I'm not much for conservative blogs. I know there's value in seeing the counterarguments in a debate, but since there's rarely anything that rises to the level of a debate-style argument on conservative blogs, I usually spare myself the drama.
I did check Powerline, however, and saw this:
I want all of our liberal readers to send us every piece of evidence that supports the claim, oft-repeated in the liberal media, that the terrorists knew all along that we were collecting data on money transfers from SWIFT. We will happily reproduce every such item of evidence that we receive. I am quite confident that the total will be zero. I have yet to see a single fact offered in support of this claim, which is, on its face, implausible.) It is important for everyone to realize, I think, how low the level of discourse in the legacy media has fallen. So: listen and weep.
I just had to respond. Here's what I sent -- a little rambling, a little sloppy, but I like it.
This email has been formatted from it's original version to fit your screen.
Read on . . .
Dear sir,
You've asked for rebuttal on whether the New York Times "financial tracking" article exposed secret information or hurt our war on terrorism. Here's my two cents on that, and a little bonus opinionating on the side:
First off, no matter how many times you can find pundits, administration spokesmen and members of the spoon-fed media saying the word "secret", it wasn't a secret.
At least, not according to Bush 5 years ago.
Actually, he should have said "re-created a foreign terrorist asset tracking center", since his administration effectively shut down the first one which the Clinton administration began -- when he took office. But more on that later.
And heres a "damaging leak" from then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.
And a Treasury report from John Snow, in April of this year.
Terrorism financing experts have known about the program for years, largely because we made no secret of it -- it's even cited in a 2002 report to the UN Security Council by the Monitoring Group for terrorist financing. Direct linking has been problematic, so go to the online document archive at ods.un.org, access without logging in and do an advanced search by the job number N0272572.
From paragraph 31 of the report:
"The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. 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."
And, hey, did you know SWIFT has a website? And they've talked about their cooperation with international law enforcement and counter-terrorism for years?
Were we worried about all this getting out? Well, no, because everyone knew that terrorists, like drug dealers and crime syndicates, inherently try to avoid paper trails and other records. They had long since moved as much as possible to "off the books" financing, that bank records and other such transactions barely touched.
This shift was highlighted in a report from the Congressional Research Service in 2002.
And again in 2003, as they continued to bemoan the government's slow response to the rise of alternative financing.
It was also cited in a release from Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey, in 2004.
And lastly, how do I know it wasn't a violation of national security? Because if it was, in fact, a violation of national security, the administration could have stopped publication.
In 1931 the Supreme Court ruled in Near v. Minnesota that the government could enjoin publication of select material if its publication will surely result in "direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our Nation or its people." The Court reaffirmed this idea in the 1971 case New York Times v. United States, creating a narrow window in which prior restraint is a constitutionally valid practice.
They could have sought enjoinment to stop publication (as they could have with all the other "devastating leaks" you've crowed about). Why didn't they?
Maybe, because of all the reasons listed above, they knew their case was junk. This is rhetoric, election-year fire-and-brimstoning to get the gullible to go out and vote the corporatist ticket again in '06.
I know that when I cited Clinton's terrorist assest tracking program, you immediately thought "flip-flopper" -- opposing Bush for going after terrorist money, but not Clinton. Saying we should shut down terrorist financing, then bashing Bush for doing it.
Well, you're wrong.
People who've studied the facts don't oppose the Bush administration for dealing with terrorism. We oppose them because they suck at it.
Back in January 2001, the Bush administration came into the White House with missile defense as its cornerstone strategy for national defense. Public discussion of security threats focused on rogue states, with little discussion of counterterrorism.
A Washington Post article lays out pretty well how counterterrorism moved down the priority ladder in those first 8 months, with statements by the likes of Lt Gen Donald Kerrick, Deputy National Security Advisor.
And the surprise for you, who would likely call this Bush-bashing -- I don't fault them for that. Every administration comes to power with priorities, issues upon which it will focus the major share of its attention. We base what we think needs our attention on our own experiences, what our friends and confidents tell us, etc. I believe they legitimately believed missile defense was the important thing to deal with, and rogue states were the greatest danger to Americans.
What I do fault them for was failing to adjust those priorities as they were educated during the transition.
When men like Rand Beers at the FBI, John O'Neill at the National Security Council and Richard Clarke at the Counterterrorism Strategy Group began pressing for attention to terrorist activity in general and Al Qaeda in particular, someone should have taken them seriously enough to get the discussion rolling. There's little evidence that anyone did, until after 9/11.
And there's another roll of the eyes - why, I've named three liberals. Terrorist sympathizers, by Cracky.
It's your way, I know. You use labels to simplify things to the point that all real-world nuance and shading is lost. Liberals bad. Hate military. Hate America.
So, since Richard Clarke criticized Bush, you call him a liberal. Never mind thirty years of counterterrorism work for this country, mostly under Republican presidents. Never mind what his party affiliation might be (I'll confess I don't know it, offhand, not that it matters). He's a liberal. Liberal bad. Liberal wrong.
Unfortunately for you, life doesn't work that way. Millions of "liberals", as you would throw around the term, love their country, and many have served it in uniform. (I did my boot at Great Lakes. Where'd you do yours? Oh, that's right . . )
But, like the androids on the original Star Trek, your programming does not allow you to process conflicting data. So you dismiss the service and expertise of anyone who criticizes this administration's policies -- as you do in this case, on the bizarre grounds that opposing Bush means these three men, for the near-century of experience between them, are wrong and evil while he is right and good.
But I digress.
Remember Clinton's Terrorist Asset Tracking Program?
Working with a slew of other nations, we were on the verge of a major assault on financial institutions worldwide whose lax rules allowed terrorists and others to launder money with impunity. We were also preparing sanctions and other economic coercions against nations whose domestic banking laws were terrorist-friendly.
We pulled out of all of that, because, as the Bush Treasury Dept said, it wasn't the direction we wanted to go -- meaning it looked a lot like banking regulation. Bills to require banks to verify foreign customers as they do for you and me -- died for lack of administration support for the same reason.
That's ideology trumping what the experts are telling you, and when Bush hurriedly restarted terrorist asset tracking after 9/11, I would have expected at least a quick mea culpa. But no dice.
And whereas our earlier efforts were indisputably within the law, Bush's strategy has been to increase executive power whenever possible, even when his own interior legal advisors are split about whether or not it's legal -- as they did regarding his particular incarnation of the financial tracking program (they weren't the only ones -- SWIFT had such concerns they almost stopped cooperating in 2003. It took contact from administration officials and some procedural changes to keep them working with us. What does it say, when a cabal of international bankers is more concerned about your financial privacy than your own government?).
The emphasis is always on broad-brush approaches severed from any oversight or transparency, so abuse can't be spotted, results can't be measured, and legal limits can't be imposed.
Guantanamo Bay? -- in addition to violating international agreements that, per the Constitution, have the force of U.S. law, many of the detentions seem to have been a waste of our time. Many detainees were brought in on little or no provocation. Despite the claim that they were all caught "on the battlefield" (which would, in fact, make them prisoners of war), many were turned over to us by local groups, to which we paid a bounty. So how do we know they didn't just grab the first poor schmuck that walked by for some easy cash? Well, that sort of thing is why you have legitimate tribunals under law, to establish whether there's actual cause to detain someone.
Hundreds of them have been released, and there's increasing evidence that many still there have no discernable connection to terrorism. Even the ones that do or who claim to -- don't seem to be providing information of value.
Take Fawaz Mahdi -- a mentally ill man, who's likely the source of the New York subway plot. Experts have assessed the supposed plot as unlikely, for a number of reasons -- not the least of which was that Osama's number two man, who supposedly called it off, would have been as incommunicado as Osama himself at the time. Insiders have let on that false leads galore have come out of Gitmo, and legitimate terror investigation has been muddied by a host of bad data.
And that's not getting into the negative impression of the camp among the world's Moslems who DON'T currently number among the fringe radicals we're trying to catch. We might as well set up an Al Qaeda recruiting center right there in Camp Iguana.
And with the "law-is-what-I-freakin'-say-it-is" approach that Bush has raised to an art form, he's mangled international agreements and domestic law about competent and properly authorized tribunals, which only compounds the problem, when we don't know if we're holding the right people in the first place.
NSA surveillance? -- in addition to jettisoning thirty years of solid procedure for no valid reason, it's also, according to FBI sources, created a flood of false leads. The standard approach of the administration, trying to find a needle in a haystack -- make the haystack bigger.
Once upon a time, we had leaks from inside the NSA, by dedicated agents fearful of abuse by an unchecked executive. Then we passed FISA, which gave us a solid process and still let us handle every wiretap we would legitimately need, without delay. For the next thirty years, no leaks. Agents in the NSA no longer had to worry about abuse, because FISA gave them that certainty that what they did was lawful and constitutional.
Then the administration bypasses FISA for no reason they've ever been able to articulate, and what's next? Leaks, by career agents fearful of abuse by an unchecked executive.
See how it works?
Banking records? -- again, jettisoning procedure and precedent, substituting administrative warrants (where the executive branch basically gives itself permission) for court authorization we used before. Back then, we were ready to shut down major terrorist financing all over the world, so you can't say that approach didn't work. Bush, again for no good reason, simply chooses the no-oversight road, and broadens the data to a ridiculously unmanageable scale.
Iraq? oh, Lord, don't even get me started on Iraq.
Non-proliferation? -- well, we've actually refused to cooperate with Swiss federal prosecutors in a case against three men for nuclear smuggling, mostly because it was still looking at Pakistan's role in the sale of nuclear technology. While the official line is A.Q. Khan acted on his own, case closed (with the man himself on "house arrest", where even Pakistan's parliament can't question him), there seems to be concern that there's more to find.
But since publicly falling out with Pakistan wouldn't look good, what with them being valuable allies and all, we'll just let that dog lie. Nice job.
We could talk about exposing the brass plaque company Brewster Jennings while we're at it. I'm sure that helped us loads.
Domestic security? -- while we pour billions down the hole in Iraq including $9 billion we can't even find funding for domestic security is anemic. Remember Bush promising 10,000 new border agents? Well, the budget Bush actually submitted after that cut funding for all but 210 of them.
Back in 2004, the Coast Guard identified $1.5 billion (i.e., about 16% of what we can't find in Iraq) needed to boost coastal and maritime security. Bush gave . . . $46 million.
Power and chemical plants, long identified as grave threats should they be sabotaged, haven't been hardened against attacks. Why? Well, they're privately or semi-privately owned, and don't want to pony up the dough. The administration's response? Do nothing.
First responders, so passionately invoked as Bush stood on the Ground Zero rubble, have been given short shrift ever since. And interoperability of radios for first responders, which would have saved lives on 9/11, is still nowhere to be seen (telcom companies want to reserve the frequencies that would be used for their own future use). They tried to cut funding for air marshals, for Gods sake.
Just a taste.
No, I don't oppose fighting terrorism. I oppose doing it incompetently, and treating security and counterterrorism as PR issues instead of real policy issues. I oppose doing it on the cheap, under the "I've-watched-too-much-TV" concept that you can just put all the data in the world into a computer and get Osama bin Laden's address, and not bother with, you know, hiring translators and staffing agencies and funding international investigations and all that complicated stuff.
And I oppose using some bogus "outrage" over a bogus "leak" to try to dogwhip the press into not asking so many darned questions about all of the above.
Sincerely,
m.