Oversight missing, again Mon Jun 26, 7:21 AM ET
"Follow the money" is an axiom long applied to catching criminals, and it quickly appeared near the top of the Bush administration's "to do" list after the 9/11 attacks. Beginning almost immediately, the CIA and Treasury Department gained access to a confidential network known as SWIFT - the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication - a Belgian consortium that tracks international financial transactions.
The secret program, disclosed Friday by several news organizations, has, says Treasury Secretary John Snow, helped locate operatives and their financiers, chart terrorist networks and bring terrorists to justice.
It's hard to imagine any American would not want the administration to go after terrorist financing, but the program instantly generated concern that the privacy of people not under suspicion was endangered.
That might easily have been avoided.
Unlike the administration's wiretapping of phone calls without court approval and its creation of a massive data bank of Americans' personal phone records - two other secret programs that prompted controversy - this one appears to be on firmer legal ground. The White House invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows broad authority to respond to an "extraordinary threat."
Also, some safeguards were built in to deter indiscriminate use of the program.
Just one further step might have avoided any problem: getting congressional approval.
A few key members of Congress were notified. (How many and when is unclear.) But Congress received wide briefings on it only after the administration realized The New York Times was preparing a story.
Why? It's improbable that Congress would have blocked the program, and specific approval might have assured unity of purpose. More important, it would have provided the checks and balances that are the public's only protection from government excess.
The administration's failure to accept that simple bargain - established by the nation's Founders - is proving to be its Achilles' heel.
The wiretapping program is an example. Long before it began, Congress had established a special court to expedite wiretaps in terrorism cases. The White House, insistent that its actions were beyond review, ignored it, as well as Congress.
Even earlier, the administration ran into trouble by insisting that it could imprison anyone it wished on terrorism charges secretly, indefinitely and without trial. It abandoned a test case involving a U.S. citizen as it neared the Supreme Court.
This sort of thing is necessary in wartime, the administration blithely argues.
It seems to us more just a matter of arrogance, and a preference for secret government. Were Vice President Cheney's claims to secrecy for his pre-9/11 energy task force really any different? The concern then was only that the industry was setting the policy.
Support for fighting the war on terrorism aggressively is broad. So, too, is resistance to needless invasions of privacy, secret government and executive arrogance.
Striking a balance shouldn't be this tough.
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