[Overpaid Slacker]

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 went so far as to call Times executive editor Bill Keller personally in an attempt to persuade him not to publish — The Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, which the NYT clamored for and fawned over, calls Keller to tell him it is a vital and legal part of anti-terror efforts and that it must remain secret. “It was top, top secret,” Kean says, and Keller decides that he knows better.

Kean stated that the NYT’s decision to expose the terrorist finance effort 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.”

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. 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.”

Anybody else care to say that the SWIFT program was not critical to our efforts? That it was low-probability, that since the terrorist financiers knew we were tracking money that they "stopped using the 'banking system'", thereby eviscerating the TFTP efficacy? That it's not such a big loss....?

Go ahead. Just make a better case for your point than the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who knows a weeeee bit more about what was going on and disagrees.

Nail the NYT, nail Keller, nail Lichtblau and Risen and hang the leakers.

This is a clear-cut case (from the info out so far, I'll stipulate, but I can't imagine exonerating circumstances) of disclosure in violation of law that requires prosecution if our secrecy, espionage and treason laws are ever going to mean anything.

Wonder if the NYT (the LAT, et al.) will publish all the "thank you" letters it receives from the families of the victims of the next terrorist-financed attacks...

JP

(EDIT for attribution: quotes excerpted from a Byron York piece on NRO)