Over at truthout, Larry Johnson hits the nail on the head with his latest opinion piece. It is interesting indeed that the very administration under fire for leaking information to the press (think Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame), is now outraged by leaks by the press. Of course, had they not made it clear years ago that one way they were fighting terrorism was by freezing bank assets (and how could you do that if you were not monitoring financial information?), their being offended would make more sense.
Would they really have us believe that until the NY Times broke the story, the terrorists did not suspect that international financial transactions were being monitored? Without this assumption, the psuedo-indignation of the administration makes no sense. And it is a very stupid assumption--not to mention nearly as unbelievable as everything else that comes out of the president's mouth these days.
UPDATE: Over at The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild shed some interesting light on the issue (see here). Perhaps his most salient observation is that:
What King, Cheney, Bush, Gonzales, and many rightwing pundits don’t seem to appreciate is that we, the American people, need to have a free press to check the excesses of government. Such a free press has never been needed more so than today, when the Bush Administration has taken excess to the nth degree. To my eyes, The New York Times has not been aggressive enough. It held the NSA spying story for more than a year, and it let Judith Miller cozy up to the Iraq War cheerleaders and placed some of their propaganda on the front page.
Of course, none of this would have been possible if the news media--owned as it is by the media conglomerates that contribute more money to the right than to the left--was not so obviously biased towards the left. Joking aside, it is both dangerous and terrifying that a sitting president would use the word "treason" when speaking of an article in the NY Times. We should all be afraid, very afraid.
UPDATE: Thanks to my new colleage Susan Feldman for bringing this article to my attention--further evidence that the "secret SWIFT program" was not very secret after all.
UPDATE: Over at The Heretik, you can find a collection of statements made by Bush in the past few years concerning the administration's policy of agressively looking into international financial transactions.
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