They also have no idea how the English language works:
http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2006 ... 02614.aspx
Bank Spy Program: A "Secret" or Common Knowledge?
[...]
"I'm not claiming I know the mind of every terrorist, but I am claiming to know exactly what President Bush and his senior aides have said. And when you have senior Treasury Department officials going before Congress, publicly talking about how they are tracing and cutting off money to terrorists, weeks and weeks before our story ran. 'USA Today,' the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into -- outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret."
[...]
"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."
Matt, do you not understand the difference between "this particular program was being kept secret" and "it shouldn't be a secret that money is being monitored"?
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Matt
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Luke I can see your point, but it does look like Lichtblau is down playing the initial story a bit.
lukpac wrote:They also have no idea how the English language works:
http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2006 ... 02614.aspx
Bank Spy Program: A "Secret" or Common Knowledge?
[...]
"I'm not claiming I know the mind of every terrorist, but I am claiming to know exactly what President Bush and his senior aides have said. And when you have senior Treasury Department officials going before Congress, publicly talking about how they are tracing and cutting off money to terrorists, weeks and weeks before our story ran. 'USA Today,' the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into -- outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret."
[...]
"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."
Matt, do you not understand the difference between "this particular program was being kept secret" and "it shouldn't be a secret that money is being monitored"?
Last edited by Matt on Thu Jul 06, 2006 11:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-Matt
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Matt
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http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2006/20060706101811.aspx
Lichtblau: For Terror Surveillance Before He Was Against It
Posted by: Clay Waters
7/6/2006 12:29:42 PM
What nerve.
Thanks to Cori Dauber at Ranting Profs , we know now that Times intelligence reporter Eric Lichtblau, notorious for co-writing the article revealing the terrorist surveillance program of international banking transactions known as SWIFT, wrote an article last November critical of the administration for -- get this -- lacking a strategy to cut off terrorist funding.
From November 29, 2005 (Times Select or $ required): “U.S. Lacks Strategy to Curb Terror Funds, Agency Says.”
An excerpt: “The government's efforts to help foreign nations cut off the supply of money to terrorists, a critical goal for the Bush administration, have been stymied by infighting among American agencies, leadership problems and insufficient financing, a new Congressional report says. More than four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, ‘the U.S. government lacks an integrated strategy’ to train foreign countries and provide them with technical assistance to shore up their financial and law enforcement systems against terrorist financing, according to the report prepared by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress.”
Lichtblau recently claimed on CNN that it was “by no means a secret” the Bush administration was cutting off or freezing money of terrorists – and thus his story didn’t hurt the anti-terror effort. But as Times-watcher Villainous Company points out, the headline pretty much invalidates Licthblau’s argument: So it was apparently a "secret" to Lichtblau, at any rate.
More from Lichtblau in November: “The administration has made cutting off money to terrorists one of the main prongs in its attack against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. It has seized tens of millions of dollars in American accounts and assets linked to terrorist groups, prodded other countries to do the same, and is now developing a program to gain access to and track potentially hundreds of millions of international bank transfers into the United States. But experts in the field say the results have been spotty, with few clear dents in Al Qaeda's ability to move money and finance terrorist attacks. The Congressional report-- a follow-up to a 2003 report that offered a similarly bleak assessment -- buttresses those concerns.”
So, seven months after criticizing Bush for failing to track terrorist financing, Lichtblau made it far more difficult to do so with his exposure of the SWIFT terrorist-tracking program. Don’t expect the Times to acknowledge this contradiction anytime soon.
Lichtblau covered the same beat as a reporter at the L.A. Times. A story he co-wrote with Josh Meyer on April 7, 2002 made the same arguments, criticizing Bush for allegedly failing to push the same programs Lichtblau exposed to the world in June 2006.
“The U.S. government's much-touted financial war on terrorism has been hamstrung by bitter turf battles among federal agencies, questionable evidence against targeted Middle Eastern groups and a lack of cooperation by foreign allies, senior government officials said. In recent months, President Bush and his top Cabinet members have hailed the U.S. government's effort to ‘shut down the money pipeline’ as an increasingly important, and successful, component of the broad counter-terrorism strategy in the United States and abroad. But privately some administration officials are voicing growing concern that the strategy isn't working as advertised.”
There’s this ironic passage: “The United States is receiving far less cooperation than it needs from many allied nations, which have pledged to help choke off the terrorist money supply but lack the political will, technical know-how and legal framework to make that happen.”
Speaking of sapping “political will,” the initial backlash resulting from Lichtblau’s exposure of SWIFT includes the Belgian prime minister calling for a Justice Ministry investigation into whether the program, which is based in Belgium, violated Belgian law.
Not that Lichtblau was totally morose in his 2002 piece. In fact, he thought financial tracking vital, if extremely difficult in practice: “Everyone agrees that financial investigations are critically important in uncovering, and even thwarting, terrorist activity. Credit card, phone and travel records and other forms of payment can be used to identify those involved in a conspiracy, to establish links between them and other co-conspirators and to gather evidence.”
The bit about “phone records” is particularly relevant, given that it was Lichtblau who revealed last December the National Security Agency’s monitoring without warrants of international phone calls and emails from and to terrorist suspects.
What would the surveillance-boosting Lichtblau of 2002 thinks of the surveillance-busting Lichtblau of today?
Lichtblau: For Terror Surveillance Before He Was Against It
Posted by: Clay Waters
7/6/2006 12:29:42 PM
What nerve.
Thanks to Cori Dauber at Ranting Profs , we know now that Times intelligence reporter Eric Lichtblau, notorious for co-writing the article revealing the terrorist surveillance program of international banking transactions known as SWIFT, wrote an article last November critical of the administration for -- get this -- lacking a strategy to cut off terrorist funding.
From November 29, 2005 (Times Select or $ required): “U.S. Lacks Strategy to Curb Terror Funds, Agency Says.”
An excerpt: “The government's efforts to help foreign nations cut off the supply of money to terrorists, a critical goal for the Bush administration, have been stymied by infighting among American agencies, leadership problems and insufficient financing, a new Congressional report says. More than four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, ‘the U.S. government lacks an integrated strategy’ to train foreign countries and provide them with technical assistance to shore up their financial and law enforcement systems against terrorist financing, according to the report prepared by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress.”
Lichtblau recently claimed on CNN that it was “by no means a secret” the Bush administration was cutting off or freezing money of terrorists – and thus his story didn’t hurt the anti-terror effort. But as Times-watcher Villainous Company points out, the headline pretty much invalidates Licthblau’s argument: So it was apparently a "secret" to Lichtblau, at any rate.
More from Lichtblau in November: “The administration has made cutting off money to terrorists one of the main prongs in its attack against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. It has seized tens of millions of dollars in American accounts and assets linked to terrorist groups, prodded other countries to do the same, and is now developing a program to gain access to and track potentially hundreds of millions of international bank transfers into the United States. But experts in the field say the results have been spotty, with few clear dents in Al Qaeda's ability to move money and finance terrorist attacks. The Congressional report-- a follow-up to a 2003 report that offered a similarly bleak assessment -- buttresses those concerns.”
So, seven months after criticizing Bush for failing to track terrorist financing, Lichtblau made it far more difficult to do so with his exposure of the SWIFT terrorist-tracking program. Don’t expect the Times to acknowledge this contradiction anytime soon.
Lichtblau covered the same beat as a reporter at the L.A. Times. A story he co-wrote with Josh Meyer on April 7, 2002 made the same arguments, criticizing Bush for allegedly failing to push the same programs Lichtblau exposed to the world in June 2006.
“The U.S. government's much-touted financial war on terrorism has been hamstrung by bitter turf battles among federal agencies, questionable evidence against targeted Middle Eastern groups and a lack of cooperation by foreign allies, senior government officials said. In recent months, President Bush and his top Cabinet members have hailed the U.S. government's effort to ‘shut down the money pipeline’ as an increasingly important, and successful, component of the broad counter-terrorism strategy in the United States and abroad. But privately some administration officials are voicing growing concern that the strategy isn't working as advertised.”
There’s this ironic passage: “The United States is receiving far less cooperation than it needs from many allied nations, which have pledged to help choke off the terrorist money supply but lack the political will, technical know-how and legal framework to make that happen.”
Speaking of sapping “political will,” the initial backlash resulting from Lichtblau’s exposure of SWIFT includes the Belgian prime minister calling for a Justice Ministry investigation into whether the program, which is based in Belgium, violated Belgian law.
Not that Lichtblau was totally morose in his 2002 piece. In fact, he thought financial tracking vital, if extremely difficult in practice: “Everyone agrees that financial investigations are critically important in uncovering, and even thwarting, terrorist activity. Credit card, phone and travel records and other forms of payment can be used to identify those involved in a conspiracy, to establish links between them and other co-conspirators and to gather evidence.”
The bit about “phone records” is particularly relevant, given that it was Lichtblau who revealed last December the National Security Agency’s monitoring without warrants of international phone calls and emails from and to terrorist suspects.
What would the surveillance-boosting Lichtblau of 2002 thinks of the surveillance-busting Lichtblau of today?
-Matt
from last week's New Yorker article 'The Hidden Power', about Vice Presidential chief of staff and legal counsellor David Addington, aka 'Cheney's Cheney', who's apparently the brains behind much of the radical push for expanded Presidential power:
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060703fa_fact1
Bruce Fein, a Republican legal activist, who voted for Bush in both Presidential elections, and who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, said that Addington and other Presidential legal advisers had “staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield—according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’ ” Richard A. Epstein, a prominent libertarian law professor at the University of Chicago, said, “The President doesn’t have the power of a king, or even that of state governors. He’s subject to the laws of Congress! The Administration’s lawyers are nuts on this issue.” He warned of an impending “constitutional crisis,” because “their talk of the inherent power of the Presidency seems to be saying that the courts can’t stop them, and neither can Congress.”
The former high-ranking lawyer for the Administration, who worked closely with Addington, and who shares his political conservatism, said that, in the aftermath of September 11th, “Addington was more like Cheney’s agent than like a lawyer. A lawyer sometimes says no.” He noted, “Addington never said, ‘There is a line you can’t cross.’ ” Although the lawyer supported the President, he felt that his Administration had been led astray. “George W. Bush has been damaged by incredibly bad legal advice,” he said.
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060703fa_fact1
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lukpac
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Matt wrote:Yes, the reporting VS commentary. Still, if the article is factual, Lichtblau doesn't look good.
Why? How does one story contradict the other?
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD
And really, if *ANY* of the *dozens if not hundreds* of articles reporting on the deception, ideological rigidity, and ineptitude of the Bush adminsstration (e.g., regarding the evidence used to push the Iraq war, prosecution of said war, conflicts of interest with energy companies and big business in general, Valerie Plame, Rove's smear campaigns, expanding the power of teh executive branch, pandering to the Christian right, etc, etc ), many quoting insiders from that same administration, are true, 'it doesn't look good for Bush', does it, Matt?
Does this administration 'look good' to you?
Does this administration 'look good' to you?
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lukpac
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Matt wrote:Well, perhaps there are certain areas that could use minor improvement.
HAHAHA!
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD