NY Times: "To Hell With National Security, We Need to Sell Newspapers!"

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(courtesy of BugMeNot.com)

Found by way of Michelle Malkin (where you will find tons o' links and updates).

The NY Times has announced a secret (and legal) government program which tracks financial transactions (the vast majority of which are occurring overseas) to track down terrorist organizations.

Article by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen:

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.

It was more important to these two clowns, and their editors, to sell newspapers by trumpeting a perfectly legal program in alarmist terms, than to allow the authorities to continue to find and arrest terrorists before they have a chance to finalize their plans and murder more people.

Lovely.

You may wonder if there are any controls on the program. In the article itself (although you have to keep reading past the first few paragraphs), you will find this:

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.

Among the safeguards, government officials said, is an outside auditing firm that verifies that the data searches are based on intelligence leads about suspected terrorists. "We are not on a fishing expedition," Mr. Levey said. "We're not just turning on a vacuum cleaner and sucking in all the information that we can."

Swift and Treasury officials said they were aware of no abuses. But Mr. Levey, the Treasury official, said one person had been removed from the operation for conducting a search considered inappropriate.

[Emphasis mine.]

And this:

The Bush administration has made no secret of its campaign to disrupt terrorist financing, and President Bush, Treasury officials and others have spoken publicly about those efforts. Administration officials, however, asked The New York Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the Swift program could jeopardize its effectiveness. They also enlisted several current and former officials, both Democrat and Republican, to vouch for its value.

Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said: "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Yes, it would be a matter of public interest -- assuming you're a terrorist and want to know what the government is doing to find you and arrest you so you can take steps to prevent it.

More:

The data does not allow the government to track routine financial activity, like A.T.M. withdrawals, confined to this country, or to see bank balances, Treasury officials said. And the information is not provided in real time — Swift generally turns it over several weeks later. Because of privacy concerns and the potential for abuse, the government sought the data only for terrorism investigations and prohibited its use for tax fraud, drug trafficking or other inquiries, the officials said.

So -- why did the public need to know more than the terrorists didn't?

You can write to the NY Times editors by e-mailing to letters@nytimes.com or faxing a letter to (212)556-3622.

Snail mail:

Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

FWIW, I just faxed a letter. My comments:

So, you've uncovered a secret and legal government program to track financial transactions by terrorist organizations, which enabled the authorities to find and arrest these terrorists before they were able to kill more people.

That's brilliant. How much is al Qaeda paying you, exactly?

You can also contact the LA Times, which has continued the violation of national security, here.

If you choose to write, be polite. Letters with profanity in them get ignored.

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