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Originally Posted by ArlJim78
Is there a NY Times thread related to the leak? This one has my blood boiling and I'm ready for a million man march on NY to protest outside of the NY times building. I want to see zealous prosecution of this offense like they did when they went after the leaker in the Valerie Plame case.
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... And you know the Bush administration is sweating when they try to turn something that has been in Public Domain knowledge since 2002 into a "Traitorous New York Times!" issue. ArtJim, the following is from Salon.com. What I can't figure out is how the rest of the media continues to let the Bush Administration get away with turning this BS into major stories, distracting from what SHOULD be major stories. Anyway... here you go:
<<Is it a leak if it wasn't a secret in the first place?
George W. Bush has said that it was "disgraceful" for the media to report that the United States is monitoring bank transactions. Republican Rep. Peter King has called for a criminal prosecution of the reporters involved, and the National Review has demanded that the White House revoke the New York Times' press credentials.
There's just one little problem here. The transaction-monitoring program described by the Times and other media outlets wasn't much of a secret anyway. As the Boston Globe reports today, "public records -- government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 -- describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001."
Among those records is a public report prepared for the United Nations Security Council in 2002, a report that specifically acknowledged that the U.S. government was monitoring transactions through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Communication, or SWIFT. "The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions," the report said, and it recommended that other countries begin to do the same.
One of the report's authors, a former U.S. diplomat named Victor Comras, tells the Globe that the United States has "spent the last four years bragging [about] how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing." Unless terrorists were "pretty dumb" Comras says, they had to have known all along that the U.S. government was watching their financial transactions.
So is the reaction from the right a little overblown? Roger Cressey, who worked as a senior counterterrorism official at the White House until 2003, seems to think so. "There have been public references to SWIFT before," Cressey tells the Globe. "The White House is overreaching when they say [the New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before." >>