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June 28, 2006

White House Revealed Financial Monitoring First

President Bush calls it "disgraceful" and a "great harm" to national security. Republican Senator Jim Bunning calls it "treason" that "scares the devil out of me." Rep. Peter King wants Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to consider "criminal prosecution." And House Speaker Denny Hastert, that paragon of virtue, is calling for the revocation of the press credentials of The New York Times. All this because the Times ran a story about the government's monitoring of banking records through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT).

But a search of public records reveals that the government itself has, for the past five years, been openly describing that monitoring program for all the world to see.

"There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. "The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. […] "Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume" their transactions were being monitored, Comras said of terrorist groups. "We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing."

Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. […]

Less than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Bush signed an executive order calling for greater cooperation with foreign entities to monitor money that might be headed to terrorist groups. The executive order was posted on the White House website.

The article lists several other instances in which the information was made public, but the point is clear: Republicans are simply looking to clamp a firm hand over the mouth of our free press in order to reduce the flow of information to voters ahead of the Fall elections.

Posted by Becky at June 28, 2006 09:03 AM