I realize that it will always be 9/10/2001 for members of the mainstream press -- especially the upper-crust like the NY Times. After all, they seem to have forgotten the demands that the US government do something-- anything -- to track down terrorists in the wake of the worst terror attacks to have ever taken place on American soil.

Now they want to criticize efforts to hunt down and root out the terrorists -- and to publish more classified material on the front page of their papers.

Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.

Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.

Hidden, of course, because publicizing the program would make it useless to investigators and aid terrorists in covering their tracks.

Oh, and by the way -- the program is conducted under the authority of legislation signed by Jimmy Carter nearly 30 years ago.

Under the program, Treasury issues a new subpoena once a month, and SWIFT turns over huge amounts of electronic financial data, according to Stuart Levey, the department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. The administrative subpoenas are issued under authority granted in the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

So this is not some rogue program dreamed up by Karl Rove in a Machiavellian attempt to undermine the privacy of Americans -- it exists because a Democrat house and Democrat Senate passed legislation that was signed by a Democrat president for the good of American national security. But I guess the press thinks it knows better what the security needs of the United States are -- or is it the security needs of the terrorists that they are concerned about?

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Posted by: Greg at 10:58 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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