May 04, 2004

WTC "Attacks"
posted by Gyan 20 years ago
  • Forgive the second FPP.
  • Wasn't there a story right after 9/11 about how lots of airline stock was sold short? Wouldn't surprise me if AQ used knowledge of the impending attack to make some quick cash. This article really needed to be more specific about what those "financial transactions" were. Otherwise the whole thing gets a conspiratorial tone I don't know the reporter was necessarily aiming for.
  • another "news story" from the same site: Bush's liberation of Iraq: A 24-carat gold-plated turd by Prisoner50X, Unknown News well. anyway, i did a Nexis search on Convar and there was a small smattering of coverage around the same time this story ran, december 2001. nothing after that. if there was anything more to this, there would have been a lot more mainstream media followup.
  • It's a Reuters story, Never mind the hosting entity. Should be easy to corroborate with Reuters.
  • yes and UPI also picked it up. but what i'm saying is, if there was anything more to the story to follow up, it would have been much more widely disseminated. also, you can tell from the story that it came from a company press release originally: the phrases, "The German-based firm Convar, a world leader in retrieving data" and "They are using a pioneering laser scanning technology"
  • The original raising of the question was also bantered about in the WSJ in the days afterward. I don't know what came of it. Though, I would have to disagree that if there was more to not only this story, but any story, mainstream media would follow it up. In theory yes, in practice how often does that happen?
  • but what i'm saying is, if there was anything more to the story to follow up, it would have been much more widely disseminated. Technically true. Propagation could fail due to lack of further development. That unduly connotes that the story didn't have any interesting angles, after all.
  • let me put it this way, iwantto... if this story were true, if they proved via computer records that these transactions occurred, and further investigated and could show that there were indeed persons who knew the attacks were coming, you can be DAMN sure the media would follow up. if for no other reason than to break a tremendously important story. competition is a powerful force in the media. we live to break a big story, to get valuable information out to the public. trust me, i'm POSITIVE reporters looked into this, and there just wasn't anything there.
  • that's a very different issue. what gyan posted discussed "a sharp rise in credit card transactions moving through some computer systems at the WTC shortly before the planes hit the twin towers." the snopes article discusses trading in airline stocks weeks and months before the attacks.
  • oh different story. naturally i didn't RTFA. yeah i don't know anything about that. The WSJ covered the airlines story, not this.
  • (iwantto, i emailed you a long story about the airlines stuff...)
  • SideDish. I read it. Thanks, an interesting read. Yeah, it seems unlikely that someone with foreknowledge would have had so few, comparitively, put options. Doesn't seem to point toward any 'conspiracy.' A paragraph the author does not use to make her point, I found interesting, though. "Given all of this, at a minimum the CBOE and government regulators who are conducting the secret investigations have known for some time who made the options puts on United and American airlines. The silence from the investigating camps could mean any of several things: Either terrorists are responsible for the puts on the airline stocks; others besides terrorists had foreknowledge; the puts were just lucky bets by credible investors; or, there is nothing whatsoever to support the insider-trading rumors." Then she uses Adam Hamilton to say it is probably unlikely. This article was from 2002, the Snopes from 2001, I wonder if there was ever a govt. report putting the whole thing to rest.
  • how about a university professor's study? "Unusual Options Market Activity with an Application to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001" by Allen M. Poteshman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Finance. that appears to be some of the latest work on the subject.
  • HTML version of the above study. This paper analyzes stock return and volatility forecasts of individual investors before and after the terror attacks of September 11. I just skimmed it, but the conclusions refer mostly to what the airline stocks did after the attacks as opposed to before, and no discussion of who, when, why, etc. Really frustrating to go through, but that's probably because i really hate numbers. Nice find though :)
  • Sidedish, Iwantto, I could be that rumors about the inminent use of UA and AA airplanes for a terrorist attack leaked from the FBI or AQ months before the attack. The thing with terrorist organizations like AQ is that, because of their rather fussy structure, they aren't as secretive as a gov agency. They act very much like drug cartels or paramilitary groups and bits of information about their operations leak to economical backers, insiders, arms traffiquers, etc. They in turn use the information as it best suit them. The raise in puts could be due to several small groups that thrusted the rumors enough to take the risk. That also explains why, even if the rise in operations was noticieable it wasn't big enough to confirm real foreknowledge. AFAIK, the DoD tried to implement some sort of terrorism stock market where those bits of information would make the market fluctuate indicating the posibility of a terrorist attack and the probable objective.
  • competition is a powerful force in the media. we live to break a big story, to get valuable information out to the public.
    You must live in quite the media market, SideDish. One where all 130-some of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers didn't run with the same editorial line on the war in Iraq, or where Conrad Black doesn't use his newspapers to push his views; one where, for example, every major metropolitan newspaper in a county does not come under the control of the same handful of wealthy men who also own the majority of private broadcasting organisations. Competition in the media. It's a cute idea.
  • rogerd: because i work for a wire service, i'm basically competing against EVERYBODY (as in, all daily newspapers throughout north america), including other wire services. the company i'm with is one of the last few media outlets that's family owned and totally independent. so i'm very lucky in that respect. and i like to think our readers are lucky, too.
  • You must live in quite the media market, SideDish. One where all 130-some of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers didn't run with the same editorial line on the war in Iraq, or where Conrad Black doesn't use his newspapers to push his views; one where, for example, every major metropolitan newspaper in a county does not come under the control of the same handful of wealthy men who also own the majority of private broadcasting organisations. Competition in the media. It's a cute idea. I'm also a print reporter -- though with considerably less experience than SideDish -- and your opinion of media made me think of the first city editor I ever worked for. When you're in the newspaper business, it's not uncommon to get a phone call from one angry person accusing you of being a GOP puppet, only to hang up and get another phone call five minutes later from someone calling you a liberal piece of shiat. In any case, my first editor laughed at me when I got my first round of calls like that, and she said something like: "I can't even get my reporters to file on deadline, let alone push an ideological agenda." I don't work for Rupert Murdoch, nor will I ever work for him. I DO work for a rather large chain, but the diversity of opinion among the company's editorial pages is amazing. And there are no memos coming down from corporate headquarters telling the editors to conform to the company line. The local editors make their own decisions. And to add one more thing to this debate -- just because you haven't seen an update doesn't mean there aren't reporters still following the story. It's not news if there's nothing new to report. I'm not saying that's the case here, because I don't know enough about this story, but I'm confident reporters aren't sleeping on this one.
  • I live in Rupert's old home town, where News Corp were incorporated until a couple of weeks ago. He owns the national paper, the city paper, and the local district papers. All of them.
  • Not to further muddy the waters but can anyone find corroboration this was a Reuters story? The FPP goes to unknownnews, and the "Reuters" link there goes to indymedia. Anyone find the original story?
  • tmike, check comments 3,4,5 in this thread.
  • Gyan, thanks, point taken. All I was saying is, Where's the "Ur-Link" back to the source? Of course, about 5 seconds after posting, I got the bright idea to google "Convar+Reuters" and found a link to Convar's News/Press Release archive with the same article in your link, and a big official Reuters logo right on it.
  • On the unknown news page there's a link to an update. Leads to an email dated 2004. Might be fake, maybe a newshound could email the company to verify? here's the text: From: ALegg@convar.com Subject: RE: 9/11 data Date: February 21, 2004 4:19:48 AM CST To: [removed by Unknown News] Brian, Thank you for your interest in the work of our recovery team. The case 9/11 has been rated as confidential by the Head of the US investigation team. I'm sorry that I can not provide any additional information to you, other then you can find on our website (convar.com --Editor). Best regards, Anja Legg Press officer CONVAR DEUTSCHLAND GmbH