Just imagine an American citizen learning the same info that the NY Slimes learned, and passing it to, say the Syrian Embassy in some country, or directly to a known Al Qaeda sympathizer.
Easy conviction for treason. But the NY Slimes can publish the same information for all the world to see, and we wonder whether we can try them and convict them for treason or some other violation of laws on revealing classified information.
I don't usually care for ultra-lib Jake Tapper, but in this case he had the idea to call up Thomas Kean, Sr. for more of an explanation (see below) of why the US access to SWIFT data was so important and why it was vital to keep it secret. It turns out that, according to what Kean was briefed on, very few people even in the banking world know about SWIFT and how it works, and almost no one would have had any idea that the US was able to get access to this data. So while Al Qaeda and similar terrorists would of course know we were trying to get at their financial transactions, they may well have imagined that they could get away with a lot in Europe and Asia that we wouldn't know about.
Now the NY Slimes has helpfully warned them off..... either the terrorists will be even more careful about not leaving tracks, and/or it may not be long before uproar in the EU, etc. makes it impossible for us to continue to access this data. Either way, we have LOST a vital tool of counter-terrorism thanks to the jihad-loving Pinch Sulzberger butt-boys of the NY Slimes.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/ KEAN on SWIFT
To help understand the controversy about the New York Times reporting of the CIA/Treasury counterterrorism program that accessed the database of the European banking consortium "Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication," called SWIFT, I phoned up former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, chair of the 9/11 Commission.
What I wanted to understand: what would terrorists and those who wish the US harm know now, with the Friday disclosure of the program, that they wouldn't have already known from the first few weeks after 9/11 WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH ANNOUNCED that the administration would do everything it could to get all data from every bank around the world.
(Bush on 9/24/01:"We're putting banks and financial institutions around the world on notice, we will work with their governments, ask them to freeze or block terrorist's ability to access funds in foreign accounts. If they fail to help us by sharing information or freezing accounts, the Department of the Treasury now has the authority to freeze their bank's assets and transactions in the United States.")
Kean said that when he was briefed by the Treasury Department on the program, "I was told very few people knew about this facility," which provides transaction processing services for over 7,000 financial organizations located in 194 countries worldwide.
"I was told that very few financial houses in this country knew about it; it was not well known even by people in banking," Kean said. "The terrorists didn't know the financial transactions went through this one group. Treasury told me, this was a method of financial tracking that people didn't understand, that nobody knew this was how things were done. Top-notch people in the US didn't even know."
"The second thing is that it took a long time to get this program set up. SWIFT is not US-controlled; we had to persuade them to cooperate, convince them that this was so important to the war on terrorism. It was a great coup when all these other countries agreed to go along."
So for even those terrorists who might know of SWIFT, "the idea of the U.S. and CIA having a tap into it is something people would find impossible to believe."