SWIFTly Downstream

The House is taking up a resolution to denounce the New York Times for publishing the SWIFT story.

House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records.

The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation.

The resolution comes as Republicans from the president on down condemn media organizations for reporting on the secret government program that tracked financial records overseas through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international banking cooperative.

Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), working independently from his leadership, began circulating a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) during a late series of votes yesterday asking his leaders to revoke the Times’s congressional press credentials.

Count on the Left to shreik that Hayworth's moves are antidemocratic and otherwise violative of free speech. Never mind the fact that the Times isn't being shuttered. It's only losing a potential source of information - an official seat at Congressional press conferences and the like. They'd still be able to publish all the leaks of classified information they want.

Jeff Jarvis, who writes more extensively on free speech matters than I, notes the following [fixed a couple of typos in the original]:

Yes, we need not only a press but also an open society of empowered citizens to balance the power of those we elect. But we also do elect those people to make judgments on our behalf. And we don’t — and should not — elect the members of the press who question them.

So when you get right down to it, this is a disagreement about what’s right. Keller is cloaking his decision in the First Amendment and the power of the press. George Bush wrapped his obvious disagreement around doing harm to the nation and our war on terror and others did go so far as to label it treason.

My bottom line, not that it matters: The government has long been urged to follow and cut off the money to terrorists to both starve and uncover them. I wholly endorse that. I assumed that they were doing precisely what The Times is shocked that they were doing: following transactions. I don’t think it’s known that the program is either illegal or ineffective. But I also think it is possible enough that revealing its existence can do the program and the nation harm, so I would not have revealed it.

UPDATE:
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UPDATE:
As of a few minutes ago, no action has been taken on the floor of the House relating to the story that first broke earlier today. If the resolution does come to the floor and I'm around blogging, you can be sure I'll post the details.

In the meantime, LGF posts that a British civil liberties group, backed by George Soros money, is going after the SWIFT program.

Now, there's a Boston Globe story claiming that the SWIFT program wasn't so secret after all.

But a search of public records -- government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 -- describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.

``There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. ``The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. ``A lot of people were aware that this was going on," said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.

Yes, a lot of people were aware that governments around the world were involved in counter-terrorism operations looking at financial services that could enable terrorists to transfer funds to promote their agendas and operations.

However, just because a bunch of people know, and weren't publicizing the nature of the program, doesn't mean that the program should have been publicized and splashed across the front page of the NYT. I had earlier written that such financial tracking programs were part and parcel of the Patriot Act and related legislation (even some proposed and supported by the Times itself). Knowing that such programs might exist, doesn't mean that all the details should become public knowledge.

It's the same things as suggesting that law enforcement policies and procedures in conducting sting operations and tactics for catching criminals become public knowledge because some folks might know or some aspects of the program may have been related to the public in stories. The criminals know that law enforcement is looking for them, but it doesn't stop them from committing those criminal acts. Some are caught in the process, so revealing details in this program hamper the counter-terror operations.

UPDATE:
HRES 895 is the resolution number for the aforementioned GOP response to the NYT running the SWIFT program story, though there's no mention the NYT, WSJ, or any of the other papers who published the information. Via Hugh Hewitt.

The Resolution resolves that 1) the House supports efforts to track terrorists; 2) that the SWIFT program was legal; 3) condemns unauthorized leaks of the nature of the program; and 4) expects the cooperation of the media in dealing with the ongoing terrorist threats.

Well, opponents to the Administration, and many leftists might have problems with 1, 2, 3, and 4. The media will certainly have problems with 3 and 4 - as seen by their actions thus far in trying to claim that their actions were done in the name of the freedom of the press, and completely avoiding the discussion of whether publishing such information undermined national security.

The document is fine for what it is, but probably doesn't go far enough in castigating the media - and particularly the NYT. That's probably done on purpose as Congress and the Adminstration still need to deal with the media as much as the sides loathe each other, and they can't turn the next 2.5 years into a bloodletting by a 1,000 papercuts.

The media, for its part, better pray that another mass casualty attack doesn't happen because you can be sure that the fingerpointing will start with the NYT and its repeated publications of classified information relating to anti-terror activities.