[Infowarrior] - Behind the SWIFT hypocracy this week.

[Richard Forno]

(Interestingly the LA Times and WSJ haven't been slammed by the
Administration over this story yet, and they also broke the item last
week......rf)

June 29, 2006
Behind Bush's Fury, a Vow Made in 2001
By SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/washington/29intel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&p
agewanted=print

WASHINGTON, June 28 ‹ Ever since President Bush vowed days after the Sept.
11 attacks to "follow the money as a trail to the terrorists," the
government has made no secret of its efforts to hunt down the bank accounts
of Al Qaeda and its allies.

But that fact has not muted the fury of Mr. Bush, his top aides and many
members of Congress at the decision last week by The New York Times and
other newspapers to disclose a centerpiece of that hunt: the Treasury
Department's search for clues in a vast database of financial transactions
maintained by a Belgium-based banking consortium known as Swift.

Speaking at a fund-raising event in St. Louis for Senator Jim Talent, Mr.
Bush made the news reports his central theme.

"This program has been a vital tool in the war on terror," Mr. Bush said.
"Last week the details of this program appeared in the press."

Mr. Bush received a prolonged, standing ovation from the Republican crowd
when he added, "There can be no excuse for anyone entrusted with vital
intelligence to leak it ‹ and no excuse for any newspaper to print it."

On Thursday, the House is expected to take up a Republican resolution
supporting the tracking of financial transactions and condemning the
publication of the existence of the program and details of how it works. The
resolution says Congress "expects the cooperation of all news media
organizations in protecting the lives of Americans and the capability of the
government to identify, disrupt and capture terrorists by not disclosing
classified intelligence programs." Democrats are proposing a variant that
expresses support for the treasury program but omits the language about the
news media.

The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, has ordered an
assessment of any damage to counterterrorism efforts from the disclosures,
but the review is expected to take months, and its findings are likely to
remain classified.

Experts on terror financing are divided in their views of the impact of the
revelations. Some say the harm in last week's publications in The Times, The
Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal may have been less in tipping
off terrorists than in putting publicity-shy bankers in an uncomfortable
spotlight.

"I would be surprised if terrorists didn't know that we were doing
everything we can to track their financial transactions, since the
administration has been very vocal about that fact," said William F.
Wechsler, a former Treasury and National Security Council official who
specialized in tracking terrorism financing.

But Mr. Wechsler said the disclosure might nonetheless hamper intelligence
collection by making financial institutions resistant to requests for access
to records.

"I wouldn't be surprised if these recent articles have made it more
difficult to get cooperation from our friends in Europe, since it may make
their cooperation with the U.S. less politically palatable," Mr. Wechsler
said.

Though privacy advocates have denounced the examination of banking
transactions, the Swift consortium has defended its cooperation with the
counterterrorism program and has not indicated any intention to stop
cooperating with the broad administrative subpoenas issued to obtain its
data.

A former federal prosecutor who handled major terrorism cases, Andrew C.
McCarthy, said he believed that the greatest harm from news reports about
such classified programs was the message that Americans could not keep
secrets.

"If foreign intelligence services think anything they tell us will end up in
the newspapers, they'll stop sharing so much information," said Mr.
McCarthy, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies in Washington.

Mr. McCarthy said he thought the Swift disclosure might encourage terrorist
plotters to stop moving money through the banking system, depriving the
United States and its allies of a valuable window on their activities.
"Methods they assumed were safe they now know are not so safe," he said.

But Bob Kerrey, a member of the 9/11 commission and former Democratic
senator from Nebraska, took a different view, saying that if the news
reports drive terrorists out of the banking system, that could actually help
the counterterrorism cause.

"If we tell people who are potential criminals that we have a lot of police
on the beat, that's a substantial deterrent," said Mr. Kerrey, now president
of New School University. If terrorists decide it is too risky to move money
through official channels, "that's very good, because it's much, much harder
to move money in other ways," Mr. Kerrey said.

A State Department official, Anthony Wayne, made a parallel point in 2004
before Congress. "As we've made it more difficult for them to use the
banking system," Mr. Wayne said, "they've been shifting to other less
reliable and more cumbersome methods, such as cash couriers."

As such testimony suggests, government agencies have often trumpeted their
successes in tracking terrorist funding. President Bush set the tone on
Sept. 24, 2001, declaring, "We're putting banks and financial institutions
around the world on notice ‹ we will work with their governments, ask them
to freeze or block terrorists' ability to access funds in foreign accounts."

Since then, the Treasury Department has produced dozens of news releases and
public reports detailing its efforts. Though officials appear never to have
mentioned the Swift program, they have repeatedly described their
cooperation with financial networks to identify accounts held by people and
organizations linked to terrorism.

Working with "our allies abroad and our partners in the private sector," an
April news release said, "Treasury follows the terrorists' money trails
aggressively, exploiting them for intelligence."

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, convened a hearing in
2004 where Treasury officials described at length their efforts, assisted by
financial institutions, to trace terrorists' money. But he has been among
the most vehement critics of the disclosures about the Swift program, saying
editors and reporters of The New York Times should be imprisoned for
publishing government secrets.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. King said he saw no contradiction.
"Obviously we wanted the terrorists to know we were trying to track them,"
Mr. King said. "But we didn't want them to know the details."