White House NYT Bashers: Hypocrites

Source: DefenseTech.org

We found out more evidence that most Republicans and the Bush Administration are huge hypocrites. This time, it's all the posturing and political mind games over the New York Times releasing information about the Bush White House possibly "illegally" mining bank records in their faux "war on terror". (Using SWIFT databases.)

The only problem is that the White House has been giving out such information when it was convenient for them over a period of 5 years or more.

For example, there's Operation: Green Quest. This was a massive anti-terror PR blitz set-up by and run through the White House. Details about the program were given by U.S. Customs officials with the sanctioning of the Bush Administration. Basically, they detailed their methods to the press about how the U.S. was tracking non-paper money transfers, transfers of smaller amounts, and physically-transferred money.

No one sounded the clarion bell or even spoke up when they were publicly outing this classified program to shore up support for hunting down terrorists.

Our meeting was sanctioned by Customs' public affairs office, and came at a time when the White House was eager to talk about all the work federal agencies were doing to hunt down terrorists. Forman told me the kinds of people, transactions, even locations that the government was targeting. (These are details, it should be noted, that the recent Times piece did not reveal.) Among the potentially sensitive items Forman told me, which were published:

"Operation Green Quest is focusing on the informal, largely paperless form of money exchange known as hawala, which is Arabic for 'to change.'"

"Few undercover agents can penetrate Middle Eastern communities and money laundering rings because they look like outsiders and don't speak the language.... As a result, Green Quest has to be more clever, by setting traps on the Internet and working to flush currency traffickers out of their hiding places."

"Treasury and FBI investigators have identified hawala as a means by which the alleged Sept. 11 terrorists may have received money from overseas."

"Green Quest investigators, who've spent their careers dismantling money laundering rackets, were blindsided by the existence of the system. 'Most of us couldn't spell hawala' before Sept. 11,' Forman said."

"The agencies' [involved in Green Quest] cooperative efforts have recently culminated in raids of alleged money laundering operations that aid suspected terrorist networks."

"Green Quest also wants to lower the threshold at which bank deposits and electronic funds transfers must be documented. Dropping the ceiling from $10,000 to $750, Forman said, may force money traffickers to try to get their cash out of the country by hand. They would then be subject to capture by a beefed-up cadre of Customs Service officers at border crossings, airports and seaports."

Green Quest was only one of the administration's efforts to combat terrorist financing which officials discussed publicly.

So the MO of the Bush White House is that "it's politics when we do it and treason when anyone else does it".

In the end, all of the Republicans in Congress and President Bush, including VP Dick Cheney, are huge hypocrites, and they really need to put this obvious attack against the First Amendment to rest.

These recent attacks against the press are more examples of a government which desires total control of the press and becomes pretty angry when they can't do so.

I say good. We need networks and presses with the ability to keep the separation between government and media, and also continue to be a tool to keep the government accountable.

When the media finally decides to completely censor stories like this, they will have won, and we will lose the "freedom of the press".

Tags: [White House NYT Bashers: Hypocrites], [Bush administration officials have been lining up to condemn The New York Times for revealing a program to track financial transactions as part of the war on terrorism], [Operation Green Quest ], [defensetech.org], [9/11], [Bush administration], [Hypocrites], [The New York Times], [Swift], [Bush Says Report on Bank Data Was Disgraceful], [executive editor of The Times, Bill Keller]