911 Trillions: Follow the Money

In this documentary, James Corbett approaches the mystery of 9-11 by tracing money flows rather than physical evidence – ie he identifies individuals and companies that plainly had foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks and used it to reap windfall profits.

The three main ways people profited from 9-11 were insurance scams, insider trading and fraudulent electronic transactions. Ironically the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 9-11 Commission and FBI identified some of the same scam artists as Corbett and other private researchers. Bizarrely they declined to indict them owing to “no known ties to al Qaeda.”

Insurance Scams

Key suspects: Larry Silverstein, GMAC (the finance arm of General Motors) and real estate developers Lloyd Goldstein and Joseph Kerr. GMAC, Goldman and Kerr helped finance Silverstein purchase of the Twin towers from the New York Port Authority in July 2001. Immediately on taking possession, Silverstein doubled the insurance coverage from $1.5 billion (the buildings’ assessed value was $1.2 billion) to $3.55 billion. In addition, following the attacks, the Port Authority repaid Silverstein 80% of the original lease. In total, Silverstein netted a $4.5 billion profit from 9-11.

Insider Trading

On Sept 10 2001, the SEC identified a 90% increase in “put options”* for companies whose stocks would tank the week after 9-11:

• United Airlines
• American Airlines
• Morgan Stanley (one of two major tenants in Twin Towers)
• Marsh & McLennan (one of two major tenants in Twin Towers)
• Boeing
• Citigroup
• Axa
• Merrill Lynch
• J P Morgan
• various reinsurers

The SEC also noted a six-fold increase in “call options” on defense contractor Raytheon (manufactured missiles subsequently used in attack on Afghanistan) in the weeks prior to the attacks.

Three of the most prominent insider traders were Mrs and Mrs Wirt D Walker III (distant relatives of George Herbert Walker Bush and business partners with Marvin Bush with links to the Carlyle Group***) and Deutsche Bank, Alex Brown Division, run by to Buzzy Krongard, former consultant to former CIA director James Woolsey Jr.

Fraudulent Electronic Transactions

Marsh & McLannan was responsible for developing Silverstream, an innovative method of paperless electronic transactions. A team of March & McLannan auditors were investigating $100 million in suspicious transactions involving AIG and Deutsche Bank. All were killed in the 9-11 attacks – their data sets conveniently destroyed. A German company Convar was able to reconstruct most of these transactions from hard drives recovered at Ground Zero.

Attack on the Pentagon

The attack on the Pentagon killed the Department of Defense team investigating the $2.3 trillion that went missing from the DOD 2000-2001 budget – and destroyed all their data.

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*A put option lets the option owner sell a stock at its original price when the share price falls – pocket the difference.

**A call option lets the option owner buy a stock at its original price when a share price increases – and pocket the difference.

***Carlyle Group – a global equity management group, closely linked with George H. W. Bush and the bin Laden family.

The Bush Crime Family

Family of Secrets

by Russ Baker

Bloomsbury Press (2009)

Book Review

Family of Secrets is about the Bush family and the Shadow Government responsible for all major domestic and foreign policy decisions over the last sixty years. For evidence, Baker relies partly on declassified documents and partly on face-to-face interviews of corporate executives, low level politicians and retired intelligence officers who have worked closely with the Bush family.

Two-thirds of the book is about George Herbert Walker Bush and CIA ties that date back to 1948 when he left Yale and went to work for Dresser Industries. Baker lays out strong evidence that Dresser and Zapata Petroleum, the oil services company Bush senior started in 1953, served the primary purpose of front companies for global industrial espionage and CIA intelligence gathering.

In this way Bush senior replicated the role his father Prescott Bush played in the World War II spy service Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Prescott was a friend and colleague of founding CIA Director Allen Dulles at the Wall Street law firm Brown Brothers Harriman. Brown Brothers Harriman bought Dresser in 1928.

According to Baker, Bush senior played a pivotal role in helping Dulles create “off- the-shelf” CIA operations – disguised as front companies – to circumvent federal legislation that prohibited the CIA from spying domestically.

For me, the high points of this book include the background Baker provides on Lee Harvey Oswald’s career as a covert CIA operative, the on-off relationship between Bush senior and Oswald’s Dallas control George de Mohrenschildt and the crucial role Bush senior played in setting up Nixon as the fall guy in the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

Baker, in essence, corroborates earlier research by Mae Brussell that the Watergate scandal was a CIA coup to remove Nixon from office.

A third of the book covers the hidden history of George W Bush, including his early alcohol and cocaine abuse, the abortion he organized for one his girlfriends, his purported Christian conversion and his AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard unit – a notorious scandal that would cost CBS anchor Dan Rather his job.

George W’s brothers Neil, Marvin and Jeb receive only brief mention related to their illegal diversion of savings and loan funds, leaving taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars when the savings and loan associations went bust in the late eighties and had to be bailed out.

Baker maintains a nonprofit investigative news service at http://whowhatwhy.org/

Below is a 2009 Ron Reagan radio interview with Russ Baker about Family of Secrets that someone tweeted me:

Russ Baker interview