Eric Lichtblau and James Risen strike again with a huge scoop.
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.
It’s a long article and it’s a complicated legal matter. Some initial thoughts on the legality are at Intel Dump and on the wisdom at HLS Watch. I’ve read the article once, and it is definitely a very partial picture of the program and laced with administration counterspin and pushback. What’s clear is that the New York Times has talked to at least 20 sources, that many sources doubt the program’s legality and/or propriety, and that the cooperating executives have felt very uneasy about the ongoing nature of the program and have sought to restrict its scope (apparently successfully).
The administration claims the program was instrumental in capturing Hambali, accused of masterminding the Bali bombing, and helped capture a Brooklyn man that was laundering money for al-Qaeda. That’s standard fare from the government. Take it or leave it.
If the Democrats take power I think one of our first orders of business should be to go over these types of programs and put them on a more legal footing. We definitely need increased safeguards against unwarranted intrusions into our privacy. We also need to be able to track bad guys. We can do both, but not the way the Bush administration is proceeding.
Naturally, the right wing is howling that the New York Times is exposing important tools in our effort to stop terrorists from striking, but they typically ignore the moral questions, the potentials for abuse, and the fact that concerned officials felt there was a need to expose this program. People don’t expose classified programs if they think they are acting within the law and serving a vital purpose. Michelle Malkin should think about that.
In the meantime, this is just one more example of how the administration used 9/11 to take us back to a pre-Watergate situation where the intelligence agencies do whatever they want and Congress need not know boo about it.
