The Saga Continues

Another major revelation to add to the pile-

NY Times: Bank Data Secretly Reviewed by U.S. to Fight Terror

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.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas or into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database...

...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.

The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift...

Now if this program existed in a vacuum, I might be willing to blow it off as a questionable, but well-intentioned counterterror program. Fight smarter, not harder and all that. I personally believe that going after the funding and finances of terror organizations is actually a far-better way of undermining them than, ohhhh say, preemptively invading a country unrelated to the 9/11 attack. If the program was done with complete legal authority and with approval from the other branches, I'd be willing to dismiss much of the controversy here.

But the reason that this story is so significant is that it does not exist by itself. It is part of a larger system of Big Brother run amok- with warrantless wiretapping, phone records databases, internet record databases, Total Information Awareness, reporters being surveilled, etc- designed by people at the top of the executive branch who saw their war on terror as merely a means to permanently expand Presidential power beyond its constitutional limits. The goal of all of this is, as blogger BooMan notes, "us[ing] 9/11 to take us back to a pre-Watergate situation where the intelligence agencies do whatever they want and Congress need not know boo about it." These men pose a serious danger to our system of government and if you even try to challenge them, you are accused of undermining the war, being unpatriotic, and of having some sort of 'derangement syndrome'.

As proof of that, one need to look no further than the reaction to this story from the President's most ardent defenders. Was their reaction, as conservatives naturally inclined to distrust big government, that this program represented further proof that basic privacy rights may be one of the most significant victims in Bush's war on terror? Or was it that the papers that reported this program- NY Times, LA Times, and others- had committed treason and should be locked up for their insidious crime? If you guessed the latter, pat yourself on the back. Michelle Malkin was having fun pretending we were in WWII with some photoshopped propaganda posters. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has called on the Attorney General to open a criminal investigation into the papers' activities. It was left to Arlen Specter (and the usual bloggers) to state the obvious that this would be a dangerous line to cross. All of this ignores that the right's beloved Wall Street Journal printed the same information as well- silence on that fact, because this story is just an avenue for the right to engage in another round of press treason accusations.

And not only has this administration stretched the limits of executive power beyond what previous administrations have, it has taken it to a new extreme- their mindboggling Orwellian assertion that neither Congress nor the courts have the right to know the details of what they are doing or to exert oversight on their activities. They have been aided in these efforts by a Republican-party rule in Washington that has been too fearful of the political backlash of taking on their own President. And so it is validated by the silence in the Capitol.

As proof that this story doesn't walk alone, here's some other related revelations-

Salon: Is the NSA spying on U.S. Internet traffic?

-Salon exclusive: Two former AT&T employees say the telecom giant has maintained a secret, highly secure room in St. Louis since 2002. Intelligence experts say it bears the earmarks of a National Security Agency operation.

-AP: AP: Police got phone data from brokers

-AP: Analysis: CIA program expands Bush's power

Feel safer yet?

Glenn Greenwald, meanwhile, looks optimistically at signs that congressional oversight may be near. I, unfortunately, do not share his optimism. As long as the President's party has complete power in Washington DC, these revelations will not be met with much action.

[*- Emergency powers? Anything that reminds me of Emperor Palpatine's rise to power can't be good.]