Fishtalk, DemsRLosers gave the best explanation of what we lost when the NYT leaked the story that I've seen. Also, I will note that William Bennett said today that he knows there are air marshalls, but he doesn't know which flights and what they look like.
Andrew McCarthy explained to Hugh Hewitt yesterday what was the real damage of the Times' stories. Terrorists and thir financial backers assumed the US was tracking their transactions to try to get at their MONEY. The SWIFT program was not designed to get their MONEY, it was designed to get THEM. To trace the movements of the money in order to find the terrorists who ultimately receive the money. We were deliberately not going after the money, which made the terrorists think they were safe. We were not even getting the information from SWIFT in realtime, but after the fact, so it wasn't useful for us to get at the money, but it was still useful to track down the terrorists in the field who ultimately received the money. Hambali was caught using this program precisely because we never moved to seize the money, we USED the money to find HIM and arrest him. Now they know we are doing this and they will simply stop using any longterm bank accounts to move their money so by the time we get the data from SWIFT it won't be useful in finding them. The dumbasses at the New York Times think this doesn't matter, but it does. It's a very serious setback in our ability to stealthily track down these bad guys without them seeing us coming.
The fact that Keller and Baquet are still trying to cover their asses ovr a week later should tell us they know they really stepped in it and they "have some 'splainin' to do" to the American people. The Fox News poll must have really shook them. America is NOT with them this time and I don't see how they recover. We need to keep up the pressure.
Amen.
The old Grey Lady and her left coast counterpart really doth protest too much. Telling. They are trying to set up a situation in which the public will be "on their side" if the government goes after them to get their sources. I don't think they are going to succeed. They tried to outnumber and out talk Bill Bennett and Fred Thompson today, but they did not succeed. Believe me, DBM, we actually are not that stupid.
You are begin all to charitable Peach.
My guess is they know it matters and are just trying to COA but not really doing too good a job, since it's a format they usually don't engage in.
NYT SOP is to put out the news (their version of it at least) and then proclaim it as the incontrovertible truth. Anyone who dares complain is instantly demagogued or worse.
They are having a bit of a problem adjusting to actually playing defense, but they better get used to it.
As I understand it, the SWIFT program was unknown and how it was applied? This is info the NY Times revealed that essentially cut down our methodology?
I like your explanation Peach, that the terrorists were blind-sided by our method of allowing them to transfer the money then catching their bad-ass selves.
I still can't get beyond those Hamas guys trying to carry all that cash. They weren't carrying cash for any other reason than to get money back to Palestine. And they carried cash because they knew bank transfers were being monitored.
Could it be that the terrorists didn't know that such as withdrawals from accounts were also being tracked? Beyond simple transfer from Saudi accounts to Hamas accounts I mean. Perhaps once these Hamas guys got caught they knew they were foiled. Perhaps the NY Times aided future terrorists by blabbing all over the place about this SWIFT program...perhaps as warning to all in the Mideast that this methodology is not safe?
Hey, I firmly believe the NY Times is in the pocket of Saudi Arabia and I also believe that plenty of those writers are directly paid by terrorist enablers. Which does not mean that I completely understand this SWIFT thing and how it all works.
But I'm reading and I'm thinking. There seems to be stuff we don't know, or me at least. Whatever the case, the NY Slimes should have kept their mouth shut. There was absolutely nothing to be gained by it. It was simple treason pure and unfettered.