December 11, 2023		INDEX
After the intelligence failure of the century we discover they could have predicted the Hamas attack on Israel if they had followed the money
Those who watched the film about the Watergate scandal will remember that the Washington Post duo (Woodstein or Burnward or whatever) were advised to "follow the money" and this advice eventually led to them toppling a president. On October 7 Hamas managed a sneak attack, killing hundreds of Israelis and capturing many more as hostages. The Israeli's ignored Egyptian advice that this was about to happen. Quite why, no-one has said. And now we discover (Economist December 9, 2023) that there was a second source the Israeli intelligence also managed to ignore. The money men. A paper by Robert Jackson Jr, a former commissioner of America's Securities and Exchange Commission, and Joshua Mitts of Columbia University, suggests that the critical information had leaked out to a trader or traders who were shorting Israeli shares on a massive scale. "In September an average of 1,581 Israeli shares a day were sold short. This was 17 per cent of the trading volume," says the Economist. "On October 2nd, five days before the attacks a whoping 227,820 shares were shorted, representing 99 per cent of total volume." It's difficult to assign motives for short selling (akin to gambling) but the authors say the most plausible reason is that whoever made the trades was familiar with Hamas's secrets. To download the paper go to https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4652027
		Former MI5 agent Annie Machon reveals MI5 assessed 1994 car bomb attack on Israeli embassy in London as false flag, an operation of Mossad.
INDEX Jonathan Brind	December 11, 2023