politics

Up In Arms Over a Four-Year-Old Story

Critics of reports about a secret government program tracking terrorists' financial transactions are ignoring the fact that information on the effort has been public since 2002.
June 27, 2006

The editors of National Review, after years of bashing the media while showing blind fealty to the executive branch under George W. Bush, have finally stopped biting their tongues and come out and said it: The president should exercise iron control over which reporters have access to information, including exclusion of those who displease him.

We found this passing strange, as the editors’ point is not just to wax indignant about others in the media, but to actively crush the concept of a free press. In response to the story that appeared in Friday’s New York Times (and other papers) detailing the government’s secret program to track financial transactions of suspected terrorists around the world, NR‘s editors proclaim, “The administration should withdraw the newspaper’s White House press credentials because this privilege [of access to the government] has been so egregiously abused, and an aggressive investigation should be undertaken to identify and prosecute, at a minimum, the government officials who have leaked national-defense information.”

That’s right. A publication staffed by journalists (whether they like to consider themselves as such or not) has officially called for the government of the United States to ban a publication from covering the White House whenever it is unhappy with what is written. Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, dismissed such action earlier today, though it’s worth looking at the NR editorial anyway, if only to counter the spin coming from some on the right.

A little further on, the editors repeat their plea, writing, “Publications such as the Times … should have their access to government reduced. Their press credentials should be withdrawn. Reporting is surely a right, but press credentials are a privilege.”

There’s no doubt that publishing an inside account of sensitive national security issues is a complicated and morally fraught business, but no matter how eager the NR‘s editors are to give up their constitutionally guaranteed rights, it’s about time they realized that while having a free press is a messy business, it’s also one that we’ve managed successfully for over two centuries. As Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, put it in a letter to readers last Sunday, “[a] reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it. That said, we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don’t know about it.” (That said, Keller really should say more about the thought process that went in to publishing the story. His note is fine, but doesn’t go far enough.)

As for the NR‘s proposal, imagine if the Times‘ access to the White House were really to be cut off — what kind of leverage would the administration then have in advocating democracy and free speech in other parts of the world? Not only would it make the United States look hypocritical, it would also take away our moral standing when criticizing other governments for suppressing dissent and free speech.

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Of course, as is so often the case, NR was taking its cue from one or more right-wing politicians. Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) told Fox News’ Chris Wallace this past Sunday, “I’m calling on the attorney general to begin a criminal investigation and prosecution of the New York Times, its reporters, the editors that worked on this, and the publisher … I believe they violated the Espionage Act, the Comint Act.”

All of which dodges the question of just how “secret” the program was. It’s safe to say, as with the wiretapping program, terrorists must have assumed that the U.S. government was already looking into their movements, communications and financial transactions. As blogger Tristam Shandy pointed out on Friday, the president himself said back in October 2001 that the U.S. government is looking to “trace their assets and freeze them, cut off their cash flows, hold people accountable who fund them, who allow the funds to go through their institutions; and not only do that at home, but to convince others around the world to join us in doing so. Thus far, we’ve frozen $6 million in bank accounts linked to terrorist activity. We’ve frozen 30 al Qaeda accounts in the United States and 20 overseas. And we’re just beginning.”

And then there’s this interesting post on the Counterterrorism Blog (hat tip to Jay Rosen for pointing this out), where Victor Comras, a terrorism financing expert who has worked for the U.N. writes, “reports on U.S. monitoring of [banking] transactions have been out there for some time. The information was fairly well known by terrorism financing experts back in 2002. The U.N. Al Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Group, on which I served as the terrorism financing expert, learned of the practice during the course of our monitoring inquiries. The information was incorporated in our report to the U.N. Security Council in December 2002. That report is still available on the U.N. Web site.”

And a part of that report stated, “The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries.”

Given that, one wonders how much terrorist money still goes through financial institutions, anyway. Back in September 2004, Treasury Under Secretary Stuart Levey told Congress, “As the formal and informal financial sectors become increasingly inhospitable to financiers of terrorism, we have witnessed an increasing reliance by al Qaeda and terrorist groups on cash couriers. The movement of money via cash couriers is now one of the principle methods that terrorists use to move funds.”

We’re not holding out much hope that this back story will ever bubble its way up to the cable talk shows or onto the pages of National Review, given that the lines of the debate have seemingly already been set: free inquiry on the part of a vigorous press vs. the view that the program screening bank transactions was the only thing standing between the American people and Armageddon.

Meantime, maybe the editors of the National Review might want consider another approach. The Times‘ Joseph Kahn reported from Beijing this morning that under a draft law being considered by the Communist Party-controlled legislature, Chinese media outlets will be fined if they report on “sudden events” without the prior blessing of government officials. Newspapers, magazines, websites and TV stations would be fined from $6,250 to $12,500 each time they publish something “without authorization.”

Sounds right up National Review‘s alley.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.