A brief history of the NYT’s perfidy in outing US Secret Agent SWIFT
Two weeks ago, the New York Times outed America’s most successful Secret Agent in the war, Secret Agent SWIFT. SWIFT was instrumental in collaring a number of terrorists and shutting off funds flows to Islamofascist cells, the mother’s milk of their warmaking capability. The Times has given various explanations for its ignoble act, explanations that have a shelf life of a day or two until they fall apart entirely. We believe that the Times’ motivation was probably crass commercialism, not wanting to get scooped by Times reporters, as happened in the Risen NSA story. We leave it to you to draw your own conclusions and to decide whether the Times sold its honor for a high enough price.
In September of 2001, the NYT said that finding out and dealing with terrorist financing should be a top priority for the Bush administration:
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.
The Bush administration pursued an aggressive policy to find and cut off terrorist funding sources, just as the NYT suggested. In November 2005 the NYT reported on the government’s efforts, as chronicled in a GAO study, entitled “Terrorist Financing: Better Strategic Planning Needed….” It is unknown the extent to which the study was scrubbed for its references to secret programs such as SWIFT monitoring, but the study was vague, critical and inconclusive, as the Times reported:
The government’s efforts to help foreign nations cut off the supply of money to terrorists, a critical goal for the Bush administration, have been stymied by infighting among American agencies, leadership problems and insufficient financing, a new Congressional report says….
The administration has made cutting off money to terrorists one of the main prongs in its attack against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. It has seized tens of millions of dollars in American accounts and assets linked to terrorist groups, prodded other countries to do the same, and is now developing a program to gain access to and track potentially hundreds of millions of international bank transfers into the United States.
But experts in the field say the results have been spotty, with few clear dents in Al Qaeda’s ability to move money and finance terrorist attacks. The Congressional report– a follow-up to a 2003 report that offered a similarly bleak assessment — buttresses those concerns.
It appears to us likely that the administration was content to have a vague and critical GAO report on its financial monitoring activities — all the better to keep them secret. But Messrs. Risen and Lichtblau kept digging, and discovered that the Bush administration’s program was in fact highly effective, and secret, as they reported June 22:
Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials….
Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said. The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, “has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities,” Stuart Levey, an undersecretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview Thursday. The program is grounded in part on the president’s emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans’ records.
Indeed, the Times article included photos of two men snared by the SWIFT program, Bali-bomber Hambali and Uzair Paracha of Brooklyn:
Despite the manifest success of the SWIFT program, its legality, and the fact that it was precisely what the Times called for in September 2001, the Times took it upon itself to blow the cover of secret agent SWIFT, one of the most effective covert operatives in the US’s war against Islamofascism.
Then the cover-up began at the New York Times.
At first, the Times claimed that the administration’s objections to outing secret agent SWIFT were “puzzling” and “half-hearted.” Treasury Secretary John Snow promptly blew that assertion away:
The New York Times’ decision to disclose the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, a robust and classified effort to map terrorist networks through the use of financial data, was irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide. In choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counter-terrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trails.
Your charge that our efforts to convince The New York Times not to publish were “half-hearted” is incorrect and offensive. Nothing could be further from the truth….I invited you to my office for the explicit purpose of talking you out of publishing this story. And there was nothing “half-hearted” about that effort. I told you about the true value of the program in defeating terrorism and sought to impress upon you the harm that would occur from its disclosure. I stressed that the program is grounded on solid legal footing, had many built-in safeguards, and has been extremely valuable in the war against terror. Additionally, Treasury Under Secretary Stuart Levey met with the reporters and your senior editors to answer countless questions, laying out the legal framework and diligently outlining the multiple safeguards and protections that are in place.
You have defended your decision to compromise this program by asserting that “terror financiers know” our methods for tracking their funds and have already moved to other methods to send money. The fact that your editors believe themselves to be qualified to assess how terrorists are moving money betrays a breathtaking arrogance and a deep misunderstanding of this program and how it works.
The American Spectator provided similar evidence on an administration that was alarmed about the disclosure of a secret and effective program:
According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories….
In the briefings, Treasury and Justice Department officials laid out the challenges law enforcement and intelligence agencies have had with the traditional and still popular hawala Muslim “banking” system, which is dependent more on interpersonal dealings than on institutions and has been prevalent in parts of the world that doesn’t understand the Islamic rules. “Since 9/11 we’ve gotten a lot better at monitoring hawalas,” says a Justice Department official. “That success has forced a lot of the money into the institutional or more traditional banking systems. And that’s where SWIFT has been particularly helpful.”…
“We thought that once the reporters and editors understood that one, these were not warrantless searches, and two, that this was a successful program that had netted real bad guys, and three, that it was a program that was helping us with current, ongoing cases, they would agree to hold off or just not do a story,” says the U.S. Treasury official. “But it became clear that nothing we said was going sway them. Whomever they were talking to, whoever was leaking the stuff, had them sold on this story.”
Pretending that the Treasury Department and senior Bush administration officials were blasé about the secret and baleful disclosures fell apart as a strategy almost immediately. The next strategy was to pretent that the secrets of Secret Agent SWIFT were already well-known. Lichtblau to Hugh Hewitt, via Michelle Malkin, blustering inanely about a program referred to as “secret” in his own story half a dozen times:
“When you have senior Treasury Department officials going before Congress, publicly talking about how they are tracing and cutting off money to terrorists, weeks and weeks before our story ran. USA Today, the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into — outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret.” (emphasis added).
Hmm. What was that headline over Lichtblau’s story again? Oh, yeah: “Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to block terror.” Meanwhile, finance regulators and top government officials in Belgium (who apparently aren’t among the “hundreds, if not thousands” who knew about the program) have ordered a probe into SWIFT…
What’s next in the cover-up? Who knows? It has been our surmise that the Times editors went along with the publication of the story in order to avoid getting scooped by their reporters, as they almost were by James Risen on the NSA story, which the NYT sat on for a year. Whether that is sufficient justification for outing America’s most effective Secret Agent is up to NYT readers, and perhaps the courts, to decide.