Tony Snow Says ‘NYT’ Should ‘Take the Heat’
Bush is really, really mad at leakers (unless they work for him)
Every passing week, it becomes more apparent that disgruntled leftists in the intelligence community and antiwar crusaders in the mainstream media, annealed in their disdain for the Bush administration, are undermining our ability to win the War on Terror…. President Bush, who said on Monday morning that the exposure “does great harm to the United States of America, must demand that the New York Times pay a price for its costly, arrogant defiance. The administration should withdraw the newspaper’s White House press credentials because this privilege has been so egregiously abused, and an aggressive investigation should be undertaken to identify and prosecute, at a minimum, the government officials who have leaked national-defense information.
Well, judging by all the caterwauling and pissed-off rhetoric coming from the Bush Administration and others on the far Right, it would seem that the New York Times got it just about right. Yes, I can understand that the Government may not want to have it’s tools and methods exposed, but it’s not as if the SWIFT program was a state secret. If enterprising reporters can uncover it, wouldn’t it also stand to reason that enterprising terrorists might have long ago done the same thing? Financial transactions leave trails; trails can be followed. What’s so new and/or different about that?
Given this Administration’s well-established bunker mentality, it makes sense that they would view the Times publishing their story as treasonous behavior. Nonetheless, neither the Mainstream Media nor any other flavor of media are under any legal or moral obligation to censor themselves. When the government begins to determine what goes to print, we no longer have a press that can be considered anything close to free.
Stalin is dead, y’all. Deal with it….
The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) was initiated soon after the 9/11 attacks. It ingeniously focuses on the hub of interlocking systems that facilitate global money transfers. The steward of that hub, centered in Brussels, is the Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or “SWIFT.” SWIFT is an organization of the world’s financial giants, including the national banks of Belgium, England, and Japan, the European Central Bank, and the U.S. Federal Reserve. SWIFT, however, is not a bank. It’s a clearinghouse that manages message traffic pursuant to international transfers of funds.
Intelligence about those communications implicates no legally recognized privacy interests. To begin with, they are predominantly foreign, and international. To the extent the U.S. Constitution might be thought to apply, the Supreme Court held nearly 30 years ago that records in the hands of third parties — including financial records maintained by banks — are not private, and thus not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, to the extent Congress later supplemented privacy protections by statute, those laws regulated disclosures by financial institutions. SWIFT is not a financial institution.
Despite this legal daylight, the Bush administration has gone out of its way to defer to privacy concerns. Assuming that American law applied, it obtained SWIFT information by administrative subpoena. It carefully narrowed its scrutiny to those transacting with suspected terrorists. It concurred with its international partners that the resulting intelligence should be used only for counterterrorism and security purposes—not for prosecutions of ordinary crimes (even though such prosecutions would be legal under American law). And it agreed to subject the TFTP to independent auditing to ensure that the effort was trained on terrorists.
OK, let’s assume for the record that the Bush Administration has been the perfect guardian of privacy issues throughout this process. (Unlikely, I know, but that’s another argument for another time.) That still doesn’t speak to the public’s right to know what is being done to protect them. Do the Bushies really think that, up until now, that terrorists really had NO idea that their transactions were being tracked? Give me a break. Anyone smart enough to cobble together and execute a plot involving hijacking four planes and ultimately flying three of them into buildings is smart enough to understand that every financial transaction leaves a trail. The question, of course, is whether or not we recognize and admit that, in their own twisted way, terrorists are every bit as smart and resourceful as we are.
The New York TImes is guilty of nothing save for reporting the news. Let’s not forget the the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times also published articles on the SWIFT program (of course, WSJ, being a reliably Conservative mouthpiece, escaped the Administration’s vitriol; the omittal of the LA Times I can only chalk up to sloppiness on the Administration’s part….)
Publishing the truth is never a treasonous offense. Our government tries to influence or stop the publishing of the truth…doesn’t that strike anyone else as the truly treasonous behavior in this sorry scenario??
