This Needs To Stop, And Someone Needs To Be Prosecuted: The New York Times Blows Another Clandestine Operation

The New York Times, not one to rest on its laurels especially after getting a Pulitzer over the NSA Surveillance program story, decided to once again u0p the ante today. This story talks about how we sifted through financial records to track down our enemies, but the way the Times reports it, it is as if the Bush Administration were "stealing" vital financial information from Americans.

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.

I am curious how those at the New York Times would have handled a post-9/11 world. Would they have just stepped up and sung kumbaya with our enemies who had just slaughtered almost 3000 Americans? Or, would they have taken the same steps the president did? We were fighting an enemy the hides because they are cowards. Bill Maher may call them courageous, but they are not. They hide, lying in wait for their next victim, their next attack. They do not operate out in the open, and because of that we needed to have new and innovative tactics for dealing with this sort of scum. The president is doing his job, and whether those fools on the Left agree or not, he is doing it within the confines of the law.

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.

The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview on Thursday.

The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.

The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.

That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues.

"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said one former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "the potential for abuse is enormous."

The program is separate from the National Security Agency's efforts to eavesdrop without warrants and collect domestic phone records, operations that have provoked fierce public debate and spurred lawsuits against the government and telecommunications companies.

But all the programs grew out of the Bush administration's desire to exploit technological tools to prevent another terrorist strike, and all reflect attempts to break down longstanding legal or institutional barriers to the government's access to private information about Americans and others inside the United States.

Officials described the Swift program as the biggest and most far-reaching of several secret efforts to trace terrorist financing. Much more limited agreements with other companies have provided access to A.T.M. transactions, credit card purchases and Western Union wire payments, the officials said.

Nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives discussed aspects of the Swift operation with The New York Times on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. Some of those officials expressed reservations about the program, saying that what they viewed as an urgent, temporary measure had become permanent nearly five years later without specific Congressional approval or formal authorization.

Data from the Brussels-based banking consortium, formally known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, has allowed officials from the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies to examine "tens of thousands" of financial transactions, Mr. Levey said.

While many of those transactions have occurred entirely on foreign soil, officials have also been keenly interested in international transfers of money by individuals, businesses, charities and other groups under suspicion inside the United States, officials said. A small fraction of Swift's records involve transactions entirely within this country, but Treasury officials said they were uncertain whether any had been examined.

Swift executives have been uneasy at times about their secret role, the government and industry officials said. By 2003, the executives told American officials they were considering pulling out of the arrangement, which began as an emergency response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said. Worried about potential legal liability, the Swift executives agreed to continue providing the data only after top officials, including Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, intervened. At that time, new controls were introduced.

The Times breathlessly continues this report over the next four pages. It is definitely a sight to behold. A prominent national newspaper, without guilt, conscience, or compunction, has decided that the best way they can help out of the war effort is to continue blowing the lid off of our secret programs that are designed to do two things:

--To help the government capture terrorists hiding here in the United States, and

--To help us track them down abroad.

And it is all done in an effort to ensure that this nation stays safe and secure. Former CIA director, Porter Goss, warned that one of his biggest problems in taking over for George Tenet was the fact that he had to locate those in the agency who were leakers. They caught one. But there are obviously more of them, and they keep flapping their yaps.

The time has come for the government to get up off of its own laurels, and finds these leakers. When they are found, they are prosecuted. And I would very much like to see the prosecutions extended to the monkeys at the Times that cannot seem to get this through their head that stories like this cannot be run. They are breaking the law every time they reveal a covert operation being conducted by the government. Their reporting does not equate to being "whistle-blowers." It only equates with those people in America that want to see us fail in this war, and those that are just plain wrong. These sorts of people are an absolute danger to the security of the nation, and like those who open their mouths in the first place, the reporters and editors need to see some jail time, too.

Marcie