Excuse me, but where is the beef? As someone who works on a daily basis on money laundering issues and who is credited (see page 3, footnote 15), along with my partner, for identifying a money laundering technique employed by terrorists, I am mystified why this is even considered a story. It is no secret that the U.S. Government has been trying to monitor terrorist financial transactions since 9-11. Anyone who works in the banking/financial sector knows that SWIFT--the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication--is a major, but not only mechanism, for moving financial assets around the world.
The only "secret" I can see, based solely on my understanding of how financial investigations work, is the fact that the CIA has access to this data without any judicial oversight. This is the classic FBI vs. CIA connundrum. If you use a law enforcement approach you are subject to judicial oversight. If you are doing "international" intelligence you have no effective oversight; the key is not to get caught.
What has the President's shorts in a knot is that this latest revelation may create a political problem for the Administration and could lead SWIFT to stop "sharing" the information with the CIA.
The CIA has adopted internal rules allowing it to define what constitutes a news organization and what doesn't, a Washington-based research group contended in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.posted by Unregistered User at 1:52 AM on June 27, 2006
MATTHEWS: Well let‘s talk about this with Ron Suskind. I read your book [“The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America‘s Pursuit of Its Enemy Since 9/11”] all weekend, a hell of a book. And one of the things in it is this very question: how the United States agencies or intelligence agencies use financial, electronic transfers around the world, people moving money in the Arab world, especially, al Qaeda people. How we check up on what they‘re up to....“Eventually not surprisingly,” and we‘re talking about electronic transfer surveillance, “our opponents figured it out. It was a matter really of deduction. Enough people got caught and a view of which activities had in common provides clues as to how they may have been identified and apprehended. We were surprised it took so long,” said one intelligence official.posted by ericb at 7:30 AM on June 28, 2006
So in other words, the bad guys figured out how we were catching them.
SUSKIND: Right, it‘s a process of deduction. After a while, you catch enough of them, they‘re not idiots. They say, “Well, we can‘t do the things we were doing.” They‘re not leaving electronic trails like they were.
MATTHEWS: So what‘s Cheney beefing about here?
SUSKIND: The fact is—look, I‘m sure...
MATTHEWS: Or President Bush. That the bad guys found out about it before the “Times” did.
SUSKIND: I‘m sure the program is of some value, but I think the White House ought to be straight with people, that this has been a thing of diminishing return for several years now, this kind of electronic surveillance.
....SUSKIND: This thing with the “Times” with the government is a false debate. We need a real debate. The fact is, our enemy has adapted. We need to come up with new tools to get them. That‘s the real debate. It‘s not about who said what in this case. Of course al Qaeda knows we‘re tracking their finances, they‘re very, very good of late in the last few years about not leaving electronic trails. That‘s for a reason. We need to come up with new tools. Human intelligence is what works here, not so much this.
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two-yearthree and a half year old remark by the anonymous State Department official: "I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, 'There's been a military coup,' and then it all makes sense."posted by Unregistered User at 4:06 PM on June 26, 2006