SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) has been around forever. It was founded in 1973, about the same time your correspondent was getting his first banking job at First National City Bank in New York. It was something of a big deal thirty plus years ago to those in banking circles who followed such things closely, since it provided a means for creating better communications and streamlined funds transfer mechanisms among institutions in various countries which were, at that time, using diverse platforms and protocols for international money movements. There is nothing secret about SWIFT; here’s its annual report if you are interested in such things.

Had we thought about SWIFT at all in the context of terrorism and the war, it would have seemed obvious to us that the US Government was doing everything it could to track funds transfers from suspicious accounts at all sorts of banks, suspicious and innocent, to other parties at other banks. Hence we were a little surprised to read the story in the New York Times about SWIFT. What on earth do people like Risen and Lichtblau think the government does all day? — precisely this sort of stuff. Are you surprised?

(To us the most suspicious thing about the story is that it reads like one of those necessary but boring chapters halfway through a thriller, in which the reader has to be brought up to speed on some technical data and jargon that are later integral to the plot. Let’s see whether Lichtblau or Risen produce a pot-boiler in the next couple of years.)

There might have been a valid reason for publishing a story on SWIFT and its use in the war if someone were doing something illegal, but everything is in fact legal. Since the piece has no such usefulness, it serves only two functions, neither of which is honorable: (a) it is soft-core anti-American porn for those New York Times readers who like such things (as was the CIA airline piece); and (b) it aids and abets the lazy and stupid among the terrorist class. (Every halfway bright Islamist terrorist knows that the government is tracking funds transfers; why do you think the Palestinians are smuggling cash, and getting caught with $800,000 in their briefcases?)

The question is not why Lichtblau and Risen wrote the story. They were probably hoping to find some illegality, and, failing that, they produced Chapter 9 of their upcoming thriller. The question is why the New York Times would print it — a story whose only impact is to alert some of America’s dopier enemies (their number is legion), and to bring a stop to an international process that works now and may well work even better in the future to stem the flow of the mother’s milk of terrorism. We’ll let Heather Mac Donald have the last word: “Al Qaeda has long worked to manipulate the media in its favor. It can disband that operation now, knowing that, unbidden, America’s most powerful newspaper is looking out for its interests.”

UPDATE

We note that Powerline linked to a piece at the Scratching Post about Leftism as a poor business strategy for the NYT. This is a subject we have covered rather extensively, as has Thomas Lifson at the American Thinker.

UPDATE II

We are taking the liberty of reproducing a letter from a soldier that ran on Powerline:

Dear Messrs. Keller, Lichtblau & Risen:

Congratulations on disclosing our government’s highly classified anti-terrorist-financing program (June 23). I apologize for not writing sooner. But I am a lieutenant in the United States Army and I spent the last four days patrolling one of the more dangerous areas in Iraq. (Alas, operational security and common sense prevent me from even revealing this unclassified location in a private medium like email.)

Unfortunately, as I supervised my soldiers late one night, I heard a booming explosion several miles away. I learned a few hours later that a powerful roadside bomb killed one soldier and severely injured another from my 130-man company. I deeply hope that we can find and kill or capture the terrorists responsible for that bomb. But, of course, these terrorists do not spring from the soil like Plato’s guardians. No, they require financing to obtain mortars and artillery shells, priming explosives, wiring and circuitry, not to mention for training and payments to locals willing to emplace bombs in exchange for a few months’ salary. As your story states, the program was legal, briefed to Congress, supported in the government and financial industry, and very successful.

Not anymore. You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here. Next time I hear that familiar explosion — or next time I feel it — I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance.

And, by the way, having graduated from Harvard Law and practiced with a federal appellate judge and two Washington law firms before becoming an infantry officer, I am well-versed in the espionage laws relevant to this story and others — laws you have plainly violated. I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars.

Very truly yours,

Tom Cotton
Baghdad, Iraq

UPDATE III

Hugh Hewitt takes on the hubris of the NYT and LAT in an excellent Townhall piece:

Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, told me in an wide-ranging interview on the story that all thought of restraint vanished when the New York Times posted its story. This despite the fact that McManus, in response to my question whether it was possible that “the story will in fact help terrorists elude capture,” McManus replied: “[I]t is conceivable.”

Mr. Lichtblau told Editor & Publisher: that in each case the newspaper believed that the information it was reporting would not put anyone in harm’s way. ‘I think we came down on the same side in both questions,’ he said of the two stories. ‘That this is not giving away information that is tangibly helping terrorists know what they don’t already know.’

You cannot balance what you have not weighed, and you cannot weigh what you cannot measure. Neither of the Times Two possesses the capacity, background, experience or learning to judge the extent of the assistance they have rendered terrorists. No “expert” they could consult would be in a position to contradict the government’s strong assertions of the danger they were putting innocents in via their recklessness.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 24th, 2006 at 10:37 am and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, War, art, culture, business, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.