Forgive the length, but its' worth the read....I have a passion for wading through the bullshit that I witness every day in America. Lots of strong opinions, but IMO, it's rare to find anyone with one that is on track. More than half of congress was on the wrong side of this one....
Quote:
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Originally Posted by powerclown
.......Given the inconsistencies admitted by the NYT reporters as to whether SWIFT was secret or not, I feel the criticism put upon the NYT is warranted. I also question the timing of this story, given the upcoming mid-term elections.
So again, why did the NYT contend they were publishing a story about a SECRET government program? Why did they word the article: "Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror" and go on to describe SWIFT as a secret government program? I thought the NYT argument is that SWIFT wasn't a secret. On has to ask why the NYT went to so much trouble to characterize this story as exposing a SECRET, but now that the shit has hit the fan, they regress into trying to spin it as SWIFT being public domain for 5 years.
It's just a game....."Pin the Tail on the President"
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Quote:
http://today.reuters.com/investing/f..._MEDIA-USA.XML
WASHINGTON, June 29 (Reuters) - Republicans intensified their criticism of news media over security issues on Thursday as the U.S. House of Representatives debated a resolution that condemns public disclosure of secret surveillance programs.
Republican lawmakers in both houses of Congress said government employees who revealed details of a secret Treasury Department effort to monitor bank transfers to the <b>New York Times</b> and other news outlets had undermined national security.
Ohio Republican Rep. Michael Oxley said such disclosures helped terrorists hide their activities more effectively. .......
...Over the past week, President George W. Bush has led a chorus of criticism <b>against the Times</b> and other media outlets for their coverage of the bank-monitoring effort and a separate surveillance program that monitors phone calls without a court warrant.
Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said of his similar resolution: "We need to express collective outrage at the indiscriminate leaking of classified information." His resolution also calls on the Justice Department to prosecute people who leak classified information.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter declined to endorse Cornyn's resolution.
"I think there would have to be a clear-cut showing of prejudice and damage before I would favor any resolution to inhibit media coverage," the Pennsylvania Republican told reporters.
Separately, Arizona Republican Rep. J.D. Hayworth has gathered <b>70 signatures on a letter calling for Times reporters' media credentials to be revoked.</b> (Additional reporting by Vicki Allen)
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powerclown, you have argued that President Bush is somehow, a "victim" of the NY Times, partisan bias and pre-election sabotage of republicans running for office in the november, mid-term elections. The Washington Post described the "secret government monitoring" of global banking transactions, and CIA and Treasury agents' intent to "plug in" to the "computerized systems" of SWIFT specifically, in an August 28, 1998, article, yet reported, as the NY Times did, nearly eight years later, about "the secret NSA and Treasury programs", or that the WSJ editorial stated:
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http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110008585
Fit and Unfit to Print
What are the obligations of the press in wartime?
Friday, June 30, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
......it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter.....
.....We recount all this because more than a few commentators have tried to link the Journal and Times at the hip......
........Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn't mind seeing in print. If this was a "leak," it was entirely authorized....
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Quote:
http://www.newshounds.us/2006/06/26/...apers_know.php
We Know The NY Times Published Secret Financial Story - How Did The Other Papers Know?
Reported by Donna - June 26, 2006 - 45 comments
I've been hearing all day how the NY Times is the one paper the president got upset with over disclosing the story about the secret financial program. I also heard that the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal had also reported it. What I didn't hear was why the president was only upset at the NY Times.
Found out on Studio B with Shepard Smith from Bret Baier.
<h3>RIght at the end of the segment about the NY Times, Bret Baier said that after the NY Times said they were going ahead with the story that the White House had "gave on the backside to other papers to take away the (NY Times) exclusive."....</h3>
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Trusted "sources", WSJ and Foxnews both revealed that this is a Bush/Cheney/Rove "Op" that we watched play out, or I'm wrong, and we're actually watching an administration that has classified and held secret, so much information, and so many initiatives, that they reflexively label everything that major news media question them about, to get "their side" of the story, as "secret".
This "Op" is by no means, restricted to the NY Times. The background story on the NY Times decision to publish their "secret government monitoring" disclosure, was that the LA Times was also preparing a similar report. On June 30, executive editors from both newspapers published this unusual Op-Ed:
Quote:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...ome-commentary
or http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/01/op...14bef0&ei=5070
When do we publish a secret?
How the press balances national security with its mission to report the news.
By Dean Baquet and Bill Keller, DEAN BAQUET is editor of the Los Angeles Times. BILL KELLER is executive editor of the New York Times.
July 1, 2006
SINCE SEPT. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in covering the government's efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. On other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information over strong objections from our government.
Last week, our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism — revived an emotional national debate, featuring angry calls of "treason" and proposals that journalists be jailed, along with much genuine concern and confusion about the role of the press in times like these.
We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day. We apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent newspapers. We agree, however, on some basics about the immense responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country........
........Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight.
We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.
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Here is the June 23, 2006, reporting by the Washington Post:
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062300167.html
Bank Records Secretly Tapped
Administration Began Using Global Database Shortly After 2001 Attacks
By Barton Gellman, Paul Blustein and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 23, 2006; Page A01
...Together with a hundredfold expansion of the FBI's use of "national security letters" to obtain communications and banking records, the secret NSA and Treasury programs have built unprecedented government databases of private transactions, most of them involving people who prove irrelevant to terrorism investigators.
Stuart Levey, undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in an interview last night that the newly disclosed program -- the existence of which the government sought to conceal -- has used the agency's powers of administrative subpoena to compel an international banking consortium to open its records. The Brussels-based cooperative, known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, links about 7,800 banks and brokerages and handles billions of transactions a year.
Terrorism investigators had sought access to SWIFT's database since the 1990s, but other government and industry authorities balked at the potential blow to confidence in the banking system. After the 2001 attacks, President Bush overrode those objections and invoked his powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to "investigate, regulate or prohibit" any foreign financial transaction linked to "an unusual and extraordinary threat."........
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<h3>Not only was the bank monitoring program not "secret" as the government has maintained, and leaked to the WSJ, it was disclosed in 1998. </h3>
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...aden082898.htm
Bin Laden's Finances Are Moving Target
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
<h3>Friday, August 28, 1998; Page A01</h3>
.........On one point U.S. officials are certain: They hold out no hope of finding bin Laden assets in the United States. He has advocated a boycott of this country for years. <h3>But they are scouring Britain for bin Laden bank accounts used to finance a Saudi dissident organization there, terrorism experts said.
The CIA and agents with Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network also will try to lay tripwires to find out when bin Laden moves funds by plugging into the computerized systems of bank transaction monitoring services – operated by the Federal Reserve and private organizations called SWIFT and CHIPS – that record the billions of dollars coursing through the global banking system daily.</h3>
John Moynihan, a former Drug Enforcement Administration investigator, said that unlike most criminal money-laundering, which washes dirty money into clean businesses, "bin Laden is taking clean, legitimately earned funds and turning it toward dirty purposes. Tracking that money will be doubly difficult because it hasn't aroused suspicion before."........
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As we see documented above, it flies in the face of credulity that Bush and Cheney are the "victims" of partisan reporting tactics by the New York Times.
Four of the most prominent American newspapers were told that publication of the U.S. CIA and Treasury Dept. banking surveillance of SWIFT financial transactions was "secret". The LA & NY Times decided to publish the information that they had both gathered via investigative reporting. The Bush administration retaliated, as the WSJ clearly admitted, and Foxnews' Bret Baier confirmed, by feeding their version of the story to WSJ and Washington Post, to rob the Times of an "exclusive".
The problem is that the SWIFT monitoring clearly was not secret, it was information previously in the public domain, reported most clearly by the Washington Post in August, 1998, and briefly described in a September, 2001 report, written by a current NY Times reporter, Scott Shane, who worked for the Tribune owned, Baltimore Sun, at that time. The LA Times, also Tribune owned, and, along with the NY Times, an independent investigator and discloser of the "secret" SWIFT data mining program, has had Scott Shane's 2001 SWIFT reporting, up on it's website for...58 months.
If this is not enough to influence anyone who was convinced by powerclown that Bush is a "victim" of the NY Times, consider the opening quote box on this post....the one that describes both republican controlled houses of congress halting all other legislative business to hound, threaten, and condemn....the New York Times.
If you support any of these congress folk or this administration, please state your case as to what I've gotten wrong in my posts, and what powerclown has gotten right. IMO, this incident is worth focussing on. It exposes the obsessive and vigorous agenda of a secretive administration, at war with the press. The press, as I've documented....three major newspapers, all published the administration's claim that the CIA/Treasury monitoring of SWIFT computers was a "secret" program. The entire republican congress bought that "line", and went with it. Two of the newspapers, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, have been documented, in this post, previously publishing details of SWIFT, the Washington Post in the most similar detail to today's alledged "secrets". The NY Times, convicted by powerclown, as "victimizing" Mr. Bush, has merely been associated with past reporting of SWIFT....by me..
because I discovered that one of their current reporters, Scott Shane, who didn't author the June 22 reporting on the "secret program", did mention SWIFT in the 2001 article that appears to this day on the <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fbal-te.money21sep21%2C1%2C2970618.story&btnG=Google+Search">LA Times website</a>, when he worked another LA Times/Tribune newspaper.
(To make it work, the LA Times link resolves as a google search result first.)
The WSJ, by it's own admission, was fed and then published the Bush admin. "spin" on the story that the LA & NY Times filed from their own investigative reporting.