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1. Tracing Terrorist Financing

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Tracing Terrorist Financing

There at it again. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have chosen to publicize another secret program that has been, up to now, extremely effective in fighting terrorism. As Patterico's Pontifications writes on Friday, headlined

New York Times Publishes Classified Details of Legal and (Formerly) Effective Anti-Terrorism Program (UPDATE: So Does LAT)

The New York Times has a lengthy article revealing classified details about an anti-terrorist program that has, among other things, caught the mastermind of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing. The publication of the article may spell the end of the program.

I am biting down on my rage right now... I'll say only this: it's becoming increasingly clear to me that the people at the New York Times are not just biased media folks whose antics can be laughed off. They are actually dangerous....

The article is likely to do far more than "jeopardize [the program's] effectiveness." It's clear to me that the publication of the article will shut it down entirely. The article says that, in 2003, officials of the banking cooperative "were discussing pulling out because of their concerns about legal and financial risks if the program were revealed, one government official said." But our top officials did a "full-court press" and promised to institute even tighter controls, which had apparently been quite successful.

Now that the program has been splashed all over the pages of the New York Times, I think that Swift's era of cooperation with the U.S. Government is over.

What exactly is in the public interest about revealing classified information that has been successful in tracking and apprehending murderous terrorists?

Is it that the program is illegal? Well, nobody really says that. To the contrary, Treasury officials "said they considered the government's authority to subpoena the Swift records to be clear." There was initially a debate about the program's legality, but Treasury and Justice Department lawyers ultimately concluded that it was legal.

So what's the problem? Well, despite the program's apparent legality, it apparently made a few people . . . uncomfortable!

The disclosure of classified information about sources and methods of fighting against our enemies in a time of war is just standard fare for the Pulitzer seekers at the NY and LA Times. It also set the White House press corps into a questioning frenzy at the daily televised briefing on Friday. Here is a clip from near the beginning where Tony Snow basically fisks the NY Times. Thanks to C-SPAN for the video. We join it when someone says that "critics are saying that this is another indication of the White House is overstepping the President's authority." Ah, those critics. They're at it again. Listen to Tony manhandle Helen Thomas in this section when she rattles on about illegal programs. She is the crazy old aunt in the attic of the press corps.

Play clip.

The lens that Tony Snow refers to is the perceptual context in which the press sees all the activities of the Bush Administration. It has to be illegal, because it seems so to the press corps. In National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy has a good take on what is going on with these revelations.

Yet again, the New York Times was presented with a simple choice: help protect American national security or help al Qaeda.

Yet again, it sided with al Qaeda.

Once again, members of the American intelligence community had a simple choice: remain faithful to their oath -- the solemn promise the nation requires before entrusting them with the secrets on which our safety depends -- or violate that oath and place themselves and their subjective notions of propriety above the law.

Once again, honor was cast aside.

For the second time in seven months, the Times has exposed classified information about a program aimed at protecting the American people against a repeat of the September 11 attacks. On this occasion, it has company in the effort: The Los Angeles Times runs a similar, sensational story. Together, the newspapers disclose the fact that the United States has covertly developed a capability to monitor the nerve center of the international financial network in order to track the movement of funds between terrorists and their facilitators.

The effort, which the government calls the "Terrorist Finance Tracking Program" (TFTP), is entirely legal. There are no conceivable constitutional violations involved. The Supreme Court held in United States v. Miller (1976) that there is no right to privacy in financial-transaction information maintained by third parties. Here, moreover, the focus is narrowed to suspected international terrorists, not Americans, and the financial transactions implicated are international, not domestic. This is not data mining, and it does not involve fishing expeditions into the financial affairs of American citizens. Indeed, few Americans even have information that is captured by the program -- though there would be nothing legally offensive even if they did...

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, smugly decreed that the Bush administration's "access to this vast repository of international financial data" was, in his singularly impeccable judgment, "a matter of public interest."

And you probably thought George Bush was the imperious one. And that the public's principal interest was in remaining alive. Wrong again.

The blunt reality here is that there is a war against the war. It is the jihad of privacy fetishists whose self-absorption knows no bounds. Pleas rooted in the well-being of our community hold no sway.

Go and read the whole thing, as they say on the blogs.

How does the LA Times justify the publication of national security secrets in a time of war? Lorie Byrd at Wizbang points to Patterico's Pontifications, who heard the following:

L.A. Times Washington Bureau Chief Doyle McManus Explains Justification for Printing Classified Details of Anti-Terror Program
Filed under: Dog Trainer, Scum, Terrorism -- Patterico @ 12:17 am

Want to hear more about the L.A. Times's rationale for publishing classified information about a successful anti-terror program? L.A. Times columnist Pattt* Morrison has a radio program on local radio station KPCC, and interviewed Times Washington Bureau Chief Doyle McManus about how the story started, and why the paper felt justified printing the story. (Hat tip to Armed Liberal.)

The bottom line is, of course, that McManus and his colleagues took it upon themselves to decide what classified information the public (and our enemies) should know about. Bizarrely, he claims that the critical factors in his decision were whether the program was legal and had adequate safeguards -- even though, as I document in a related post, it was indeed legal and had extensive safeguards in place. Thus, his excuses are an apparent cover for some other motivation, as yet unrevealed.

I personally find the paper's decision to publish these details to be appalling and reprehensible, but I applaud McManus's willingness to discuss it publicly.

You can reach the broadcast here.

Here is an edited version of the radio show. Listen as they spin this as a legitimate balance of national security post 9-11 against the public's right to know. I'm sure Doyle McManus would be happy to appear on the radio when the terrorists blow up the LA Times building in Los Angeles with funding from their terrorist financiers after the Treasury department was unable to stop them because they found another way to fund their Jihad. But we will have to wait to hear that version.

Play clip.

The NY Times Bill Keller has published their rationale for why they published national security secrets in a time of war. Paul at Wizbang has the short version:

So Bill Keller wrote a letter defending his paper's running of the banking records story.

You can read it for yourself and I'm sure many bloggers and pundits will have many intelligent things to say about it. (Which we'll probably link here.)

But since you value your time, you can skip all that and I'll give you the Reader's Digest version:

Dear Reader:

1) We have no reason to believe the program was illegal in any way.

2) We have every reason to believe it was effective at catching terrorists.

3) We ran the story anyway, screw you.

Bill Keller

If we find some more intelligent analysis we'll link it here, but really you know everything you need to know about it.

Sounds about right to me.

Congressman Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and former FBI agent was on Bill Bennett's Morning in America show today, explaining why this is so bad for our efforts in the war on terror. Here's an excerpt from that now.

Play clip.

It's all about accountability. We can't just elect a different NY Times editorial staff. We're stuck with these guys. Just for completeness, here is President Bush on his opinion of the leak published by the NY Times. From RedOrbit, we have the audio.