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Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. He hosts the podcast ‘Active Measures’ with Alex Rubinstein. He has contributed to the GrayZone and Mint Press News and he also has a substack at kitklarenberg.com. His work exposing state crimes against democracy has made him an honoree for the 2022 Indy Media Awards.

In the September 13^th edition of Global Research News Hour, host Michael Welch asked Klarenberg to explain some of the aspects of 9/11 that investigators today should not shirk. He also elaborated on the stock market activity in both the 9/11 attacks and the October 7 attacks on Israel that may have predicted terrorist behaviour.

Global Research: The Office of Military Investigations found that CIA and FBI veterans affirmed that the agencies using the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate were trying to contact and recruit these two hijackers, Nawaf Hazmi and Khalid Mihdhar, as assets. People who a year later used planes as an act of terrorism. Talk about that aspect of 9-11 because I think it is fascinating.

Kit Klarenberg: There were people within, I guess you could call it the 9-11 truth movement, although I don’t personally consider myself a member of any movement, apart from the movement for humanity perhaps.

In effect, for years, independent researchers and journalists had been raising very obvious questions about whether the CIA had a relationship with some of the hijackers via the Saudi Intelligence services. Not least because of the very strange confirmed behaviour by the CIA around the two hijackers you mentioned, which is Hazmi and Mihdhar. So they entered the US despite the fact that the CIA and NSA knew that they were coming.

They shouldn’t have been allowed to get in in the first place and they had multi-entry visas to the US. And when they landed, the numerous FBI officials, just a bit of background, there was something called Alec Station, which was the CIA’s anti-Bin Laden and anti-Al Qaeda unit. Now this had FBI agents posted to it.

When they found out that Hazmi and Mihdhar were members of Al Qaeda and who were flagged as potentially very dangerous terrorists, said we want to inform our superiors in FBI headquarters about this. And they were blocked. They were consistently blocked from doing so.

And there are all sorts of indications that Alec Station sought to obfuscate and mislead the FBI about the presence of these two known Al Qaeda operatives on US soil. Now, not long after arrival, as in within minutes of their arrival at Los Angeles International Airport, they bump into, apparently by happenstance, Omar al-Bayoumi, who was this kind of very shady Saudi government employee who doesn’t seem to have done much very obvious work for the Saudi government, but it appears was receiving an enormous amount of money from the House of Saud. Now, the FBI, years later, set up something called Operation Encore, which was an investigation into potential potential Saudi connections to the 9-11 attacks.

And they concluded there was a 50-50 chance that Bayoumi, and by extension Saudi Arabia, had detailed advanced knowledge of the 9-11 attacks. Now, this was sat on until, I believe it was 2021, when the Biden administration released a tranche of Operation Encore documents. But the point is, is this this spy talk released court filing, it has all sorts of information on how, yes, the CIA had a relationship, a liaison relationship with Hazmi and Mihdhar via the Saudi Intelligence services.

Now, this raises all sorts of questions, namely, why did it take so long for this to be confirmed? The filing offers some explanation for this, which is that the CIA and the FBI just lied, despite well knowing about this rather dark handshake, which raises the obvious prospect that the pair, if not other hijackers, were working for the CIA on the day of the attacks. Now, yeah, I would recommend your listeners read my article, and indeed the hyperlinked court filing in full, because it is full of completely dynamite disclosures. Yes, that kind of beg for a re-investigation of who knew what and about 9-11 in advance.

But also, yes, whether there was some degree of direction and control over the hijackers, whether they knew or didn’t know by the CIA. It’s all quite extraordinary. But if nothing else, we know for a fact now that, yes, there was a relationship with two of the hijackers.

The CIA sought to conceal this for reasons unclear. I think more widely, it’s kind of remarkable. I remember very well where I was and what I was doing on 9-11 when I was 12.

But the entire event has been rather forgotten. I mean, this was the start.

GR: Well, you mentioned that a lot, that there are memory holes in the stuff that they’ve known about, and they’ve just kind of forgotten it.

I mean, you mentioned in the article about Hani Hanjour, he had a demonstrably bad record of flying, and yet here he is executing the perfect downwards corkscrew flight into the Pentagon with precision that the vast majority of pilots don’t possess the skill to accomplish. And yet he was able to do it on September 11th, one of the many conflicting narratives that we have your term memory hole in the past 20 years.

KK: Yeah, and I think that Hani Hanjour is, I mean, I would suggest, and that’s what my investigation includes, was a very likely candidate for another 9-11 hijacker who was working for the CIA.

Now, I mean, the mainstream media has even reported on the oddity of Hanjour being the worst flight school pupil that his teachers had ever seen. And in written exams, he would take hours to answer a question that students typically completed in just 20 minutes. He was unable to control a single-engine Cessna during practical tests, and the sense among the teachers with whom he crossed paths was he shouldn’t be in the air under any circumstances.

Now, yes, as you mentioned, he performs this perfect descending corkscrew turn about 330 degrees from around 7,000 feet in the air while travelling over 500 miles per hour to come perfectly level with a pedestrian road leading up to the Pentagon, flying just over a metre above the ground, knocking over lampposts en route, and then crashing into a wing of the Pentagon, which is disused. The only people killed were largely maintenance workers who were reconstructing this section of the Pentagon. There were no senior staff harmed in this.

And, yes, this raises the very obvious question of what the hell actually happened, because the official story of the worst pilot trainee teachers had ever seen doing this seems not only implausible, but impossible. And, I mean, this is a door that a large number of people, including, I might add, people within independent media, don’t want opened because it raises all sorts of crazy questions about, you know, what were the planes being remotely flown? Was it actually not a plane at all, but something rather different, such as a missile? I mean, I think that, yes, there is an aversion to exploring this stuff because it is speculative, and I can understand that as someone who works overwhelmingly based on primary source documentary evidence in the form of leaked and declassified files. Yeah, but, I mean, those explanations do seem, you know, rather more compelling and plausible than Hanjour flying it himself.

Now, I mean, there are all sorts of other debates which, again, people don’t particularly want to go near about controlled demolition and etc. I do think at this stage, when we are 23 years removed from this, the risk of people getting into very serious trouble for probing these areas, not least because, yes, the world has kind of moved on and this catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor, in the phrase of the Project for a New American Century, has been rather forgotten, despite the world-changing consequences it ushered in. This is the kind of stuff that we need to be looking at.

GR: On the days immediately before 9/11, there were ‘put’ options placed on United and American airlines, the airplanes that were hijacked, suggesting a terrorist attack involving the airlines might happen. In an article you wrote in December of last year, you wrote about similarly strange behaviour of Israeli stock immediately before October 7, likewise suggesting a similar planned terrorist attack. Could you comment on how people other than Hamas might have profited from this knowledge, that the government would have known and therefore this was an attack that was allowed to happen on purpose?

KK: Yeah, sure.

I mean, I do think that, I mean, I’ve mentioned the kind of empirical case for 9-11 being a conspiracy. Yeah, one of the most compelling things is that pointing in that direction is the fact that there was widespread, extremely suspicious trading in the months and weeks and days leading up to 9-11, and which implied foreknowledge. Now, there are multiple academic papers which conclude that, yes, that the activity such as betting on, investing large amounts of money in stocks that did well out of 9-11, such as Raytheon, the defence contractor, and betting against stocks that did badly, such as United Airlines out of 9-11.

There was an enormous amount of activity in both directions, which suggested that people knew the attack was coming and they sought to profit from it. And they did to a large extent. I mean, to give you an example on just one, on September 10th, 2001, which is a day before this, the purchase of Raytheon shares soared sixfold.

And then a week later, their value had almost doubled. So, I mean, there are coincidences and there are also not coincidences. But I think that I kind of had this in mind when I read this very interesting academic study, which concluded that there was suspicious trading on Israeli stocks, again, both positive and negative trading, as it were, in the days preceding October 7th last year.

Now, the paper has a number of very revealing graphics, which show the enormous spikes going from almost zero, if not total zero, to hundreds of thousands of trades being made in the days on Israeli stocks that were damaged by October 7th. But what’s even more compelling, and again, you might be tempted to dismiss that as coincidence, is that the paper also finds similar patterns in the trading of Israeli stocks in April 2023. This is right when, and this has been reported in the mainstream media, Hamas was planning to execute what happened on October 7th originally.

Shorting activity on the Israeli ETF since October, 2022

But they got cold feet because they sensed that the Israelis were onto them. So they dropped their plans. Now, I mean, again, this can hardly be considered a coincidence.

But at both times when an attack was expected, and indeed an attack was executed, there is a similar level of deeply suspicious, unprecedentedly high stock market activity related to Israeli stocks. Now, I mean, this is a point that I made in my Mint Press article, which you mentioned, which is that, yeah, there are countless indications which have been confirmed in the mainstream that the Israeli military and Israeli Intelligence services knew that something was coming. And, you know, I got a lot of flak in certain circles for suggesting when this began that they knew what was coming.

And this has just been amply confirmed by subsequent disclosures.

GR: Well, there have been like Egyptian intelligence, and they’d also sent information to them about the possibility of attack. And Israeli Mossad, I mean, they have all sorts of transmitters all along the – I mean, I think they said something like a former IDF operative said that a cat couldn’t get across without notifying it.

And yet, according to an interview I did, I guess, late in spring or something, they found they were all – like they were completely caught off guard. So it all seems like, you know, in terms of the position of the troops and so on and so forth. So that all sort of further corroborates the possibility that they let it happen on purpose.

And this was with the goal of, you know, creating this incident where they would have their own war on terrorism, so-called, right?

KK: Yeah, no, absolutely. And it’s like, you know, I mean, I’ve been covering events in Gaza and the West Bank for many, many, many years. And it’s like, you know, Israel has formed doing this, where there are several examples, such as in the lead up to Operation Protective Edge in 2014 or Operation Cast Lead in 2008, where the Palestinian leadership was in peace talks with Israel.

And then at the very last minute, there are a series of Israeli provocations. Hamas responds with rather flaccid rocket attacks. And then this is used as a pretext for not only sabotaging peace negotiations, but carpet bombing Gaza.

Now, as well, I think that you’ve got to bear in mind that, like, not long before this, Azerbaijani authorities carried out an almost total ethnic cleansing in Artsakh, which is this was now formerly Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijanians moved in and said, well, and told the 200,000 strong population, if you don’t leave immediately, we’re going to massacre you all. So, of course, they left.

Now, that was assisted by the Israelis, and it received not a wink of criticism in the Western mainstream at all. So we must ask ourselves, was that a motivating factor for Netanyahu to think, right, well, I’m just going to carry out my own, like, you know, total ethnic cleansing? I mean, and that is what has happened. It’s I mean, another data point within this that just sticks in my mind a lot, which is there is a veteran British client journalist called Robert Peston.

He’s a British journalist. He, on October 8th, published a very notable post on X or Twitter, as it was previously called. And he said that British Intelligence sources had told him that the Hamas’ strike on Israel the previous day was going to evolve into a full blown regional war in West Asia as destabilizing to global security as Putin’s attack on Ukraine.

And it stated that this crisis would spread well, that his intelligence sources stated that this crisis will spread well beyond the Middle East. And we are in the early stages of a conflict with ramifications for much of the world. Now, this was posted about 24 hours after Hamas breached Gaza’s concentration camp walls.

How did his British intelligence sources know this unless they wanted this to happen, were planning for this to happen and intended for the grand regional war that they spoke of to happen? Because at that point, the Israeli government hadn’t even announced a response, really, beyond dispatching Israeli occupation force operatives en masse to massacre people. There was no sense that there was going to be, I mean, we’re almost a year into this, of the Israeli occupation forces going into Gaza routinely and jousting with Hamas. And it goes on and on.

And it looks like Hezbollah and Israel any day now could end up in a full blown hot war. Like, you know, it’s really, really, really suspicious. And I think that in a very basic way as well, Netanyahu has all sorts of domestic political problems, including the fact that he is being investigated for corruption.

The second that he’s out of office, he’s probably going to jail. Now, in that context where on a micro and macro level, you feel like your time is running out. And I do think that the genocide in Gaza has exposed all sorts of structural problems within Israel, namely that it’s a settler colonial population.

And so they’ve had a population collapse. A large number of people have fled home to the countries they’re actually born in. Their economy has been ravaged by this.

They’re having zero tourism, which was a big major economic sector for them. Their tech sector, because the apparent fallibility of their security systems was amply demonstrated on October 7th, are suffering big time. Yeah.

I mean, these were already kind of existing issues. And I think that in terms of drawing the U.S. deeper into this and other Western powers as a kind of grand last hurrah, was Netanyahu’s only option from a personal and just wider geopolitical perspective. So the reasons for allowing this to go ahead couldn’t be writ larger.