September 11 attacks advance-knowledge conspiracy theories
Various conspiracy theories allege that certain institutions or individuals had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001. Some of the primary debates include whether the Bush administration or the United States Armed Forces had awareness of the planned attack methods, the precise volume of intelligence that American agencies had regarding al-Qaeda activities inside the United States, whether the put options placed on United Airlines and American Airlines and other trades indicated foreknowledge, and why the identities of the traders have never been made public.
Additional facets of the theories include debate as to whether warnings received from foreign agencies were specific enough to have warranted preventive action, whether domestic intelligence about planned al-Qaeda attacks was thorough enough to have mandated intervention, the extent to which the alleged hijackers were under surveillance prior to the attacks, and whether Israeli Mossad or the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence were aware of an imminent attack.
Using planes as missiles
Immediately following the attacks, President George W. Bush stated that: "Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings", and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice claimed: "no one could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile". An Air Force general called the attack: "something we had never seen before, something we had never even thought of." A few days after the attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced: "There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country." However, Mueller noted that an FBI agent in Minneapolis said Moussaoui might be that type of person that could fly something into the World Trade Center. Mueller said this warning should have been followed more vigorously.Some mainstream media reports have conflicted with these statements, claiming that the FBI, CIA and Executive Branch knew of the threat of planes being used as missiles as early as 1995, following the foiling of the Bojinka plot. In September 2002, one year after the 9/11 attacks, The Chicago Sun-Times reported that:
The FBI had advance indications of plans to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as weapons, but neither acted on them nor distributed the intelligence to local police agencies. From the moment of the September 11 attacks, all high-ranking federal officials insisted that the terrorists' method of operation surprised them. Many continue to stick to that story. Actually, elements of the suicide hijacking plan were known to the FBI as early as 1995 and, if coupled with current information, might have uncovered the plot.
The Pentagon Mass Casualty project was a contingency exercise that was held in the Office of the Secretary of Defense conference room between October 24 and 26, 2000. The exercise required emergency response teams, members of the defense protective services, and U.S. government officials to conduct emergency simulations in preparation for a possible plane crash into the Pentagon.
The book The Terror Timeline includes numerous articles that are often cited to suggest that the method of flying planes into buildings was known by U.S. officials:
- In 1994, there were three examples of failed attempts to deliberately crash planes into buildings, including one where a lone pilot crashed a small plane into the lawn of the White House.
- The Bojinka plot was a foiled large-scale al-Qaeda terrorist attack to blow up eleven airliners and their passengers as they flew from Asia to America, due to take place in January 1995.
- The 2000 edition of the FAA's annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation said that although Osama bin Laden 'is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so,' adding, 'Bin Laden's anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation.'"
- In April 2001, NORAD ran a war game in which the Pentagon was to become incapacitated; a NORAD planner proposed the simulated crash of a hijacked foreign commercial airliner into the Pentagon, but the Joints Chiefs of Staff rejected that scenario as "too unrealistic"
- In July 2001 at the G8 summit in Genoa, anti-aircraft missile batteries were installed following a report that terrorists would try to crash a plane to kill George Bush and other world leaders.
- On the morning of September 11, 2001, the National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for operating U.S. reconnaissance satellites, had scheduled an exercise simulating the crashing of an aircraft into their building, 4 miles from Washington Dulles International Airport.
In the two years before the September 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States. In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagonbut that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic.
That NORAD was aware of the threat of terrorists hijacking commercial airliners within the United States, and using them as guided missiles, was flatly denied by the 9/11 Commission, which asserted several times in their report that "The threat of terrorists hijacking commercial airliners within the United Statesand using them as guided missileswas not recognized by NORAD before 9/11."
The September 11 attacks in 2001 occurred during that year's Global Guardian and Vigilant Guardian joint exercises. That year, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, Vigilant Guardian 'postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union' on North America. In contrast to the 9/11 Commission Report – Michael Ruppert has characterized Vigilant Guardian as "a hijacking drill, not a cold war exercise". He cites direct quotes from participants which indicate "that the drill involved hijacked airliners rather than Russian Bombers". General Arnold, Tech. Sgt. W. Powel and Lt. Col. Dwane Deskins have stated that when they first were informed about hijacked airliners they thought it was "part of the exercise".
The Joint Inquiry of 2002 confirmed that the Intelligence Community had received at least twelve reports over a seven-year period suggesting that terrorists might use planes as weapons. After briefly discussing each of them, it says that "The CIA disseminated several of these reports to the FBI and to agencies responsible for preventive actions. They included the FAA... Despite these reports, the Intelligence Community did not produce any assessments of the likelihood that terrorists would use planes as weapons, and U.S. policymakers apparently remained unaware of this kind of potential threat." Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger testified to the Joint Inquiry:
We heard of the idea of planes as weapons, but I don't recall being presented with any specific threat information about an attack of this nature, or highlighting this threat, or indicating it was more likely than any other
By September 2001, a part of the Pentagon Renovation Program was completed: blast windows and wall reinforcing system, to significantly diminish the Defense Department headquarters' vulnerability to blast damage from a terrorist attack.
Insider trading
The Times reported on September 18 that investigations were underway into the unusually large numbers of shares in insurance companies and airlines sold off before the attack in the UK, Italy, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France, and the US. News accounts in the weeks that followed reported a notable pattern of trading in the options of United and American Airlines, as well as Morgan Stanley and other market activity. An article published in The Journal of Business in 2006 provides statistical evidence of unusual put option market activity days before 9/11:Examination of the option trading leading up to September 11 reveals that there was an unusually high level of put buying. This finding is consistent with informed investors having traded options before the attacks.
In a statement to the 9/11 Commission in 2003, Mindy Kleinberg, of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, said:
Never before on the Chicago Exchange were such large amounts of United and American Airlines options traded. These investors netted a profit of at least $5 million after the September 11 attacks. Interestingly, the names of the investors remain undisclosed and the $5 million remains unclaimed in the Chicago Exchange account.
The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that "Exhaustive investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, FBI, and other agencies have uncovered no evidence that anyone with advance knowledge of the attacks profited through securities transactions." The report further stated:
WTC hard drive restoration operation
In December 2001 and early 2002, there was extensive media coverage of the efforts by the German data retrieval company Convar to reconstruct, using laser scanning technology, data from damaged hard drives recovered from the WTC as part of the investigation into a surge in financial transactions just before the two hijacked planes crashed into New York's World Trade Center. The company's CEO, Peter Henschel, noting that the investigation was being conducted for a number of U.S.-based clients cooperating with the FBI, said that there was suspicion that criminals had used inside knowledge about the attacks to make and authorize financial transactions during the chaos. According to Convar's data retrieval expert Richard Wagner, criminal transactions in excess of 100 million dollars could have been made in the hope that their trail would have disappeared as a result of the destruction of the WTC mainframe computers. As reported by the Heute Journal, a news programme by the German ZDF TV channel, by March 2002 Convar had been able to restore several hundred hard drives from the WTC.However, the 9/11 Commission, in a memorandum entitled "FBI Briefing on Trading" dated October 18, 2003, said that when asked about the media coverage of the hard drive restoration operation, the "assembled agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive recovery effort", further noting that one New York agent argued that it was "extremely unlikely that any hard-drives survived to the extent that they data be recovered."