Leading the "charge" against the NY Times reporting, were VP Cheney and President Bush:
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<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060627-8.html">Remarks by the Vice President at a Luncheon for Congressional Candidate Adrian Smith June 27, 2006</a>....The second program that The New York Times has now disclosed is the terrorist financial tracking program, just within about the last week or so....... ....The New York Times has now made it more difficult for us to prevent attacks in the future. Publishing this highly classified information about our sources and methods for collecting intelligence will enable the terrorists to look for ways to defeat our efforts. These kinds of stories also adversely affect our relationships with people who work with us against the terrorists. In the future, they will be less likely to cooperate if they think the United States is incapable of keeping a secret. What is doubly disturbing for me is that not only have they gone forward with these stories, but they've been rewarded for it, for example, in the case of the terrorist surveillance program, by being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalism. I think that is a disgrace.
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How do Cheney's comments "stand up", when they are considered in the context of the September 21, 2001 article that I already posted, and the following, from a December, 2002, UN Report:
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<a href="http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/725/72/PDF/N0272572.pdf?OpenElement">From .pdf page 11:</a>
30. New emphasis is also being placed by several major banking countries on Financial Action Task Force (FATF) special recommendation VII (see annex IV), which relates to wire transfers. FATF has issued a new proposal for an interpretive note to ensure that basic information identifying the originator of fund transfers is obtained and preserved by banks and intermediaries, and that such information is made rapidly available to law enforcement and other appropriate authorities for the purpose of investigating, prosecuting and tracing the assets of terrorists or other criminals. The Group would like to see the FATF proposal for an interpretive note quickly adopted and implemented by all countries and banking jurisdictions.
31. The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the <h3>SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions.</h3> The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries.
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Can anyone explain to me what Cheney was talking about when he accused the NY Times of <b>"Publishing this highly classified information about our sources and methods for collecting intelligence"?</b> Here is a link to the NY Times, June 22 article:
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/washington/23intel.html?ei=5090&en=4b46b4fd8685c26b&ex=1308715200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">Bank Data Is Sifted by US in Secret to Block Terror</a>
I read the whole article linked above, again. How can a news article that reports on the intercepting of SWIFT financial transaction instruction messages, by U.S. government agencies, cause such controversy and fingerpointing from promininet republicans? I've established that the information about U.S. surveillance of <a href="http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:wHQBtSe7APMJ:www.baltimoresun.com/news/custom/attack/bal-te.money21sep21,1,71575.story.hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=">SWIFT was published</a> just 10 days after 9/11, by the Baltimore Sun, and now....I've posted an example of much more specific disclosure of U.S. monitoring of SWIFT, this time in a December 17, 2002 UN Report.
If you've read this far, and compared Cheney's accusations concerning the NY Times reporting, and the public record of SWIFT monitoring by the U.S., in 2001 in the Baltimore Sun, and a year later in a UN report, both fully accessible on the internet, where do you think he is coming from, and what do you think his goals are? IMO, the "games" that powerclown maintains the press is "playing", aren't being played by the press at all. The "games" are being played by Cheney and Bush; and the are openly attempting to impede our right to know, to deflect attention from the mass, warrantless surveilance that is neither "secret", nor intended to "monitor" al Qaeda.
How could it be in your interest to support or defend what Bush/Cheney and their chorus of pundits and faux news parrots are all accusing the NY Times of doing, when it is now apparent that al Qaeda was tipped off about the SWIFT monitoring in 2001 or in 2002, at the latest? The data mining of SWIFT transactions has gone on for five years, who is our government actually monitoring, now that the al Qaeda excuse has worn so thin as a justification?