[h/t: Hugh Hewitt]

For a concise analysis of why the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were just flat out wrong in their assertion that their expose of the SWIFT-terrorist-financial-tracking program would not compromise our efforts to gain intelligence on International terrorist groups — because they already knew that we were tracking them — see Dennis Lormel’s post at Counter Terrorism Blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Returning to the simple argument, one of its flaws was resonant in the Times article itself. The Times article mentioned select operational investigative SWIFT program successes, to include the capture of Jamaah Islamiah leader Hambali. How could that happen if terrorists had stopped using the formal financial system because of Government disclosures of financial tracking mechanisms? Another factor is that many of the skeptics lack operational familiarity with the SWIFT program and do not understand its operational capability or more importantly its continuous operational success up until publication of the Times article.

When Bill Keller, editor-in-chief at the NYT said to Charlie Rose:

The lesser of the two, and the one that was presented to me, really as something of an afterthought, was that this will inform terrorists of something that they don’t know. I find it hard to believe that people at the Treasury Department and the White House really believe that, given that they have publicly testified repeatedly to the fact that they go after all the information they can get about international financial transactions that are behind terrorism.

He was either lying, is beyond clueless, or more likely, is more committed to the destruction of the Bush administration than to his own survival. Sounds to me like Bill needs some meds, and a long vacation. (db)

Technorati Tags: SWIFT, New York Times, AntiTerrorismBlog, Dennis Lormel

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 10:40 am and is filed under Intellegence Efforts, Media Doin' It Wrong. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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