From “The Corbett Report”
From gold vaults and insurance policies to recovered hard drives and advance trades, the 9/11 money trail is one of the most fascinating and under-explored aspects of the false flag events of September 11, 2001. Join James for this important 25th anniversary 9/11 podcast on the mysteries of the 9/11 financial anomalies.
TRANSCRIPT
In late 2004, enticed by a review in The Japan Times that praised the lucid prose and the dramatic recounting of events contained in The 9/11 Commission Report, I found myself purchasing that now-infamous document from the local bookstore and reading it cover to cover.
Of course, 9/11 researchers will know by now that The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is a tissue of lies and that any information garnered from that report has to be taken with Herculean helpings of sodium chloride.
We know, for example, that the Commission’s deeply conflicted Executive Director, Philip Zelikow, had, along with his senior advisor Ernest May, written an outline of that final report, complete with “chapter headings, subheadings and sub-subheadings” before the Commission had convened even a single staff meeting, a move so outrageous that, when it was eventually discovered by commission staffers, caused those staffers to mock the point by creating their own parody document, “The Warren Commision Report—Preemptive Outline,” which included the chapter heading “Single Bullet: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence Yet. But Really. We’re Sure.”
We know that the 9/11 Commission Report was constructed from legally inadmissible lies, with a full 25% of the report’s footnotes sourcing back to illegally extracted torture confessions, the records of which were then illegally destroyed by the CIA against court order.
And we know that even the 9/11 Commissioners themselves knew that it was a cover up from top-to-bottom and that the entire Commission was “set up to fail.”
In their book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, and in press conferences and interviews at the time the report was released, Kean and Hamilton famously remarked that the commission had been “set up to fail.”
EVAN SOLOMON: Even Lee Hamilton, the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission itself, admits to us that the process he headed up was seriously flawed.
LEE HAMILTON: So there are all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail. We got started late. We had a very short time frame; indeed we had to get it extended. We did not have enough money. They were afraid we were going to hang somebody.
THOMAS KEAN: But it was very difficult. And Lee and I write in our book that we think the commission in many ways was set up to fail.
As it turns out, the majority of the commissioners felt that the commission had been lied to, deliberately obstructed, undermined by the White House, or set up with staff that had conflicts of interest in the investigation.
One of these concerned commissioners, Max Cleland, resigned because the commission had been “deliberately compromised by the President of the United States.”
Commissioner John Lehman, meanwhile, admitted on NBC Nightly News that the Commission had to go through Karl Rove and other senior White House members to access key documents in their investigation and that “[w]e purposely put together a staff that had—in a way—conflicts of interest,” stressing, lest there be any doubt, that “[a]ll of the staff had, to a certain extent, some conflict of interest.”
Commission members even considered bringing criminal charges against Pentagon officials who had deliberately lied to them about the military’s complete lack of response on that day.
But perhaps the most cryptic of all the dissenting commissioners was Bob Kerrey. In 2009 he remarked that 9/11 was a “30-year old conspiracy,” but no mainstream reporter has ever followed up with him to clarify this statement.
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: Do you support a criminal investigation into 9/11? Because I know yours was an exposition. It was not a criminal investigation.
BOB KERREY: I don’t think so, but I don’t know. I mean, I do support a permanent commission to examine not just that but lots of other things in this area.
ROTHE-KUSHEL: But if it’s a permanent cover-up then it’s—I mean, if it is an act of war and it’s hiding things—which everyone on your Commission knew, that the Pentagon was changing their stories, lying to you—then it’s a cover-up of an act of war, and under Article 3 Section 3 of the Constitution, it’s treason. So unless we get to the very bottom of it then we’re still talking a treasonous exposition.
KERREY: This is a longer conversation, I’m not sure we’ll ever get to the bottom of it.
ROTHE-KUSHEL: We have to or we can’t save our country, sir.
KERREY: I don’t think—well, if that’s the condition upon which we’re going to be saving our country—because the problem is, it’s a 30-year-old conspiracy.
ROTHE-KUSHEL: No, I’m talking about 9/11.
KERREY: That’s what I’m talking about.
ROTHE-KUSHEL: Oh, you are. You mean . . .
KERREY: Anyway, I gotta run.
SOURCE: 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey finally confesses 9-11 Commission could not do it’s job – Part 3 of 3
SOURCE: 9/11 Whistleblowers
But sitting in my Japanese apartment in January 2005, I knew none of these things. At that time, wrapped in the bubble of ignorance that decades of statist indoctrination and establishment media had blown around me and having done no independent research into the topic myself, I was prepared to take the Commission and its pronouncements more or less at face value.
But even so, there was one passage in particular that jumped out at me: “To date, the US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance.”
Even to me, a then-credulous reader of a report that came with the imprimatur of a national commission and the full backing of the US government and establishment media, the passage struck me as odd. When have we ever heard a pronouncement that the question of the funding of a crime is of “little practical significance”?
On the contrary. Haven’t we all heard the phrase, popularized in All the President’s Men and repeated ad nauseum ever since, that the golden rule of any criminal investigation is that we must “follow the money”?
DEEP THROAT: Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House. The truth is these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand.
WOODWARD: Hunt’s come in from the cold. Supposedly he’s got a lawyer with $25,000 in a brown paper bag.
DEEP THROAT: Follow the money.
WOODWARD: What do you mean? Where?
DEEP THROAT: Oh, I can’t tell you that.
WOODWARD: But you could tell me that.
DEEP THROAT: No, I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction if I can, but that’s all. Just follow the money
SOURCE: All the President’s Men | Follow The Money Scene | Warner Bros. Entertainment
Why, then, did the 9/11 Commission exhort us not to adhere to this investigative dictum?
And, even more puzzlingly, why has the 9/11 Truth movement—a movement whose very existence is predicated on the debunking of every lie propounded by the 9/11 Commission and all the other official government sources of information about the events of September 11, 2001—seemingly agreed with the 9/11 Commission Report on this point? Why has there been so little attention paid to this, the most glaring and obvious loose string in the tapestry of lies that is the Official Story of 9/11?
It’s not like there is a lack of fascinating stories to be investigated.
Of course, the first and most obvious lie would be the 9/11 Commission Report’s profession of ignorance about the “origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks.” We now know, for example, that US government investigators did know about the funds and other material aid provided to Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar by Omar al-Bayoumi, and that this was specifically being done “at the behest of the CIA through the Saudi intelligence service.”
But, to be fair, this is the false 9/11 money trail that is meant to be discovered in order to draw would-be money trail researchers into the limited hangout of 9/11. This tantalizing money trail, dutifully documented in court filings from the Office of Military Commission, serves a triple purpose.
Firstly, it is meant to buttress the lie that the alleged hijackers actually were in control of the planes on 9/11 and actually were responsible for those spectacular attacks, instead of—as they were—patsies whose legends were carefully constructed by the intelligence agencies in order to create a plausible cookie crumb trail leading well-meaning government investigators to blame the false flag events of September 11th on “Al Qaeda.”
Secondly, it is meant to be part of the ongoing blackmail that the US government holds over the Saudis, another one of the tantalizing pieces of information buried in redacted pages and obscure court documents that on a moment’s notice, could be suddenly “discovered” by a government official and dutifully reported by an establishment press in order to whip the public into hysteria over the Saudi menace, conveniently omitting the fact that these patsies were being run “at the behest of the CIA.”
Thirdly, it is meant as the final escape hatch for the 9/11 perpetrators should 9/11 Truth make any serious headway in the quest to bring those perpetrators to justice. “Yes, of course the CIA was running these dastardly Al Qaeda terrorists,” this limited hangout story, first propounded by Richard Clarke, goes. “You see, the CIA were trying to recruit sources inside Al Qaeda and—wouldn’t you know it!—the would-be double agents triple-crossed us and went ahead with the attacks!”
CLARKE: For me, to this day it is inexplicable why, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn’t tell me, that the director of the Counterterrorism Center didn’t tell me, that the other 48 people in CIA who knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over 12 months.
JOHN DUFFY: They were stopped from getting to you and stopped from getting to the White House.
CLARKE: And stopped from getting to the FBI and the Defense Department. We therefore conclude that there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.
RAY NOWOSIELSKI: How high level?
CLARKE: I would think it would have to be made by the director.
SOURCE: Interview #07 (Washington, DC)
But there are many other incredibly important avenues of investigation for would-be 9/11 money trail researchers to explore.
There is of course the fascinating saga of “Lucky” Larry Silverstein, who managed to use just $14 million of his own money to secure a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers (along with World Trade Center Buildings 4 and 5, two 9-story office buildings, and 400,000 square feet of retail space) just five weeks before the 9/11 attacks. By insisting on insuring the buildings for $3.55 billion (more than double the $1.5 billion insurance policy previously held by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and nearly three times the $1.2 billion valuation assigned to the buildings earlier that year), by insisting on a clause giving his consortium the right to rebuild the structures if they were destroyed and even to expand the existing retail space by thirty percent, and by claiming each plane strike as a separate, insurable act, Silverstein and his partners were able to walk away with $4.55 billion in insurance payouts as well as the ownership of three office buildings on the World Trade Center complex.
Luckily for Larry, he was not in the “Windows on the World” at the top of the North Tower for his regular morning meeting on the morning of 9/11 because his wife had insisted he go to a doctor’s appointment instead that particular day.
CHARLIE ROSE: Where were you on September 11?
LARRY SILVERSTEIN: You know, I was home. And the only reason I wasn’t where I was every morning, subsequent to the 26th day of July, I was—my mornings were spent usually at a breakfast meeting at Windows. An 8:00 breakfast meeting. Windows, at the top.
[…]
And so my mornings were spend at the Trade Center, and then by noon I was back uptown. And so that particular morning, because I have light colored hair and fair skin and the dermatologist—my wife, God bless her, made an appointment for me at the doctor. And I remember dressing to go to the doctor and finally saying, “Sweetheart, I’ve got so much to do downtown, I’ve gotta cancel this, I’ve got to go downtown.” And she said, “You’re not going to cancel this appointment, you’re going to the dermatologist.”
I’ve been married to the same woman for 46 years, you get the sense of determination on occasion. I said, “OK, yes, dear, I’II go. I’II go.”
And then just minutes later, she got the telephone call to turn on the television set and witnessed this horrendous circumstance, the first plane hitting and then the second plane hitting, of course when the second hit it became obvious that this was terrorism.
Then there’s the issue of the precious metal vault underneath 4 World Trade Center. By some reports, these vaults held as much as $1 billion worth of gold and silver belonging to the Comex metals trading division, to various Comex customers and to the Bank of Nova Scotia.
The New York Daily News reported that gold had been found in a delivery tunnel under 5 World Trade Center during the Ground Zero cleanup, although other reports indicate that the delivery tunnel merely had to be cleared so that they could reach the gold under 4 World Trade Center.
Regardless, on the same day that the gold was recovered from the vault, then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani called off the search and rescue teams, barring firefighters for searching for their fallen comrades in the pile. To this day, many firefighters claim the “scoop and dump” operation at Ground Zero was always more about finding gold than it was about recovering bodies.
In the end, only $230 million of gold was announced recovered.
There’s the curious case of the operation undertaken by Convar GmbH, a German data recovery firm that was tasked by the FBI with recovering the data from hard drives that had been retrieved from Ground Zero. The firm actually did begin to recover data that led to a startling conclusion: certain traders had advance knowledge of the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center and used the cover of that chaos to illegally transfer more than $100 million in funds. “They thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed,” one data recovery worker was quoted as saying.
But after an initial press release by Convar and a handful of articles on the subject, the company never spoke of the operation or its conclusions again. The FBI later officially denied the existence of any data recovery operation to the 9/11 Commission, who then failed to include any follow up on the Convar findings in its final report.
When pressed for more information in 2006, a Convar spokesman only said that the company could no longer provide information about the subject.
DUTCH REPORTER: Is it true that large amounts of money were transferred illegally out of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11, just before the attacks?
CONVAR SPOKESMAN: If you would look on the website, I would say “Yes.”
DUTCH REPORTER: Uh huh.
CONVAR SPOKESMAN: Because that was the information from a previous release.
DUTCH REPORTER: Uh huh.
CONVAR SPOKESMAN: If you were to ask me today I would need to tell you I could not give you any additional information about that. I’m really sorry about…
DUTCH REPORTER: What if I were to ask you one year ago? What would you have…
CONVAR SPOKESMAN: I would have said that what we have there is what we said before. Yes, exactly.
Then there’s the anomalous trading prior to 9/11, trading that did not just involve put options on the airlines, but puts and calls on various businesses in the World Trade Center and on defense contractor stocks that, as not one, not two, but three peer-reviewed economics papers confirmed, were consistent with advance knowledge of the attacks.
There are the FBI documents that implicate Wirt D. Walker III, a distant relative of the Bush family and a business partner of Marvin Bush, the president’s brother, in those trades.
And there’s the even more curious coda to that story: the SEC’s decision to destroy the records of their investigation into those trades.
There’s the issue of the Pentagon’s missing trillions, a known issue for years before 9/11 that was strangely reconfirmed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on September 10, 2001, where he acknowledged the ongoing budgetary issue, declared a new war…on bureacuracy, and asked how the Secretary of Defense could attack the Pentagon in front of the American people.
And there’s one of the strangest, least likely, but bizarrely neglected tale in the 9/11 money trail saga: CIA agent Robert Baer’s strange boast that he “knows the guy” who “cashed out” the day before 9/11.
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: …the last thing I want to leave you with is the National Reconnaissance Office was running a drill of a plane crashing into their building and you know they’re staffed by DoD and CIA…
ROBERT BAER: I know the guy that went into his broker in San Diego and said “Cash me out, it’s going down tomorrow.”
JEREMY ROTHE KUSHEL: Really?
ROBERT BAER: Yeah.
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: What?
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: Well, his brother worked at the White House.
Amazingly, all of this is still only scratching the surface of the 9/11 money trail. There are many, many other severely under-explored and long-neglected rabbit holes for researchers to tumble down.
A few intrepid researchers have done work on this subject, but sadly these researchers number in the single digits.
There’s Mark Gaffney, whose Black 9/11: Money, Motive and Technology is one of the few book-length explorations of the subject.
There’s Jeremy Rys, whose ambitiously named “9/11 Conspiracy Solved” may not quite have “solved” 9/11 as advertised, but does provide an impressive amount of detail about the 9/11 financing.
There’s Richard Grove’s classic Project Constellation podcast, which discusses financial anomalies at Marsh & McLennan and their relation to 9/11 from an eyewitness point of view.
There’s Lars Schall, who has done important work on the insider trading issue and other financial anomalies of 9/11.
There are my own humble contributions to this research, perhaps most notably my documentary on 9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money.
And, perhaps most hopefully, there is 9/11 Was an Epstein Job? which doesn’t prove Epstein’s culpability for 9/11 but does explore many of the money trail links between Epstein associates and 9/11 and was created earlier this year by a relatively young 9/11 researcher.
That up-and-coming 9/11 researchers are looking into the financial aspects of the September 11 false flag is indeed a hopeful sign, but given the enormity of this subject and the shocking lack of attention to it, these contributions, valuable as they might be, seem utterly inadequate to the task of accounting for the 9/11 money trail.
There is much more work to be done on this subject, and, if you’ll permit me to observe, although I would certainly never dissuade anyone from pursuing whatever line of inquiry they are interested in, it just might possibly be the case that, as fascinating and enlightening as the 5,671st documentary on the destruction of the towers would no doubt be, perhaps the sixth or seventh serious investigation of the 9/11 money trail might be even more enlightening.
After all, 9/11 was, at base, a crime, and we all know how to go about solving a crime: Follow the money.
Thank you.