Conservatives react to news accounts of secret bank monitoring

June 27, 2006

OK, so the Republican line is that the major dailies — including the New York Times, LA Times, and Wall Street Journal — have seriously undermined national security by exposing the Bush’s administration’s secret program to monitor bank records without court orders. Conservatives are having trouble articulating why the revelations are so dangerous, but that hasn’t stopped a Grade A freak-out from unfolding in GOP circles.

Just how apoplectic is the right? Well, first consider what talk show host Melanie Morgan said on MSNBC’s Hardball last night.

Chris Matthews: Let me ask you Melanie, do you really mean “treason”? You mean put them in jail for life? I don’t know what treason carries as a sanction, but I assume the penalties are incredible severe, 20 years perhaps.

Melanie Morgan: Yes.

Matthews: You are saying to put Bill Keller and his associates in prison for 20 years?

Morgan: Absolutely. I am absolutely advocating that.

Yes, MSNBC hosted a discussion on whether NYT journalists were literally guilty of treason, as if this were a normal, reasonable question.

I noticed one popular conservative blogger, however, who was willing to go a little further.

Just a few quick comments about what the New York Times, The L.A. Times, and the Wall Street Journal have done in divulging government secrets used to defend Americans against our terrorist enemy during a time of war.

The Rosenbergs where executed for a lot less – conspiracy to commit espionage for helping the Soviet Union steal the secrets to the atomic bomb from the United States during World War II.

Wouldn’t executing Risen, Lichtblau, and Keller for treason (along with the person or persons responsible for leaking the government secrets) bring with it the ancillary benefit of encouraging other journalists and editors to find more socially beneficial ways to win a Pulitzer Prize and government leakers other ways of carrying out their leftwing Democratic party-supporting political agenda? (emphasis in the original)

In an addendum to the post, the same blogger explained, “[T]he SOBs deserve to be shot at sunrise – without a trial.”

Remember, David Broder believes the liberal blogs he’s seen “are heavier on vituperation of President Bush and other targets than on creative thought.” I wonder what Broder thinks about the vituperation on the right?

I’m confused by the uproar on this one. Ever since 9/11, I have assumed the government was monitoring bank transfers and transactions. I distinctly remember the administration focusing on “money laundering” and requesting bank records back in 2002.

Additionally, a Business Week article from 2002 discusses the Defense Dept.’s plan for a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system. Okay, so the plans were already out in the open that the government was creating this database. Where does the treason come in again??

  • You didn’t mention Chris Matthews nailing Ms. Morgan on Rove’s leaking the name of a covert CIA operative. You should of heard her whining “It’s not a crime, nobodies proved a crime, Plame wasn’t covert”.

    She came off like the twit she clearly is. And Chris could have buried her even deeper if he’d tried.

    Considering the fact that the Bushites have managed to fire one suspected leaker at the NSA for “mental problems” and one alleged leaker at the CIA ten days before her retirement for actually giving Kerry a campaign contribution, we should turn the situation around and demand that the SAdministration find and fire their leakers before they start after reporters and editors. After all, we know Rove leaked, and they haven’t punished him.

  • With all the continued fuckups, as in Iraq and Katrina, the consistent failure to follow the law, and the stretching and distorting of the law, and the increased opacity of the national security state, it’s a wonder that the Bush administration’s approval ratings aren’t below 10 percent.

  • I’d be happy to put anyone who leaks classified information behind bars, including Bush’s staff. The issue I have is that Congress has failed to do the job we’ve sent them (in part) to Washington to do, which is to provide oversight on the policies of leathe White House.

    The newspapers reporting the information is just plain wrong. Congress not providing oversight is wrong. The White House implementing flawed policies is wrong. Someone leaking information about the policies is wrong. There is no high ground here.

  • Glenn Greenwald had this little nugget from a speech Bush made on April 19, 2004. “Before September the 11th, law enforcement could more easily obtain business and financial records of white-collar criminals than of suspected terrorists. See, part of the way to make sure that we catch terrorists is we chase money trails. And yet it was easier to chase a money trail with a white-collar criminal than it was a terrorist. The Patriot Act ended this double standard and it made it easier for investigators to catch suspected terrorists by following paper trails here in America.”

    Am I to believe that reporters should be prosecuted for reporting on the same substance that Bush used in a speech? I think the right-wingers are getting more delusional and scared as we roll into ’06 election cycle.

  • Wow, so I checked an article that the Heritage Foundation posted in 2002 about TIA. They stated:

    Neither TIA nor its subcomponents are secret projects being developed in the nether world of the intelligence community to subvert democracy and civil liberty, but open projects which DARPA described in detail during its recent DARPA Tech symposium in Anaheim, CA. It has even posted transcripts from this seminar on its website.

    Well, when I went to the website they indicated, I found that the slides and script of IAO leader John Poindexter had been deleted. He is the only one whose notes have been deleted.

    However, if you read the script pdf file talking about the Genisys system, you will see the following discussion about privacy concerns:

    We have three methods relevant to protecting privacy. First, we can exploit partitioning to separate identity information from transactions that people conduct, only reforming this association when we have evidence and legal authority to do so. We can also use partitioning to project specific information authorized for the particular role of the requestor. In this way, the Center for Disease Control, for example, could access recent statistical medical information while others could not.
    Second, we will develop and employ information filters to keep information that is not relevant out of the repository. Filters could be used to implement laws and policy that regulate the kinds of information recorded and who it pertains to. Finally, we will use software agents to mine the information in the repository, form associations from content, and expunge information found to be unrelated to combating terrorism. Filters are not perfect, and this last method will help ensure privacy when filters fail or when the combination of bits of information make it clear that the information has no utility. These three method are initial steps toward achieving personal privacy and security. They are probably inadequate, and we are soliciting additional new ideas in this area.

    Obviously, according to the administration’s own people, privacy is an issue of concern and at least at that time, there were inadequate methods of screening information to protect American citizens.

    So my question becomes….if it was okay to discuss this program publicly in the media and to post this information on websites open to the public, why then are the revelations in the NY Times considered treason???

    And shouldn’t the subject of privacy for American citizens continue to be open to public debate?

  • These guys are all certifiable. Nothing has to make sense anymore. Just keep repeating the mantras “nine eleven” “osama” “lefty” “rapture”. Read and re-read online selections of Coulter-speak. Watch ads. Plug in your iPod. Don’t read. Tear up the Constitution. Don’t burn the Flag – no matter how insane the country for which it stands. Imitate a trained seal: use your Diebold machine. Above all, recognize patriotic criticism for the capital crime of treason. Burning at the stake’s too good for these guys.

  • “why then are the revelations in the NY Times considered treason?” – Gridlock

    Because the Bushites and Boy George II himself asked the NYT not to publish. The treason here is not revealing the method we use to track terrorist money. The treason is not listening to the SAdministration’s request not to publish. Apparantly, failure to conform to Government censorship should be considered treason.

  • So, what the freakazoids are calling for is that journalists who perform the foundational duty of their profession—which is to call into question the activities of government when those activities may be either a violation(1)of legislated/adjudicated individual rights or (2) established criminal laws—should be imprisoned or put to death?

    If Melanie Morgan wishes to encourage wrongful prosecution and imprisonment of individual citizens for false reasons, then she herself should be charged with criminal intimidation, criminal menacing, and maybe a couple of other items. As for the “blogger”—fomenting the murder of a journalist because he says something that’s disagreeable is no less a crime than a bunch of guys with box-cutters stealing a plane and flying it into the WTC. If the Reich wants to play, then they would be wise to contemplate that such “games” (killing citizens in retaliation for not being good little bundists) have a historical habit of being a two-way street—and the ensuing event tends toward an outcome not of their liking….

  • I just spent the last 1/2 hour listening to Scott Johnson of Powerblog on MN Public Radio. I was praying for some of that liberal bias that is so touted yet the host never cut him off or threatened to kill him. Talk about unhinged! He equated the NTY article to the publication of the news the US had broken Japanese naval codes in the Chicago Tribune (?) in 1942. He repeated this 4 or 5 times.

    A caller asked him if the fact that the NYT story was confirmed (via the Treasury Department briefing the WSJ who published basically the same story). His response was that the caller’s question didn’t even merit a response it was so stupid.

    I say let these people spin off into space with their rantings. Scott Johnson definately did nothing to turn anyone to his side of the argument. It only makes him and those like him appear more unhinged.

  • It keeps getting better. In a February 2006 Newsweek article it discusses the shut down of TIA and the Information Awareness Office when Congress shut down their funding in 2003. But apparently the programs live on in a ‘classified’ manner:

    Yet today, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename of Topsail (minus the futures market), two officials privy to the intelligence tell NEWSWEEK. It is in programs like these that real data mining is going on and—considering the furor over TIA—with fewer intrusions on civil liberties than occur under the NSA surveillance program. “It’s the best thing to come out of American intelligence in decades,” says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “It is truly Poindexter’s brainchild. Of all the people in the intelligence business, he has the keenest appreciation of using advanced information technology for intelligence gathering.” Poindexter, who lives just outside Washington in Rockville, Md., could not be reached for comment on whether he is still involved with Topsail.

    So when the Congress questioned activities of the Defense Dept’s IAO, rather than continue the program, the Congress stopped funding it. But Cheney and the boys decided they would just go around Congress by ‘classifying’ the activities and apparently shifted funds from Homeland Security or Iraq or both to fund the continuing activity that Congress had looked at and killed.

    Disgusting.

  • Will conservative disregard for government abuse of our privacy rights “stay the course” when the government falls into liberal hands?

  • Let us start acting on the fact these people are NOT “consrevatives.” They are far right revolutionaries (a high-falutin’ term for “fascist”). They really do want to overthrow the republic. And calling them “goose-stepper wannabes” is not some political slur, but rather a statement of objective fact.

  • Re#13

    Of course not. Conservatives would be shrieking with horror and the right wing blogosphere would be screaming bloody murder.

    But of course, the twits in teh current administration don’t think that their fixes for an Imperial Presidency can ever be applied against them.

  • Is anyone else disturbed by the reference to the Rosenberg trial? If I remember my history correctly, the Rosenbergs stand as a tragic example of what happens when you have an overreaching government motivated by fear looking to cast blame on any easy target.

  • They call it “money laundering” for a reason – the people who do it are trying to cover their tracks and are expecting someone to trace their steps.

  • Anytime someone starts talking publicly about executing journalists for some wholly imagined “crime,” it’s disturbing.

    I don’t know about VT, but fortunately, here in NC even some of the journalists own guns.

  • Two more points where the R’s are wrong:

    1) any smart aQ operatives (which are the ones we want to catch) probably use “hawala” to transfer money out of the sight and grasp of government entities, and

    2) this program has only helped find amateurs and fools who could never pull anything off anyway.

    Does anyone think that aQ would trust even their own nations’ banks with money transfers and accounting? No friggin’ way.

  • This is a coordinated meme. All of the righties point to the same 3 things.
    This is treason, because
    We are at war
    The reason?
    The liberal media wants to Get Bush
    Crooks and Liars has a great video of wingnut radio’s Chris Baker’s head exploding, when Bernie Ward wouldn’t engage on the phony right wing barking points. Bernie’s point was simple, and he stuck to it: Who should decide what gets published? The government? Baker could only froth about treason, liberal bush hating media, time of war, blablabla – He could not even face the question. When he realized that that Bernie wasn’t going to let go without an answer, Baker stormed off the set. It’s hilarious and must see.

  • Greedy Rethugs. . . it wasn’t enough to just go after one prong of the First Amendment per week. Along with restricting freedom to express ones self by burning a flag, they want to go after freedom of the press as well (literally, it appears, by jailing the folks running the presses). Good thing a Congressional recess is coming up or at the rate they are going there wouldn’t be any Constitution left in a few months.

    I always knew political operatives tried to coordinate “issue weeks” with consistent themes, but i never really knew “We Hate the First Amendment” would be one of them.

  • If anyone here saw Melanie in action last night they’d know she’s a stark raving lunatic. I don’t know if she’s trying to emulate Coulter, but the woman has definately lost it. She’s going to bark her way into irrelevance.

  • Kevin Drum has pointed out that one consequence of the outing of the program may be that it will discourage terrorists from using conventional transfer/communication channels–and that this is a good thing.

    Which prompts the inquiry–what are that chances that this is a rope-a-dope, designed to convince them that we have power that we do not in fact have at all?

  • #20 I was home and got to watch that confrontation with Bernie Ward. It was very strange. It’s kind of funny if you forget how serious these righties are.

    That’s Bernie’s style though. Keep repeating a legitimate question until it is answered. I listen to him at night sometimes; he makes the right wing-nuts go even nuttier. It would be fun to watch again. It made me think of Novak storming off Crossfire. I just happened to watch that one too.

  • The Bushies should remember the old admonition “Don’t pick a fight with people who buy their ink by the barrel.”

  • The adminstration had been talking about going after the money from the get go. No news here. I was not at all surprised about the article.

    Next thing you know the Times will pen a story about how spy satellites are being used to track these guys … Damn! Let the cat out of the bag again. I guess it’s all about the old Alberto Gonzales quote about how these guys will forget their communications and financial transactions are being monitored … until our newpapers remind them! Doh!

    They must be trying to get Dems to fall for this cannard by figuring they’d be indignant about this financial spying … but there’s only crickets chirping from the left.

  • This is just a way for the White House to rebuild it’s image, and to try to win in the midterm election.

    By leaking this information, the White House is able to register it’s ourtrage with “liberal” press. It’s all about branding that will smear the “liberal” Dems. Just listen to the rhetoric. Think about how different it is from the NSA story.

    Dems can will by not defending the press, and by attacking the White House directly. “How can the Republicans be trusted to run our country if they can’t keep our secrets? How can they be trusted? Where’s the leak investigation?” Repeat over and over. “The Republicans are incompetent: they can’t keep our secrets.”

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