Answer that, Bill Keller and the NY Timers
Betsy's Page
Stuart Levey, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Departmenttestified before the House Subcommittee on Financial Services about the harm done by the leak of the SWIFT program. Hugh Hewitt provides a link to Levey's statement about what we have lost since the New York Times decided that their judgment on national security trumped those who dealt with security affairs day in and day out.
<<< Some observers have argued that the disclosure of the program did little damage because terrorist facilitators are smart and already knew to avoid the banking system. They correctly point out that there has been an overall trend among terrorists towards cash couriers and other informal mechanisms of money transfer – a trend that I have testified about. They also hold up as public warnings the repeated assertions by government officials that we are actively following the terrorists’ money.
What we had not spoken about publicly, however, is this particular source. And, unfortunately, this revelation is very damaging. Since being asked to oversee this program by then-Secretary Snow and then-Deputy Secretary Bodman almost two years ago, I have received the written output from this program as part of my daily intelligence briefing. For two years, I have been reviewing that output every morning. I cannot remember a day when that briefing did not include at least one terrorism lead from this program. Despite attempts at secrecy, terrorist facilitators have continued to use the international banking system to send money to one another, even after September 11th. This disclosure compromised one of our most valuable programs and will only make our efforts to track terrorist financing --and to prevent terrorist attacks-- harder. Tracking terrorist money trails is difficult enough without having our sources and methods reported on the front page newspapers. >>> (emphasis added)
Zap! So much for this supercilious claim that, of course the terrorists knew all about this program and so the NYT story was nothing new. If they knew all about it, why was our guy in the Treasury Department seeing something every single day of the past two years that came from a lead from this program? Sounds like the terrorists didn't all know about it, did they?
And the other thing that makes me hoot is to see all these congressmen and women huff and puff that they weren't informed. Well, they're on the Financial Services Subcommittee. The administration informed those on the Intelligence Committee. These guys are just angry that they're not in the loop. It's all about turf and their sense of self-importance. If we can't have a small, limited group of congressmen be the ones informed about very top secret operations and have to tell everyone who might feel slighted about not being informed, then we might as well give up all hope for keeping anything secret.
betsyspage.blogspot.com
chron.com
hughhewitt.townhall.com
financialservices.house.gov |
