FAKE Republican Outrage

[Doug]

DOUG
It's not a leak when Bush does it in public, in a speech.

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From the official White House page of Bush's 9/24/2001 speech:

We've established a foreign terrorist asset tracking center at the Department of the Treasury to identify and investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks.

It will bring together representatives of the intelligence, law enforcement and financial regulatory agencies to accomplish two goals: to follow the money as a trail to the terrorists, to follow their money so we can find out where they are; and to freeze the money to disrupt their actions.

We're also working with the friends and allies throughout the world to share information. We're working closely with the United Nations, the EU and through the G-7/G-8 structure to limit the ability of terrorist organizations to take advantage of the international financial systems.

See here.
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But then now we get Bush saying this on 6/26/2006:

The 9/11 Commission recommended that the government be robust in tracing money. If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money. And that's exactly what we're doing. And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror.

See here. Another official White House transcript.
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DOUG
Why is the press letting Bumbling Bush get away with lambasting the New York Times for simply stating something Bush had announced years ago?

[Doug]

Here's why the administration is pretending to be upset.

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The Times article reported that shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Treasury Department tapped into the "nerve center of the global banking industry" -- a huge database of international financial transactions maintained by a banking consortium known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). According to the Times, the administration limited its use of SWIFT to "tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda."

And now:
Tony Snow asserted during his June 27 press briefing, "I am absolutely sure they [the terrorists] didn't know about SWIFT."

Reported at mediamatters.com
Here.

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DOUG says:
The terrorists didn't know about SWIFT?? It was reported in 2002. Look:

And as former State Department official Victor Comras noted in a June 23 Counterterrorism Blog post, the United Nations Al Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Group learned of the SWIFT program years ago -- a fact the group incorporated into its December 2002 report to the U.N. Security Council:

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.

(see above source)
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[Dardedar]

Amazing.

[Doug]

DOUG
Now this pretend exposure of what Bush had publicly stated is putting lives at risk??

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"Loose lips kill American people," House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said Wednesday while condemning the leaks.
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AND:

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San Francisco talk show host Melanie Morgan believes that Times editor Bill Keller should be jailed for treason for approving the publication.

The maximum penalty for treason is death.

"If he were to be tried and convicted of treason, yes, I would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber," Morgan, whose show airs on KSFO-AM, told The Chronicle on Wednesday. "It is about revealing classified secrets in the time of war. And the media has got to take responsibility for revealing classified information that is putting American lives at risk."

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For each quotation, see here.

[Savonarola]

Doug quoted:

"If he were to be tried and convicted of treason, yes, I would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber," Morgan, whose show airs on KSFO-AM, told The Chronicle on Wednesday. "It is about revealing classified secrets in the time of war. And the media has got to take responsibility for revealing classified information that is putting American lives at risk."

I presume Morgan also approves of the death penalty for Rove for the Plame/CIA leak, right?
And if Bush really did "approve" the leak, I suppose that she'd support his capital punishment, too?

[Doug]

DOUG
I know this dead horse in getting a heck of a whipping, but how has the administration reacted to leaks in the past?

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In the past, however, the Bush administration has seen fit to disclose classified information to the Times and other news outlets in order to bolster its arguments or discredit its political opponents...

In an infamous September 8, 2002, article headlined, "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts," New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon relied on leaked classified intelligence to report that "Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb." ...The now-discredited allegations that the tubes represented evidence of Saddam's revived nuclear weapons program were attributed to anonymous "administration officials" as well as an unnamed Iraqi defector.

Indeed, the day of the article's publication, Vice President Dick Cheney... touted Miller and Gordon's reporting on the aluminum tubes. Cheney said, "There's a story in The New York Times this morning ... and I want to attribute the Times. I don't want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire ... the kind of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge."

Go here.
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[Guest]

You said it right the first time - as far they are concerned, if they say it, it isn't a leak - not only that, they expect that nobody will pay attention because they know it's political rhetoric - it only has the possibility of truth when someone else (like the NYT) reports it.