Hang Right Politics

Posted by Kathy on June 23rd, 2006 in Traitors, GWOT, The Pinocchio Press

The New York Times has an interesting response to the exposure of a terrorist cell in Miami. In what can optimistically be described as the ostrich approach to the GWOT (a more nefarious conclusion would be collusion with the terrorists and enemies of our country), the NYT has decided now is a good time to reveal more about our counter-terrorism network:

WASHINGTON, June 22 - 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.

For the video of the story, go here. Here is a choice nugget from the article:

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of 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 or 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 undersecretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview 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.

Apparently the multiple safeguards to protect American privacy is not adequate for the NYT. If I had a suspicious mind, I’d wonder why this is so disturbing to them…

Of course I also wonder how they aren’t prosecuted for treason.

HAT TIP: Powerline

UPDATE:Bull Dog Pundit has more.

UPDATE II: Here’s what Kim has over at Wizbang:

Update: Let’s flashback to Gabriel Schoenfeld’s important piece from the March edition of Commentary Magazine in which he argued that the New York Times was violating the Espionage Act with its article that exposed the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program. This is what Mr. Schoenfeld said about the New York Times’ publication of the NSA program:

The Justice Department has already initiated a criminal investigation into the leak of the NSA program, focusing on which government employees may have broken the law. But the government is contending with hundreds of national-security leaks, and progress is uncertain at best. The real question that an intrepid prosecutor in the Justice Department should be asking is whether, in the aftermath of September 11, we as a nation can afford to permit the reporters and editors of a great newspaper to become the unelected authority that determines for all of us what is a legitimate secret and what is not. Like the Constitution itself, the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of the press are not a suicide pact. The laws governing what the Times has done are perfectly clear; will they be enforced?

Good question. Will they be enforced with the Times’ and the other media outlets’ exposure of this classified national security program?

UPDATE III by COgirl. Here’s the ScrappleFace take on it. New York Times Secretly Sifting CIA Data