“A Good Program…to Make Us Safer…Is Over.” (9/11 Comm. Co-Chair Kean on NY Times' latest treason)

A September 11 commission co-chairman talks about the damage done by the latest New York Times leak.

Thomas Kean, the co-chairman of the September 11 Commission, was briefed several weeks ago about the Treasury Department’s terrorist-finance program, and after the session, Kean says, “I came away with the idea that this was a good program, one that was legal, one that was not violating anybody’s civil liberties…and something the U.S. government should be doing to make us safer.”

Kean tells National Review Online that the New York Times’s decision to expose the terrorist finance effort — Kean called Times executive editor Bill Keller in an attempt to persuade him not to publish — has done terrible damage to the program. “I think it’s over,” Kean says. “Terrorists read the newspapers. Once the program became known, then obviously the terrorists were not going to use these methods any more.”

Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, says he had a pessimistic feeling after calling Keller. “He couldn’t have been more courteous,” Kean recalls. “He said he’d take my views into consideration. But…when the Treasury Department called to ask whether I had made the call, I said, ‘Yes, I have, but I think you have a problem.’“

For Kean, the story started when he was contacted by the Treasury Department after officials there learned that the Times was preparing a story. Kean describes the officials as being “very agitated and very concerned” about possible exposure of the program. “It was top, top secret,” Kean says.

At the time, Kean didn’t know about the program. He says the commission’s other co-chairman, former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, did know, having been briefed when the commission was conducting its investigation into the September 11 terrorist attacks. (There were a number of issues about which just one of the co-chairmen was informed, Kean says; this, apparently, was one of them.)

But faced with a possible Times story, Treasury wanted to tell Kean about the program, and two officials traveled to his office in Far Hills, New Jersey. “They sat here and closed all the doors and told me that my security clearance had been reactivated for the purpose of the briefing,” Kane says. “They gave me a full briefing about the program; they were here quite a while.”

At the end of the meeting — Kean says he asked a lot of questions — Kean was satisfied that the program was effective and should remain classified. Treasury officials asked that he call Keller. When he did, he was not encouraged. “You just get a feeling,” Kean recalls. “I just had a sense that they were leaning toward running the story.” Keller, he says, listened to his concerns but did not attempt to make the case for publication. (Hamilton also called the Times to request that the paper not reveal the program.)

The exposure of the terrorist-finance program was particularly troubling to Kean because the 9/11 Commission had given high marks to the administration’s efforts in the area of terrorist financing. Last December, the commission issued a report card for the administration, and in a number of areas, the grades weren’t very good. For example, the commissioners gave the administration a “D” for bag and cargo screening at airports, a “D” for critical infrastructure assessment, and a “D” for government-wide information sharing about terrorism. In fact, the only area in which the administration scored an “A” — actually an “A-” — was in its efforts on terrorist financing. “The U.S. has won the support of key countries in tackling terrorism finance,” the commissioners wrote, “though there is still much to do in the Gulf States and in South Asia. The government has made significant strides in using terrorism finance as an intelligence tool.”

Now, a major part of that effort appears to have been compromised. “That’s the way it is in this war,” says Kean. “There are a number of programs we are using to try to disrupt terrorist activities, and you never know which one is going to be successful. We knew that this one already had been.”

— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.

The difference is that Plame was outed by her husband. When all of your neighbors know that you work for the CIA, you are not covert. When most DC reporters know you work for the CIA, you are not covert.

When administration officials tell the truth to reporters that does not endanger national security or put covert agents lives at risk, there is no crime.

This time, adminstration officials and members of Congress (including "Running Scared" Jack Murtha) called the Times and asked them not to run the story as it would curtail US intelligence gathering capabilities. And just like when the Times ran the exposee on monitoring telephone calls to members of terrorist organizations, the President's approval rating goes up. People do want the government to catch and kill terrorists. We just don't need to know how we find them, because then we won't be able to find more terrorists to kill.

Maybe that is what the Times wants.

I had an interesting experience with the New York Times recently.

I wonder if the New York Times has a secret program of their own they're not telling subscribers about.

Here's the story:

They sent me a subscription offer.... some ridiculously low price offer.

I sent them back the empty envelope...

Amazingly, two weeks later, I started receiving the NYT in my driveway every morning. At first I thought it was another desperation tactic to get new subscribers by giving away the paper.

Then the invoice finally arrived, claiming that I'd agreed to subscribe. I called and asked them to fax me a copy of anything I'd signed agreeing to get their rag.

They politely and quickly canceled the subscription without charging me for the papers delivered.

Since then I've been wondering - Do they use encrypted bar-coding on the subscription envelope which identifies the person to whom the subscription offer was sent? It's no harder than computer printing the name and address which they have to do anyhow.

It would save a lot of expense for them as they would drastically reduce the handling of the envelopes. Just machine read the bar code information, and trash the envelope and its contents without even opening them.

You're going to send an invoice anyhow... so it really makes a lot of business sense.

But the point is - they're doing it SECRETLY

You guys do realize that all information published about the operation of this program in the NY Times was already public domain, right?

From a 2002 UN 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."

Source: http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/725/72/PDF/N0272572.pdf?OpenElement

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