were either aircraft manufacturers (Boeing), airlines (AA, UA, Delta & KLM) or investment banks (Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan) it is quite normal for the fortunes of various companies to rise and fall together. // END Colby

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The gains from exercising put options, reported in Table 2 for the 13 identified cases of informed trading before September 11th, do not depend upon the econometric procedure, but rather are factually based, close to the maximum possible.

=======================================

News to Colby 9 not equal to 13

Table 2: Evidence of Informed Put-Option Purchases before September 11th

AMERICAN 0.98 probablility via calculator ( link provided) 49 to one.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Ive tried to inform Colby (pun intended) of the evidence of FOREKNOWLEDGE , but no matter of the truth of it he emotionally cant except it.

Edited September 26, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

LOL You insisted various times on this thread I was a xxxx (or 'lier') because I said I couldn't find the 100 to 1 stat. in your posts and now you tell us it "came from the KPFA radio program ,no longer archived" // END Colby

FOUND IT

http://educationforu...fa

POST # 7

INSIDER TRADING BEFORE 911 (that FOREKNOWLEDGE)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/76605 audio talk

[...]

As if I, or anyone else, had the obligation to listen to a 60 interview. In anycase you said the information was in this thread, in fact the is from a different one and was posted 6 months ago.

Logically flawed the puts cited in the chart only involved 9 companies were were either aircraft manufacturers (Boeing), airlines (AA, UA, Delta & KLM) or investment banks (Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan) it is quite normal for the fortunes of various companies to rise and fall together. // END Colby

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The gains from exercising put options, reported in Table 2 for the 13 identified cases of informed tradingbefore September 11th, do not depend upon the econometric procedure, but rather are factually based, close to the maximum possible.

=======================================

News to Colby 9not equal to 13

Your reading comprehension has failed you again, 2 industries, 9 companies /13 transaction

Table 2: Evidence of Informed Put-Option Purchases before September 11th

AMERICAN 0.98 probablility via calculator ( link provided) 49 to one.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Ive tried to inform Colby (pun intended) of the evidence of FOREKNOWLEDGE , but no matter of the truth of it he emotionally cant except it.

You are the one with the apparent mental block, as I've explained a few times already there were good reasons for people to short AA and the other companies involved that did not involve insider trading.

[Steven Gaal]

For the entire set of fourteen companies studied, only 37 incidents are identified: 13 spikes identifiable before September 11th as reported in Table 2, 14 associated with earnings announcements (all but 4 beforehand, 2 on same day, 2 after), 6 associated with mergers and acquisitions (4 beforehand, 2 same day), and 4 not identified. In other words, spikes are being shown to relate to real events, most frequently anticipating them.

As if I, or anyone else, had the obligation to listen to a 60 interview. In anycase you said the information was in this thread, in fact the is from a different one and was posted 6 months ago. // COLBY END

YES I THOUGHT IT 100 to one odds WAS BECAUSE THE MAN IN THE AUDIO TALKED ABOUT THE NEW ANALYSIS FROM THE NEW DATUM, he said 100 to one .WHEN I USED THE CALCULATOR (see link ) IT TURNED OUT TO BE 49 to ONE odds. However lets go with your incorrect 9 companies, thats 49 X 49 X 49 X 49 X 49 X 49 X 49 X 49 x 49 to one odds = foreknowledge.

Edited September 27, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

There are a few problems with these theories "Given the prices at the time, this [the Sept. 6 and 10 put orders] would have yielded speculators between $2 million and $4 million in profit" perhaps to a nurse (or an English teacher) that's a king's ransom but in the real world it's not a lot of money, not really enough to risk blowing such an operation. Also as noted earlier American's stock price had fallen 12% since Aug. 24 and on Sept 6 made a string of profit warnings but some think the only explanation for spikes in put orders, one that day (2,075 puts) the other two weekdays later(2,282 puts) is a conspiracy. These spikes were not even unprecedented or the biggest spike in puts that year "there were repeated spikes in put options on American Airlines during the year before Sept. 11, including June 19 with 2,951 puts, June 15 at 1,144 puts, April 16 at 1,019 and Jan. 8 at 1,315 puts." The other companies with supposedly suspicious put spikes happened under similar circumstances. Also several of the put orders people have pointed as evidence of inside knowledge were only marginally tied to 9/11. Why would someone with inside knowledge of the plot buy puts for Delta let alone KLM instead of more for Boeing, American and United ? Why J.P. Morgan and Citigroup, which weren't based at the WTC or even the WFC (across the street) instead of the various financial companies based in those buildings?

http://www.911myths.com/index.php/Not_Much_Stock_In_Put_Conspiracy

http://www.911myths.com/index.php/Put_Options