SWIFT Boated
This administration will not let any opportunity pass to demonstrate their hold over a cowed domestic media, but the casual bandying about of the 'T' word should set even America's notoriously low-sensitivity bullshit detector to ringing:
The Bush administration has repeatedly bragged about its efforts and self-proclaimed success tracking terrorist financing since the September 11 attacks. The government described its quest to catch financiers in numerous public documents, reports and Capitol Hill testimonies. Even as far back as 1990, the Council on Europe called for greater cooperation between Interpol and agencies like SWIFT – a global banking hub that monitors millions of transfers worth trillions of dollars...
... “The U.S. was touting quite loudly its tracking of terrorist financing,” said Comras, an attorney and consultant on terrorism financing. “If they’re doing that, it’s only logical that they’re following the funds through the clearinghouses. How else would they do it? For us, it was an obvious no-brainer.”
These men have once again underestimated the brainless!
The Bush administration has repeatedly bragged about its efforts and self-proclaimed success tracking terrorist financing since the September 11 attacks. The government described its quest to catch financiers in numerous public documents, reports and Capitol Hill testimonies. Even as far back as 1990, the Council on Europe called for greater cooperation between Interpol and agencies like SWIFT – a global banking hub that monitors millions of transfers worth trillions of dollars...
... “The U.S. was touting quite loudly its tracking of terrorist financing,” said Comras, an attorney and consultant on terrorism financing. “If they’re doing that, it’s only logical that they’re following the funds through the clearinghouses. How else would they do it? For us, it was an obvious no-brainer.”
These men have once again underestimated the brainless!
Tags: War On A Free Press
posted by Management at 10:01 PM
2 Comments:
Bush vs. New York Times
By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
Posted on June 28, 2006, Printed on July 10, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/38251/
UPDATE: The GOP will introduce a resolution to condemn the New York Times for its reporting.
The Bush administration's jihad against newspapers that reported on a secret program to monitor the personal banking records of unsuspecting citizens is more important than the original story. For what the president and his spokesmen are once again asserting is that the prosecution of this ill-defined, open-ended "war on terror" inevitably trumps basic democratic rights in general and the constitutionally enshrined freedom of the press in particular.
The stakes are very high here. We've already been told that we must put up with official lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the unprecedented torture of prisoners of war and a massive electronic-eavesdropping program and other invasions of privacy. Now the target is more basic -- the freedom of the press to report on such nefarious government activities. The argument in defense of this assault on freedom is the familiar refrain of dictators, wannabe and real, who grasp for power at the expense of democracy: We are in a war with an enemy so powerful and devious that we cannot afford the safeguard of transparent and accountable governance.
"We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America," President Bush said Monday.
The "bunch of people" Bush says we are fighting was originally believed to be those behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, specifically Osama bin Laden and his decentralized Al Qaida terrorist organization. Yet Bush, prodded by the neoconservative clique, quickly expanded this war beyond what should have been a worldwide manhunt for Al Qaida operatives into an open-ended occupation of Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- which, as we know from the Sept. 11 commission report, had nothing to do with Al Qaida or Sept. 11.
In fact, if the media, or Congress, had aggressively pursued the truth earlier, rather than being overwhelmed by the shock of Sept. 11, anti-U.S. terrorists of every stripe would not now be swarming over Iraq. Nor would the degenerating situation in Afghanistan and the enhanced power of religious fanatics throughout the Mideast, from Tehran to Gaza, pose such threats to peace if a fully informed public had held this president in check. Even today, the Bush administration continues to place the situation in Iraq in the "war on terror" framework, instead of acknowledging the primary role of religious and nationalist passions unleashed by the unwarranted U.S. invasion.
As Bush has continued to stretch it to cover all of his leadership failings, the "war on terror" has become a meaningless phrase, to be exploited for the political convenience of the moment. Terrorism, which should be treated clinically as a dangerous pathology threatening all modern societies, instead has been seized upon as an all-purpose propaganda opportunity for consolidating this administration's political power. In such a situation, the press' role as a conduit of both information and debate is more essential than ever. Freedom of the press, enshrined in our Constitution at a time when our fragile nation was besieged by enemies of the new republic, is not an indulgence to be allowed in safe periods but rather an indispensable tool for keeping ourselves safe. That is just the point that Vice President Dick Cheney, the high priest of excessive secrecy -- even in domestic matters, such as refusing to reveal the content of his negotiation with Enron lobbyists in framing the administration's energy policy -- is bent on obscuring.
"Some in the press, in particular the New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult," said Cheney, all but calling the newspaper traitorous.
How convenient to leave out the Wall Street Journal, which editorially supports the administration but which also covered this latest example of Bush's abuse of power in its news pages. The administration's attack on the Times, in fact, is not really about national security, but rather follows a domestic political agenda that requires attacking free media that dare offer criticism.
On Monday, following the pattern, Cheney also attacked the Times' earlier disclosure that the National Security Agency had simply ignored the legal requirement of court warrants in monitoring telephone calls. "I think that is a disgrace," he said of the Times' winning a Pulitzer Prize for the stories.
What is truly a disgrace, though, is an administration that has consistently deceived the public about its intentions, and that continues to shamefully exploit post-Sept. 11 fears to ensure its grip on the body politic.
Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. See more of Robert Scheer at TruthDig.
Jun 30, 2006
Secret terrorist probe not so secret – or useful, insiders say
By Rachael Lee Coleman
rcoleman@moneylaundering.com
News of the Bush administration’s clandestine bank surveillance program stunned many Americans, but Washington insiders say it didn’t surprise them or the terrorists the program tails.
President Bush described last week’s media reports exposing the U.S. Treasury Department’s terrorist finance tracking program – covert scrutiny of international financial transactions through a Belgium-based cooperative known by its acronym SWIFT – as “disgraceful” and Republican Senator Jim Bunning accused the reporters who wrote the stories of “treason.”
“The rhetoric on this is way out of proportion on both sides,” said Victor Comras, a former State Department official and U.S. diplomat appointed by the United Nations Security Council to assess global anti-terrorist financing efforts. “The people who finance terrorism and launder money recognized long ago that these transactions can be traced.”
Since the New York Times and other media didn’t tell the public anything the terrorists didn’t already know and since banks already monitor suspicious transactions for the U.S. government, many question the probe’s usefulness. “It’s not a cost-effective way to deal with terrorism issues,” Comras said.
Known program
The Bush administration has repeatedly bragged about its efforts and self-proclaimed success tracking terrorist financing since the September 11 attacks. The government described its quest to catch financiers in numerous public documents, reports and Capitol Hill testimonies. Even as far back as 1990, the Council on Europe called for greater cooperation between Interpol and agencies like SWIFT – a global banking hub that monitors millions of transfers worth trillions of dollars.
Comras co-authored a 2002 report for the UN Security Council describing how “critical” data-rich international clearinghouses, like SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) or CHIPS (Clearing House Interbank Payments System) and the Federal Reserve Wire Transfer System, could be monitored for terror-related transactions – a tactic adopted by Canada’s financial intelligence agency FinTRAC, which requires banks there to provide it with SWIFT data.
“The U.S. was touting quite loudly its tracking of terrorist financing,” said Comras, an attorney and consultant on terrorism financing. “If they’re doing that, it’s only logical that they’re following the funds through the clearinghouses. How else would they do it? For us, it was an obvious no-brainer.”
With that much information circulating in the public domain, specialists believe terrorists certainly knew of the controversial Central Intelligence Agency-run program, just as they discovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation acquired records from Western Union, the world’s largest money transmitter. According to Ron Suskind’s recently-published book The One-Percent Doctrine, the FBI used subpoenas to obtain credit card transaction records from Western Union’s parent company, First Data Corp., to track potential terrorist activity.
“The 9/11 terrorists educated themselves about the American financial system,” said Andy Cochran, a terrorism and homeland security consultant and founder of the Counterterrorism Blog. “You would think, by now, they would have found out what was happening, the same as they found out about Western Union. They’re doing the acting. We’re doing the reacting.”
Jim Shedd, an international consultant and former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, said it was only a matter of time before the press unearthed the story.
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that the government is doing everything it can to protect the country,” Shedd said. “Once it’s out of the bag, it’s out of the bag.”
Just one tool
Government officials claim the secret program helped them capture al Qaeda operative Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hambali, whom they believe masterminded the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort. They also say it helped them track down Uzair Paracha, a Brooklyn man convicted last year for laundering $200,000 for an al Qaeda operative in Pakistan.
Some acknowledge that the covert program may have been useful immediately after September 11, but Shedd and others agree it isn’t – and shouldn’t be – the government’s only anti-terrorism tool, particularly when terrorists and other criminals move money through alternative channels.
“The M.O. has changed,” Cochran said. “The question is whether we have changed with it, and I don’t think we have.”
As transaction monitoring becomes more sophisticated, financiers send smaller amounts of money in a greater number of transactions. Terrorists and other criminal networks often co-mingle dirty funds with legitimate charitable contributions, or use cash couriers and underground systems like the black market peso exchange and Hawala, an ancient trust-based remittance system used in Asia and the Middle East that involves no actual movement of cash.
“They use a number of different methods,” Comras said. “They still use the banking system, but in ways we aren’t able to decipher. They’re very effective in masking transactions, most of which come in under the wire very safely. We’re lost in mass amounts of information.”
That leads to questions about SWIFT’s usefulness in these kinds of endeavors. Treasury assured SWIFT – a consortium of 2,200 institutions – that it only sought data for specific individuals when the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, served it with broad administrative subpoenas. SWIFT officials said they were forced to balance the “confidentiality of our users’ data” with the request and that they “negotiated with the Treasury over the scope and oversight” of the program.
Still, investigators and specialists agree that mining millions of records is a tough way to find potential terrorists because most use aliases and combine wire transfers with a multitude of other transfer mechanisms.
“If you have a specific lead and you get lucky, it can be a useful tool,” Comras said. “If you’re using it for data mining purposes, it’s not effective because you’re sifting through millions of transactions everyday trying to figure out which ones are questionable.”
SARs just as effective
The SWIFT data, investigators agree, is no more useful than the information already provided to the U.S. government by the banks handling the transactions. The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has been overwhelmed with suspicious activity reports, or SARs, and other documents that the Bank Secrecy Act requires financial institutions to file. According to FinCEN, those businesses filed 230,000 SARs in 2005 and more than 3 million since 1996.
The USA Patriot Act amended the BSA in 2001 to grant law enforcement agencies equal access to that and other BSA data. Two years later, the U.S. Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security designated the FBI to lead terrorist financing investigations and operations.
Yet, turf wars and a lack of communication between agencies like the CIA and the FBI have caused investigators to duplicate probes and prevented them from gleaning the wealth of information at their fingertips.
Treasury officials kept mum about how, or even if, analysts use SAR and SWIFT data together. However, OFAC spokeswoman Molly Millerwise noted that SWIFT data is “used only for terrorism investigations” and is “distinct from SARs and other reports” banks must file under the BSA.
“My greatest criticism is that we don’t know yet what to do with the terrorists once we’ve spotted them,” Comras said. “We put them on a list, but nobody cares what that list means. We haven’t really put terrorist financiers out.”
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