The New York Times reports that the Bush administration has been spying on international bank transactions.
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.In theory, this is probably a logical and necessary step in ensuring national security, and like wiretapping, no one in their right mind could be against it as long as it is done within the law.
The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.
Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.
The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview on Thursday.
The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.
The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.
That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues.
"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said one former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "the potential for abuse is enormous."
Ay, there's the rub. The revelations that the Bush administration has routinely skirted the laws on the books and taken it upon themselves to decide just how the laws they do observe apply -- or don't apply -- to them make this kind of story that used to be the stuff of the nightmares of the TFH brigade who saw silent black helicopters hovering over the World Trade Center, or the militiamen who romp around in their Elmer Fudd hats and cammie-jammies in the northern Idaho woods muttering about the "Zion Occupation Government" in Washington.
Paranoia about government spying has now become routine because we've seen that the people in charge of the government have no qualms about taking whatever liberties they wish with our liberties under the rubric of the war on terror. The mantra of "If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to worry about" used to be the tag line in every bad Soviet-spy thriller, and ironically, we're getting it from people whose credo used to be that being a conservative meant smaller government, more freedoms, and a deep suspicion of Big Brother. And even more ironically, the Bush administration, rather than handle their powers in the true conservative fashion of respect for the Rule of Law -- at least they sure harped on it between 1993 and 2001 -- have treated the powers of secrecy and security like a kid with an AK-47; making the most routine meetings super-secret, and then turning around and using classified information as a weapon of political revenge.
You can expect a huge outcry from the right wing that once again the New York Times has revealed state secrets and are treasonable evil-doers by telling the terrorists that we are watching international banking transactions. Excuse me, but just how dumb are the terrorists who wouldn't have already figured that out? Like the phone tapping, it isn't the fact that the counterterrorism forces have been doing it; it's the extent to which they've been doing it and whether or not they are doing it within the law that matters.
