Free Republic

US promises immigration crackdown US officials have pledged to continue a crackdown on illegal immigration a day after agents arrested 1,200 people at meat-packing plants in six states. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the arrests had uncovered flagrant violations of immigration and privacy laws. Most of the workers arrested at the Swift & Co meat-packing plants are from Central American and African countries. Swift & Co said it did not knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The arrests followed a 10-month investigation into alleged illegal immigrants suspected of using forged or stolen identity papers. "Violations of our immigration laws and privacy...

GREELEY, Colo. — Federal agents raided six Swift & Co. processing plants in six states on Tuesday in search of illegal immigrants who stole the identities of lawful U.S. residents and used their Social Security numbers to get jobs at the beef and pork company. Agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency executed search warrants at Swift's processing facilities in Greeley, Colo.; Grand Island, Neb.; Cactus, Texas; Hyrum, Utah; Marshalltown, Iowa; and Worthington, Minn. ICE officials did not have an arrest total but said workers were being arrested on administrative immigration violations and in some cases, existing criminal arrest...

WASHINGTON - More than 1,200 people were arrested in meatpacking plants in six states during raids that federal officials said amounted to the largest-ever workplace crackdown on illegal immigration. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Wednesday the investigation uncovered a "disturbing front" in the war against illegal immigration, in which illegal immigrants are using the identities of U.S. citizens to obtain jobs. "Violations of our immigration laws and privacy rights often go hand in hand," he said. "Enforcement actions like this one protect the privacy rights of innocent Americans while striking a blow against illegal immigration." The raids at Swift...

One way to get businesses to STOP HIRING ILLEGAL ALIENS is to BOYCOTT their products to QUIT SUPPORTING THEM!!!

BRUSSELS, Belgium - A report by an EU panel released Thursday said the bank data transfer agency SWIFT broke European privacy laws by handing over personal data to U.S. authorities for use in anti-terror investigations. The Belgian-based company, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, "committed violations of data protection laws" by secretly transferring data to the United States, without properly informing Belgian authorities, the EU's data protection panel said. The panel's report calls on SWIFT, financial institutions and EU authorities to "take the necessary measures" to end the transfer, which it said contradicts Belgian and EU data protection rules....

The NY Times, which has revealed some of the nation’s most crucial secrets (including the surveillance of foreign Al Qaeda communications with domestic accomplices, and the SWIFT program that traces bank transactions of foreign terrorists) now opines that maybe it shouldn’t have revealed the SWIFT program to the world. The Public Editor of the Times (sort of an ombudsman) said yesterday

The Navy lawyer who led a successful Supreme Court challenge of the Bush administration's military tribunals for detainees at Guantanamo Bay has been passed over for promotion and will have to leave the military, The Miami Herald reported Sunday. Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, will retire in March or April under the military's "up or out" promotion system. Swift said last week he was notified he would not be promoted to commander. He said the notification came about two weeks after the Supreme Court sided with him and against the White House in the case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a...

...Has Times editor gotten away with murder?Posted: September 22, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern If you blinked you would have missed it. I'm speaking of the news coverage about who really leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a non-covert CIA agent. The leaker, former Colin Powell aide Richard Armitage, was a vocal critic of the war in Iraq. Perhaps the media "overlooked" Armitage and his role in this scandal precisely because he shared their disdain for the war in Iraq. Did you happen to notice that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby didn't receive that same consideration – even though they...

Dear Friend, The topic of this email -- and the subject of a major speech I will deliver in Boston's Faneuil Hall tomorrow -- is national security. If you think I'm planning to alert people to Republican pre-election fear-mongering on this vitally important issue, you're only half right. Of course, we need to reject the Republicans' idea that a "debate" on national security involves them demanding another book of blank checks for policies that don't work. And, needless to say, we can't tolerate them smearing any Democrat who stands up to their miserable record of failure. I will be campaigning...

LONDON (Reuters) - Teams of international scientists have used observations from NASA's Swift satellite and other telescopes to witness the evolution of a cosmic blast into a stellar explosion or supernova. The blast is thought to be a milder type of gamma-ray burst (GRB) -- the most powerful type of explosion known to astronomers -- called an X-ray flash. It is known as GRB060218 after the February 18 date it began in the constellation of Aries about 440 million light years away. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. "This extends the...

By Walter Pincus pincusw@washpost.com Courage in journalism today takes all the obvious, traditional forms -- reporting from a war zone or from a totalitarian country where a reporter's life or safety are issues. In Washington, D.C., where I work, it's a far less dramatic form of courage if a journalist stands up to a government official or a politician who he or she has reason to believe is not telling the truth or living up to his or her responsibilities. But I believe a new kind of courage is needed in journalism in this age of instant news, instant analysis,...

A civil liberties group asked six governments Wednesday to block the release of confidential financial records to U.S. authorities as part of American anti-terrorist probes. London-based watchdog Privacy International said it filed complaints with authorities in Japan, Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Argentina, demanding a halt to the monitoring of millions of transactions as part of a CIA-U.S. Treasury program. The group filed similar complaints in 32 countries, mostly in Europe, last month. The U.S. Treasury has acknowledged that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks it has tracked millions of financial transactions handled by the Belgium-based Society for...

Highlight - "What we had not spoken about publicly, however, is this particular source. And, unfortunately, this revelation is very damaging. Since being asked to oversee this program by then-Secretary Snow and then-Deputy Secretary Bodman almost two years ago, I have received the written output from this program as part of my daily intelligence briefing. For two years, I have been reviewing that output every morning. I cannot remember a day when that briefing did not include at least one terrorism lead from this program. Despite attempts at secrecy, terrorist facilitators have continued to use the international banking system to...

Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society. No, the "they" I'm referring to are the editors of The New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety. Last December, the Times ran a story revealing...

By a vote of 302 to 219, the European Parliament approved a resolution demanding that European banks and governments disclose what they knew about the U.S. program to monitor terrorists' financial transactions. The New York Times reports one French politician accused the U.S. of "rifling through our private bank accounts," and an Italian lawmaker compared the case to alleged CIA kidnappings of terror suspects, saying it has the same objective, "to extort information." The administration had tried to convince the Times not to unveil the secret program, arguing among other things, that it would hurt cooperation with the Europeans. But...

In an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times on July 1, 2006, Dean Baquet (L.A. Times editor) and Bill Keller (New York Times executive editor) said: "…We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism. ... "…The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism initiatives that are still in operation." They say they are “not neutral” in the GWOT, after all, they too are in the enemy’s kill zone. They infer they...

According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories. "We didn't give them specifics, just general information about regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on SWIFT,...

One of these days, if you lose a son, a daughter, a cousin or a good friend in a terrorist attack, blame whoever perpetrated the deed first, but secondly blame The New York Times, whose irresponsibility may have enabled the killers to obtain necessary financing. This story on how the government tracks terrorist funding likewise hurts the paper while also hurting America as a whole by telling the enemy how he might be found out. Said Tony Snow, presidential press secretary, the Times and other papers that broke the story "ought to think long and hard about whether a public's...

Because the war on terror is fought in a peacetime atmosphere, treason can be presented as dissent, and you can get away with it. Case in point is the energetic pursuit, and publication, of U.S. intelligence gathering techniques, by the American media. The latest one was the reporting of how the U.S. has been analyzing international bank wire transfers. This apparently led to the capture of several prominent terrorists, especially in Southeast Asia. But to opponents of the war, this is an assault on civil liberties, attacks they consider more dangerous than potential terrorist violence. Earlier scoops revealed to terrorists...

This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows. To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50883 Monday, July 3, 2006 In defense of the New York Times Posted: July 3, 20061:00 a.m. Eastern By Vox Day © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com I am no fan of the New York Times. It is a pompous, outdated media organization that combines a dedication to poisonous ideology with a predilection for mediocre art and faux eurostylism. Its reporters are columnists who write opinion columns that pass for news stories, while its columnists are talentless divas whose ignorance of politics and economics is only exceeded...

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice-over): Targeting the "Times." George Bush, Dick Cheney and an army of conservative critics rip the "New York Times" for disclosing a secret program for monitoring the banking records of terror suspects. Did editor Bill Keller go too far, or is the White House just bashing the media for political gain? And why have the "Los Angeles Times" and "Wall Street Journal" have been given a pass for publishing similar stories? The co-author of the "New York Times" story, Eric Lichtblau, joins our discussion. Bloggers go mainstream. Hillary Clinton is the latest Democrat to hire...

The top editor of the New York Times remains unrepentant about publishing stories exposing national security intelligence programs, saying he would do it again. "I think it's useful for us to discuss, to know about how our government is waging this war to protect us," said Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, on CBS' "Face the Nation" program. "This was a case where clearly the terrorists or the people who finance terrorism know quite well, because the Treasury Department and the White House have talked openly about it, that they monitor international banking transactions. It's not news to the...

The top editor of the New York Times said if he had it to do again, he would still publish his newspaper's controversial expose of a secret program monitoring global bank transfers, despite outrage from the Republican White House and members of Congress. Speaking on CBS television's "Face The Nation" program Sunday, Times executive editor Bill Keller said he did not regret his decision to run the story, which was condemned on Thursday in a vote by the Republican-led House of Representatives in a non-binding resolution. "I think it's useful for us to discuss, to know about how our government...

The battle of Midway Island was the turning point of the Pacific War. Victory at Midway was possible because the U.S. had broken the Japanese naval code. The Chicago Tribune spilled the beans in a story that ran under the headline: "NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was furious. He knew that if the Japanese read the story, they'd suspect their codes were compromised, and change them. The president "initially was disposed to send in the Marines to shut down Tribune tower," wrote Harry Evans. "He was talked out of that, then...

You could call it “Treason Central,” or “al Qaeda West,” but no matter what you call it, the building housing the once-august New York Times at 229 West 43rd St. in New York City is a beehive of anti-American hostility, where selling out the nation’s secrets has become the newspaper’s stock in trade. This latest episode of the Times revealing information vital to the government’s ability to protect the American people from new 9/11s is just another example of the Times’ contempt for the security of the people of the United States of America in a time of war. To...

You could call it "Treason Central," or "al-Qaida West," but no matter what you call it, the building housing the once-august New York Times at 229 West 43rd Street in New York City is a beehive of anti-American hostility, where selling out the nation's secrets has become the newspaper's stock in trade. This latest episode of the Times revealing information vital to the government's ability to protect the American people from new 9/11s is just another example of the Times' contempt for the security of the people of the United States of America in a time of war. To say...

POLL TO FREEP Do you believe that The New York Times, L.A. Times and The Wall Street Journal SWIFT reports put at risk our national security? Yes 22% No 78%

All the Classified Info That's Fit to Discloseby James LileksIt seems as if The New York Times is revealing all our national security secrets. But relax -- they have their limits. If The Times learned that U.S. troops were force-feeding Gitmo detainees with Coca-Cola, they wouldn't publish Coke's secret formula. They might get sued. If there's a CIA program that uses offensive cartoons of Muhammad to communicate with agents, they'll keep mum, lest they have to publish the images. But secret law-enforcement-type programs as classified as the access code to The Times' top-floor elevator? Fair game. You've got the right...

This is a vanity post. As everyone knows, the NY Times recently published an article describing, in detail, a classified program intended to inhibit terrorist financing. Post your letters to the NY Times (letters@nytimes.com) and Exec. Editor Bill Keller below and we'll get a nice collection going!

Because we don’t know, Jack …* On the Monday, June 26 edition of CNN’s “Situation Room,” hosted by Wolf Blitzer, New York Times editor in chief Bill Keller discussed the newspaper’s decision to publish last week details of a secret U.S. Government program to track terrorist financing. Here’s a part of the exchange: KELLER: To the best of my knowledge, three people outside of the administration were asked by the administration to call us. I spoke to one of them. One of them spoke to our Washington bureau chief. One of them spoke to Jill Abramson, our managing editor. All...

Two prominent former newsman for The New York Times, Max Frankel and Alex Jones, came out in defense of their old employer's recent disclosure of a secret bank monitoring program, saying the continued attacks on the paper are unfair and misplaced. Frankel, who served as executive editor from 1986 to 1994 and held other posts in Washington and Moscow, called the recent criticism an "outburst of Agnewism," while Jones, a onetime press reporter for the paper and current director of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, said this was "an important moment for the watchdog press in wartime." <> Today,...

Congress authorized the program. Whereas the defense of other recently disclosed surveillance programs may depend in part on the president's authority to act in the face of congressional silence or disapproval, defense of the TFTP is simplified by Congress's express statutory authorization of the president to conduct this program. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) expressly affords the president power to investigate international financial transactions, including those of non-foreign persons, pursuant to a declared state of emergency. Section 1702(a)(2) empowers the president to compel production of such financial transactions, via administrative subpoenas. The president certainly has satisfied...

A civil liberties group on Wednesday asked 32 national governments to block the release of confidential financial records to U.S. authorities as part of American anti-terrorist probes. London-based watchdog Privacy International demanded a halt to the "completely unacceptable" monitoring of millions of transactions as part of a CIA-U.S. Treasury program. The Treasury has acknowledged that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks it has tracked millions of financial transactions handled by the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT. Both SWIFT and the U.S. authorities say records were subpoenaed as part of targeted investigations into suspected terrorist activity....

Rights unit challenges U.S. over bank data By Dan Bilefsky International Herald Tribune Published: June 27, 2006 BRUSSELS A human rights group in London said Tuesday that it had lodged complaints in 32 countries against a banking consortium in Brussels, contending that it violated European and Asian data protection rules by providing the United States with confidential information about international money transfers. Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said the organization filed the complaints with the data protection authorities with the aim of halting what it called "illegal transfers" of private information to the United States by the Society for...

Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt has ordered a probe into whether a Brussels-based banking consortium broke the law when it provided US anti-terror authorities with confidential information about international money transfers. The consortium known as SWIFT – society for worldwide inter-bank financial telecommunications – was brought into the limelight when the New York Times last week reported that officials from the CIA, the FBI and other US agencies had since 2001 been allowed to inspect the transfers. Prime minister Guy Verhofstadt asked the Belgian justice ministry on Monday (26 June) to investigate whether SWIFT acted illegally in allowing US...

Over the last year, The New York Times has twice published reports about secret antiterrorism programs being run by the Bush administration. Both times, critics have claimed that the paper was being unpatriotic or even aiding the terrorists. Some have even suggested that it should be indicted under the Espionage Act. There have been a handful of times in American history when the government has indeed tried to prosecute journalists for publishing things it preferred to keep quiet. None of them turned out well — from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the time when the government tried to enjoin...

House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records. The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation. The resolution comes as Republicans from the president on down condemn media organizations for reporting on the secret government program that tracked financial records overseas through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international banking cooperative.

Letter to the Editors of The New York Times by Treasury Secretary SnowMr. Bill Keller, Managing EditorThe New York Times229 West 43rd Street New York, NY 10036 Dear Mr. Keller:The New York Times' decision to disclose the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, a robust and classified effort to map terrorist networks through the use of financial data, was irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide. In choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counter-terrorism program and alerted terrorists...

Attorney General Gonzales: Indict the New York Times June 24th, 2006 Within days of the September 11th attacks, the head of Reuters’ worldwide news division, explaining the agency’s refusal to use the word “terrorist,” made the famous fatuous remark that “one man’s freedom terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Reuters, it seemed, wouldn’t be taking sides in America’s war on Islamic jihad, because as journalists, Reuters didn’t believe the American people and our allies are any “better” than our putrid enemies. Such is the repulsive state of the “moral equivalence” mongers in what passes for news journalism, even among those...

MANY READERS have been sharply critical of our decision to publish an article Friday on the U.S. Treasury Department's program to secretly monitor worldwide money transfers in an effort to track terrorist financing. They have sent me sincere and powerful expressions of their disappointment in our newspaper, and they deserve an equally thoughtful and honest response. The decision to publish this article was not one we took lightly. We considered very seriously the government's assertion that these disclosures could cause difficulties for counterterrorism programs. And we weighed that assertion against the fact that there is an intense and ongoing public...

The New York Times September 24, 2001 Monday Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Column 1; Editorial Desk; Pg. 30 LENGTH: 545 words HEADLINE: Finances of Terror Organizing the hijacking of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took significant sums of money. [snip] Washington and its allies must also disable the financial networks used by terrorists. [snip] Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also must be closer coordination among America's law enforcement, national security and financial regulatory agencies....

Fox News video The O'Reilly Factor Pres. Bush takes on The NY Times and other committed left-media

Mr. Bill Keller, Managing EditorThe New York Times229 West 43rd StreetNew York, NY 10036 Dear Mr. Keller: The New York Times' decision to disclose the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, a robust and classified effort to map terrorist networks through the use of financial data, was irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide.  In choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counter-terrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their money trails. Your...

Former Attorney General Ed Meese - Times' Intel Revelations Giving "Aid And Comfort To The Enemy" Suggesting Treason June 26, 2006 - Washington, DC - PipeLineNews.org - Interviewed on today's Rush Limbaugh show former AG Meese - who has been contacted by New York Congressman Peter King in his efforts to bring legal action against the New York Times - blasted the liberal newspaper. Meese stated that last thursdays outing by the paper of the "Swift" financial tracking system employed by the CIA and the Treasury Dept. to track financial activity by al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups was its "the...

Mr. Bill Keller, Managing Editor The New York Times 229 West 43rd Street New York, NY 10036 Dear Mr. Keller: The New York Times' decision to disclose the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, a robust and classified effort to map terrorist networks through the use of financial data, was irresponsible and harmful to the security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide. In choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counter-terrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and sources used to track their...

FReeper governsleastgovernsbest, AKA Mark Finkelstein, will be on the Lars Larson Show this evening at about 6:30 EDT. Lars and Mark will be discussing the NY Times leak of the government anti-terror program designed to track terrorists' financial transactions. Time permitting they might also get into the amazing ability of Democrats and their MSM friends to switch gears without missing a beat. For months they have demanded a troop reduction. But as soon as there are indications a reduction might be in the offing, they criticize the Bush administration for timing withdrawals for political purposes! Campbell Brown’s interview with Gen....

It has become increasingly clear that multiple members, if not most, of the leftist mainstream media no longer care about either the fate of the American people at the hands of terrorists or the survival of the United States. The latest example is that of the New York Times publishing yet another article that stabs our country and its people in the back, by publishing classified information regarding the tracking of radical Islamic terrorists' international banking activities. The Times’ article (“Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror”), which was published Friday, was quickly picked up by...

He was on their morning shows announcing this but no story up yet on their site. Please, let it happen!

It’s not my place here to interpret the Espionage Act. I realize, too, that it’s not yet been used to prosecute journalists. But laws are advocated, and interpreted, in light of the exigencies of the day, and especially where national defense is at issue, they must be aggressively enforced and tested at critical times. With the cancer of Islamic jihad metastasizing around the U.S., this is very much such a time, and I believe the Justice Department should aggressively seek to protect America’s interests, like any lawyer is bound to do for a client, and pursue an indictment of the...

BY NOW IT'S UNDENIABLE: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives. The Times's latest revelation of a national security secret appeared on last Friday's front page--where no al Qaeda operative could possibly miss it. Under the deliberately sensational headline, "Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror," the Times...