Odd happenings on 9/11: the files they destroyed.
You don't need a theory about what happened to notice a pattern in what happened after: the records that would let anyone check kept getting classified, fought over, and shredded.
This is not an “inside job” page. It makes no claim about who carried out the attacks. It is about a narrower, documented, and genuinely strange thing: the way the U.S. government handled the paper. The single largest cluster of pre-attack “crash bets” in market history was investigated and then the case files were destroyed. The FBI's report clearing five detained Israelis was buried until a FOIA request pried it loose. Over and over, the evidence that would settle a question — in either direction — was made impossible to see. We grade the destruction and the secrecy as fact. We grade the question they raise — who has the standing to make agencies bury this — as smoke.
What this page argues
Two documented facts sit at the center. First: after investigating the anomalous pre-9/11 put options (the subject of our Krongard file), the SEC classified its report, fought its release for eight years, redacted the name of the investor it cleared, and — its own Inspector General documented — destroyed the underlying “Matters Under Inquiry” files in violation of federal record-keeping rules. Second: the FBI's report concluding that five detained Israelis had no foreknowledge (the subject of our Dancing Israelis file) was never published, surfacing only through FOIA years later.
Neither destroyed record proves a plot. What they prove is a habit: the government repeatedly chose secrecy over the one thing that ends speculation — a public, checkable record. That habit is not neutral. It is the engine that turns coincidences into conspiracies and lets real accountability questions die unanswered. We hold the destruction as fact and the “who benefits from the dark” question as an open one.
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Odd happenings on 9/11: the files they destroyed.
Not an inside-job page. A documented pattern in what happened after: the records that would let anyone check kept getting classified, fought over, and shredded.
The record, claim by claim
The SEC destroyed its pre-investigation files on the 9/11 trading — its own watchdog said so.
FACTThe SEC's Office of Inspector General documented that the agency destroyed the 'Matters Under Inquiry' (MUI) files — the pre-formal-investigation records — including those connected to its September 11 trading review, in violation of federal record-keeping requirements. These are the working files that would show what leads were opened and dropped. They no longer exist.
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Office of Inspector General — report on the destruction of records related to 'Matters Under Inquiry'
The SEC's exoneration of the biggest pre-9/11 bet is unverifiable by design.
FACTThe SEC concluded it found no evidence of advance-knowledge trading and traced 95% of the Sept. 6 United Airlines put volume to a single U.S. hedge fund making a bearish bet. But it redacted the investor's name, classified the report, and fought Freedom of Information Act requests for eight years; the document was released (still partly blacked out) only in 2010, after the National Security Archive forced it. The public is asked to accept the clearance without being allowed to see who was cleared.
The FBI's report clearing the detained Israelis was buried — released only through FOIA.
FACTThe FBI's Newark and New York divisions concluded that five Israelis detained on 9/11 had no prior knowledge of the attacks and were not engaged in clandestine activity. That exculpatory finding was never publicized; it came to light only through a FOIA request years later. The secrecy did not protect anyone — it left a vacuum that a hijacker's father filled with the 'dancing Israelis' smear.
The question the destruction raises: who has the standing to make agencies bury this?
SOME SMOKEThis is the open thread, and we mark it as exactly that. Two federal agencies handled the most scrutinized event in modern American history by classifying, redacting, and — in the SEC's case — destroying the records that would let the public check their work. That is not the footprint of a routine inquiry that had nothing to hide. It does not identify a culprit, prove a motive, or establish that anything criminal was concealed. But 'why was the paper trail on the biggest financial anomaly and the most infamous detention of 9/11 made unrecoverable?' is a legitimate accountability question that the official record does not answer. We grade its existence SOME SMOKE — a real thread, no proven wrongdoing, posed rather than asserted.
- Synthesis of the documented SEC record-destruction and FOIA history and the buried FBI report; no evidence of a specific directive is claimed
Secrecy is a decision, not an accident
Any one of these could be explained away. Files get purged; sensitive reports get classified; a redaction protects an innocent third party. But the pattern is the point. On the two threads where the evidence was most explosive — who made millions betting the airlines would fall, and who those detained men really were — the government's instinct was identical: seal it, fight to keep it sealed, and in one case shred it. Each choice was defensible in isolation and corrosive in aggregate, because each one moved a checkable fact into the category of “trust us.” This site's entire method is a bet against “trust us.”
Where the evidence is strong, and where it stops
- Destruction and secrecy are documented. The SEC OIG's record-destruction finding, the eight-year FOIA fight, and the FOIA-only release of the FBI report are all on the record.
- Secrecy is not proof of a plot. Agencies over-classify and mishandle records for banal reasons — turf, embarrassment, inertia. We do not treat the destruction as evidence of complicity in the attacks.
- The exonerations may well be correct. The SEC's hedge-fund finding and the FBI's no-foreknowledge finding could be entirely true. Our objection is that they were made unverifiable, not that they were necessarily wrong.
- No perpetrator claim, full stop. This page names no one as responsible for 9/11 and advances no demolition or foreknowledge theory. It is about the handling of records, and nothing more.
Destroyed records are how you guarantee the questions never die
The cruelest irony is that secrecy is the conspiracy theorist's best friend. Publish the SEC's cleared investor and the put-option story becomes a closed case with a footnote. Publish the FBI's report in 2001 and “dancing Israelis” never becomes a slogan. Instead the government chose the dark, and two decades of speculation — some of it ugly, some of it legitimate — rushed into the vacuum. That is the real lesson of the odd happenings: the damage was not only whatever the records might have shown; it was the decision to make sure no one could ever look. It belongs beside the rest of the Too Big to Jail file — accountability defeated not by acquittal but by erasure.
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn't 'they destroyed the files' just a truther talking point?
The difference is what you build on it. A truther uses the destruction to assert a hidden plot they can't prove. We use it to make a bounded, documented point: the SEC's own Inspector General found the 9/11 trading files were destroyed, and the exculpatory reports were buried until FOIA — so the public can't verify the official conclusions. We draw no perpetrator theory from that. Destroyed records are a real accountability problem whether or not there was ever a plot.
If the conclusions were probably right, why does the secrecy matter?
Because “probably right and unverifiable” is exactly the condition that breeds conspiracy — and because an institution that can bury the record when the answer is innocent can bury it when the answer is not. The precedent is the danger. Transparency isn't a favor you grant when you're sure the public will like the answer; it's the thing that makes the answer trustworthy at all.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- SEC Office of Inspector General — report on the destruction of records related to “Matters Under Inquiry”
- SEC — Statement Concerning Terrorist Attack Trading Investigation (2004) and the “Pre-September 11, 2001 Trading Review” (FOIA release, 2010); 9/11 Commission Report (p.172; note 130, p.499)
- FBI internal memo (Sept. 24, 2001) and Newark/New York casework, obtained via FOIA
- The Banker Who Ran the CIA and The ‘Dancing Israelis’ — the two threads whose records were buried