UPDATE: Blood in the water…
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After Sulzberger's disgraceful shielding of Judith Miller, you'd almost think
this
was our girlfriend Karma coming back to bite him. If so, he's missing some serious
flesh.
But between the WSJ Bush thumping and the New York Times disgraceful stenography on WMD, it's almost comical watching these newspaper titans battle it out for righteous representative of all things strong on terror. But let's get real.
SWIFT is
heating up because Republicans are so desperate they're hoping it can become the campaign issue that will save their sorry souls in November. Never
mind that the program was online and has its own magazine. Anything for politics
and election year scapegoating.
But there is sanity at the center, where the truth resides. Two people weigh in who know: Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey. Their points are important. But since SWIFT and monitoring bank activities was hardly
a secret, especially to the terrorists. The only conclusion that can be reached is that Rove is back in action trying to save the boss one more time. Hey, good luck with that.
COUNTERTERRORISM has become a source of continuing domestic and international
political controversy. Much of it, like the role of the Iraq war in inspiring
new terrorists, deserves analysis and debate. Increasingly, however, many
of the political issues surrounding counterterrorism are formulaic, knee-jerk,
disingenuous and purely partisan. The current debate about United States monitoring
of transfers over the Swift international financial system strikes us as a
case of over-reaction by both the Bush administration and its critics.(snip)
So, too, however, are the Bush administration's protests that the press revelations
about the financial monitoring program may tip off the terrorists. Administration
officials made the same kinds of complaints about news media accounts of electronic
surveillance. They want the public to believe that it had not already occurred
to every terrorist on the planet that his telephone was probably monitored
and his international bank transfers subject to scrutiny. How gullible does
the administration take the American citizenry to be?Terrorists have for many years employed nontraditional communications and
money transfers — including the ancient Middle Eastern hawala system,
involving couriers and a loosely linked network of money brokers — precisely
because they assume that international calls, e-mail and banking are monitored
not only by the United States but by Britain, France, Israel, Russia and even
many third-world countries.While this was not news to terrorists, it may, it appears, have been news
to some Americans, including some in Congress. But should the press really
be called unpatriotic by the administration, and even threatened with prosecution
by politicians, for disclosing things the terrorists already assumed?(snip)
There is, of course, another possible explanation for all the outraged bloviating.
It is an election year. Karl Rove has already said that if it were up to the
Democrats, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would still be alive. The attacks on the press
are part of a political effort by administration officials to use terrorism
to divide America, and to scare their supporters to the polls again this year.What
The Terrorists Already Knew, by Richard A. Clarke and Roger W.
Cressey, counterterrorism officials on the National Security Council under
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, are security consultants.
As for the “outraged bloviating,” to quote Clarke and Cressey, Sulzberger has a
response to the WSJ. I say we put Sulzie and Paul Gigot (WSJ opinion page pimp) in a ring. It would be amusing to see which man is softer.
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