Who wrote this about stopping terrorist banking and financing?
The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity and is readying an executive order freezing the assets of known terrorists. Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also must be closer coordination among America’s law enforcement, national security and financial regulatory agencies….
New regulations requiring money service businesses like the hawala banks to register and imposing criminal penalties on those that do not are scheduled to come into force late next year. The effective date should be moved up to this fall, and rules should be strictly enforced the moment they take effect. If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one.
Sounds like some people who want to get tough about terrorism, doesn’t it? Sounds like serious people. Maybe they were when they wrote this on September 24, 2001 and they were thinking about serious matters, but that was a long time ago. 2006 is an election year, after all, and some people think that that is the most important thing of all.
UPDATE
Curiously, these terrible examples of what-it-means-to-be-American have a tin ear about the politics of their actions as well.
UPDATE II
Nicole Gelinas in City Journal adds to undestanding that the SWIFT measures largely filled in gaps left in the hastily drawn Patriot Act, which, as you recall, was passed almost unanimously in the Senate and overwhelmingly in the House:
In pursuing the Swift initiative without seeking the authorization of Congress (though it briefed lawmakers and the 9/11 Commission about it on a classified basis), the Bush administration may simply have concluded that it had already won permission to carry out bank surveillance. After all, Swift really just fills in gaps in the massive surveillance program authorized under the Patriot Act (and did so quietly, until the media unconscionably exposed it). Why tell the terrorists what we’re doing to catch them when there’s no legal reason to do so? Moreover, the administration may have reasoned, since Swift is an international system, it’s hard to see how U.S. legislation would apply to it in the first place.
Well, the program is legal, and US legislation does not apply to many of its aspects. Nonetheless, the international spotlight and pressure from litigants can suffice to bring about the Times’ desired objective of bringing the program to its knees, as the AP reported:
A civil liberties group said Wednesday that it had asked governments around the world to block the release of confidential financial records to U.S. anti-terrorism authorities. London-based watchdog Privacy International said it had filed complaints with data protection and privacy regulators in 13 European countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, arguing that the disclosures of financial transactions “were made without any legal basis or authority whatsoever.”
The New York Times stands a good chance of being the reason that a lot of innocent people get killed.