Those looking to place even more blame on hedge funds need turn no further than the 9/11 Commission report issued on Thursday.

Buried deep on page 499 of the 585-page report was a footnote explaining that a long-short trader and the suggestions of a writer for an options newsletter accounted for some of the suspicious trading in the period up to 9/11. No one with prior knowledge of the attacks benefited from September 11th, said the Commission and the SEC.

"A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10," stated the report writers.

"Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades," the writers continued.

The two examples and a few sentences in the body of report were all that the Commission said on the matter.

The SEC issued a brief release on Thursday stating that it had examined 9.5 million trades that took place during the weeks before September 11. Officials also stated they examined trades in the New York Stock Exchange, NASD, the American Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Pacific Exchange, and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, as well as 32 exchange-traded funds, and securities and derivatives of 103 companies.

"The statement [issued on Thursday] speaks for itself," said SEC spokesman John Heine. 

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