Not long before September 11, 2001, someone placed large bets on Wall Street—buying “put” contracts—on the possibility that the shares of airline stocks would decline. After the attacks, the shares did fall sharply and a great deal of speculation ensued that the trades were placed by parties who had advance knowledge of the attack.
This theorizing was knocked down by the 9/11 Commission, which noted in a footnote in its report that there was an entirely innocuous explanation for the trading. Alexander Rose of National Review did an even more thorough job of explaining the irregular-appearing transactions and knocking down the rumors.
The same story has now resurfaced interestingly again with rumors circulating that a number of recent and odd Wall Street bets suggest that a September 11 reprise is on its way. Details, and another persuasive knock-down of the rumors, can be found on TheStreet.com.
But let’s assume for a moment that Osama bin Laden, logging on to a laptop in his cave, decided to make his portfolio grow via terrorism. Would he risk operational security by placing the trades or having a proxy place the trades?
That always seemed unlikely, and is especially unlikely now because the CIA and the Treasury Department are able to monitor all sorts of transactions through SWIFT, the European financial clearinghouse. The New York Times compromised the program when it tipped off bin Laden, and the whole world, to the existence of the highly classified monitoring program in June 2006.
It probably doesn’t matter. No new director, entering as the head of a long entrenched bureaucracy, is going to have much of an effect on day to day operations. The programs that already exist will continue and new ones will be added. Paperwork and procedures might be modified. But, all in all, the machine will grind along much as before. Holding an appointee responsible for systemic failures in a bureaucracy won’t change the way it operates.
It was the Clinton years that gave us the likes of Valerie Plame at CIA and now a former Clintonista is heading CIA. Expect more affirmative action hiring at CIA and the hiring and promotion of individuals with advanced degrees in Women’s Studies, African Studies and Gay Studies. The Pres-Elect owes Liberal Activists something to keep them quiet now that Rick Warren is giving the Invocation at Obama’s Inauguration, so expect those “aggrieved” groups to get payment in hiring, and Federal monies from the stimulus package.
Jack Ryan you say? Hell, I settle for Meg Ryan.
As a general rule, any intelligence agency that’s broadly familiar to the general public has ceased to be effective. The CIA is no exception–it’s been a dead letter for decades, as numerous insiders have documented. Putting a time-server in charge of it is therefore really no worse than any other choice. What really matters is how the administration handles the intelligence organs that still matter–including the ones that none of us have yet heard of.
Jack Ryan? He’s already been President. Pam Landy is still waiting her turn.
Let’s “hope” that everyone, including yours truly, is wrong about Panetta. Since one “intelligence” professional after another has failed to form the CIA into an agency both willing to and capable of adroitly carrying out its primary task (“to collect information, analyze it, and manage it to best uphold our national security”), perhaps it will take someone not already integrated into the intelligence culture to see it with sufficiently opened eyes to do something about the messes other than conceal them. Panetta may not be that man (I doubt he is), but I am praying I’m completely wrong.
Meg Ryan, you say? I’d settle for Ryan Seacrest; after all this has been called the American Idol campaign.
I’m sorry that I haven’t anything more substantial or serious or thought provoking to say. I’m afraid that I’ve caught a case of the Obama blues…