I understood that Brewster-Jennings was doing some money tracking, more through developing contacts than through data mining.

Anybody know more about this?

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

I am so effing angry I could burn a flag

An apt - & for now free- expression of their contempt for "our values" and mine for them

Burn baby burn

Does it give anyone a warm fuzzy feeling to know that the administration has identified thousands of suspected terrorists in our country?   I know they have, because my President told me this bank record mining operation is only being done to suspected terrorists.  You know, now that I think back, some of my bank statements have little colored check marks by the entries!!  I'd better hide my Koran I guess.

Hoppy in Sacramento

I’ve seen the same talking points on RW blogs- “Treason!” It’s a pretty coordinated smear campaign and it comes down to one thing- the Big Chill. Continue browbeating the MSM with liberal hippie label, the more they go out of their way to be “balanced.” Bill Keller explains why the outrage is bogus here.

Larry,

Thank you for laying this issue out so clearly. I saw Bush today pretending to be infuriated about the leak, but I couldn't help thinking that he didn't seem to really grasp what it was he was suppose to be angry about. I always get the feeling that someone behind the scenes (Rove) has told him how to feel and how to act. There's a stinky rat here.

George Bush and Dick Cheney are a disgrace. They just can't resist reminding the American people that they think we are idiots. And worse, they take our enemies for being fools.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, Larry, although you hid the money quote.

What Bush is irritated about in these stories is not so much the release of classified information that shouldn't have been classified in the first place, but the fact that they have so few results from any of these Constitution-busting techniques.

What are the successes? They say that they can't tell us because they're classified, but we hear about the sad seven from Miami who were fantasizing about a ground war. They wouldn't tell us if they rolled up a real terror ring? Puh-leeze.

I understand that the White House leaked the "SWIFT" story to the Wall Street Journal "to get better coverage."

What do we call that? 

More to the point, Ron Suskind's new book "One Percent Doctrine" which went to press  two months ago or more includes reporting on the "tracking of the financial records of terrorist suspects" and the degree to which diminishing returns has set in on that spying effort.

What do we call that?

The Bushies need to get out into the heartland and count "OUT OF IRAQ" signs on front lawns.  Their base is pretty upset with them as it is. The "base" keeps subscribing to the NYTimes along with the Chicago Tribune. 

This may really be off topic but maybe it isn't. Remember a few years back that rather pitiful young man from Marin County who was found in Afghanistan apparently having been in Bin Laden's camp at one time? It always has amazed me that what he could do, no CIA covert agent could do? This question and other inconsistencies, even contradictions in the so-called government war on terror are perplexing. Is all this government spying really about terrorism or is it about something else. Was 9/11 really a complete surprise to the Bush government. It certainly has become a convenient rationale for creating what is fast becoming a police state.

I too wondered how the kid, John Walker Lindh, talked to bin Laden. If you are interested, I found a pretty good CNN story about him:   

Walker Lindh told interrogators that bin Laden visited the camp several times, usually with one of his sons. Walker Lindh and four others met bin Laden on one occasion, and the al Qaeda leader "made small talk and thanked them all for taking part in the Jihad," according to the FBI report.

We may never know, but my understanding is what you found. Since the most useful intel is the people kind, any inside connections developed by B-J would have been very useful. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that with Saudi bankers in the mix there would be some dirt spattered on the Bushes, deserved or not.

The story rings true, to those of us that don't trust Bush and Cheney. What aids in that is that Cheney was both very intrusive over at CIA and very interested in the Joe Wilson attack. If he found out what Plame was doing it might have evaporated any concern he had over blowing her cover, even if it wasn't the primary reason for it.

Sibel Edmonds, the FBI translator and whistle-blower, has been saying exactly this.

The same people who outed Plame are the same people who gagged her and prevented her from telling anybody and everybody that "senior elected officials" - read that phrase again - SENIOR ELECTED OFFICIALS - are deep in cahoots with European, Russian, Central Asian, Turkish and Israeli Mafia groups engaged in organized crime, including drug and weapons smuggling and black market nuclear materials - the latter the sort of thing the Brewster Jennings operation was involved in.

One of the main names is Marc Rich - who used to be Scooter Libby's client - and was pardoned by Bill Clinton for 400 years worth of prison felonies in exchange for some thousands of dollars worth of furniture and campaign contributions - and maybe a blowjob, since Rich's wife was involved, IIRC.

That would require uh.. reading a book.

dc

Yes. Hard to generate the partisan rants over a book when "leaks" to the NYTimes in particular create such a prominent battleground.

Wait! Wait! Don't off bin Laden. We may need him on our side.

You are right. Please understand that there is no such thing as a “war on terror” or “war on terrorism.” It is a stupid statement, and I’ll explain why in a moment. I don’t mean that as a pejorative. And to repeat it, or give it any credence, is to help spread a lie, a deliberate attempt at propaganda, or a statement by a person who does not know what he or she is talking about.

I find that the newspapers and television, as well as “blogs” on the internet, all use the phrase “war on terror” and it does everyone a disservice. Google alone states that there are 137,000,000 references to this phase.

When our President, George Bush, says those words, he is talking non-sense. So is anyone else using these words. The reason I am writing this is to explain this phenomenon.

The words are inflammatory, and their ultimate effect often deliberately to cause people to suspend any rational judgment about the things the speaker wants to do because of this so-called “War on Terror.” When rational judgment is suspended, people will do anything no matter how ineffective it is because of the emotional mind-clouding power, and the fear it gives rise to, when such meaningless words are used.

It is also extremely sloppy journalism to repeat this phase, except as a direct quote, because it is meaningless. It is as meaningless as “war on laziness” or the “war on weather.” Journalists seem never to have heard of semantics, or an "abstraction ladder", which looks at the meaning of words and how their use affects us.

Right now, we as a country are involved in a number of situations, one or two very separate wars, some diplomatic efforts, and a very diverse set of circumstances that may possibly threaten our way of life, and we, as a country, appear to be afraid of a number of diversified groups of people who reside in various countries. We are also, as a country, possibly threatened in a number of ways by a number of countries, as opposed to small scattered groups of people.

If we can define what these groups and countries are and distinguish how they differ from one another, it can help us to understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what the characteristics of all this mixed up “war on terror” might really mean. This, of course, immediately implies that there is no one single opponent against whom we can wage war, but instead presents a variety of different situations, some more dangerous than others, each of them requiring that we handle them, as best we can, in different ways if we want to reduce any threat they pose.

• The first group of people that we claim to be fighting with is a vaguely defined group, once led by a man named Bin Laden, that calls itself Al Qaeda. It appears to be based in Afghanistan, but may have spread to various other countries. It is a loosely-knit, guerrilla group that dislikes “the West”, vaguely defined as European and American countries. We don’t know nearly enough about it to be “at war” with this group because it is so diffuse, and it is all too easy to confuse it with other groups at times. It is not certain that its leaders are alive or have control over this group because it is so diffuse. Originally, it was most probably responsible for the event known as “9/11”. We, as a country under President Bush, claim to be fighting this group but appear to have lost interest in pursuing this group forcefully.

I say “claim to be fighting” because, for all of our efforts, we have never caught Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda appears to be stronger than ever before. We have troops in Afghanistan, but they appear to be there mainly poised to defend the central government, which has been threatened by a number of groups including the Taliban (the prior totalitarian government), war lords in various provinces, and a loose network of guerillas including the Al Qaeda group. The current Administration, led by President Bush, has apparently de-emphasized our military efforts in Afghanistan and his rhetoric, his use of the words “war on terror”, appear to be mainly directed at Iraq, not Afghanistan.

The number of deaths of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan in this first military operation is 255 with 765 injured as of January 2006, as tracked by Wikipedia. I cite this figure in sharp contrast to the number of U.S. troops killed in the next military effort, still going on today, in Iraq which was 2,299 U.S. soldiers killed and 33,094 seriously injured as of March 2006 (cited at the site http://icasualties.org/oif/default.aspxhttp://icasualties.org/oif/default.aspx). The disparity between Afghanistan and Iraq, in terms of dead and casualties is very revealing about what is being emphasized.

• The second group that we were fighting was the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. It was a war declared by President Bush, with no real resistance from Congress. The enemy was a vague one – mainly the dictator, Saddam Hussein, who somehow had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and was linked vaguely to “terrorists”, the same ones named in Afghanistan as being Al Qaeda. None of these reasons has proven to be true. I repeat: None of the reasons given for this war have been proven to be true. As cited above, more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq as a result of this war. Because of what the President and his Administration have been saying, and repeating as a mantra, according to many surveys, many people in the U.S. believe, irrationally, that this war is being fought as a “war on terror.” This is simply not an accurate or true statement.

It appears that Iraq has three major ethnic groups that have never gotten along. When Saddam was in charge of the country, the Sunni controlled everything with an iron hand. The Shiites, although in the majority, had no political power. The Kurds, the third group, also had no power. Once Saddam’s forces were overcome by the U.S. forces, the Shiites grabbed political power, the Kurds grabbed the northern part of the country, and the Sunni who had control and resented losing it have begun conducting an insurgency. The Shiites and the Sunni both have deep hatred of each other; it is obvious that the Sunni aren’t used to being out of power, and the Shiites resent all of the terrible things that were done to their people when the Sunni were in power. This is has led to brutal killings, with our troops in the middle, mainly siding with the Shiite majority. The country at this time may be in civil war.

Our troops really aren’t fighting “terror” or “terrorists” here. They are actually intervening in an internal conflict that has been going on for a long time back to when England and Winston Churchill was involved. I will add that there have been instances of non-Iraqi individuals crossing the border into Iraq from Syria and Iran to attack American military forces, and some of these individuals may be linked to Al Qaeda, but that is not the biggest part of the problem. In fact, because of our invasion of Iraq and our destruction of the status quo, by eliminating Saddam Hussein, it may be that we have opened a whole new breeding ground for, and encouraged, these individuals to learn how to operate successfully and conduct terrorist operations.

Iraq thus appears to be involved in a civil war of Sunnis versus Shiites, with Kurds protecting their interests, and some outsiders conducting guerilla terrorist operations aimed at fomenting unrest and driving the U.S. forces out. We cannot be involved in a “war on terror” here because there are at least four separate parties here, and it isn’t always clear who is doing what to hurt or kill whom.

• A third arena whom we are not fighting is North Korea, a dictatorship that is working to build an atomic bomb capability. This country is a military threat to South Korea because it possesses a huge standing army of more than a million soldiers. It is a country with a well-defined government, not a loosely organized group of individuals. We have not declared war on them, nor have they declared war on the U.S. But for some reason, at times, they have been included in this “war on terror.”

• A fourth arena that is also sometimes referred to under the mantra of “war on terror” is Iran. Iran is the largest country in the Middle East, with a government that is primarily run by its religious right. They may provide a place for Al Qaeda and other groups which dislike the U.S. for various reasons to develop and train members. We are not at war with Iran, and they are not at war with us. But, for some reason, they also have been lumped into this “war on terror”.

• There are other places in the world, such as South America and the Philippines, that have been also lumped into this “war on terror”, but, again, we have not declared war on them nor have they declared war on the U.S. Numerous groups, some of which hate the U.S. and some involved in insurgencies against their existing government, have the earmarks of “terrorists” in that they conduct underground operations, kill people indiscriminately, have loose organizations, may or may not be linked to other similar organizations.

• In general, it is also important to separate different types of terrorists (a very maligned word) into specific and different groups. For example, Basque separatists, in Spain, commit what we would call terrorist acts. So do the Tamil Tigers in northern Sri Lanka. They can both be called “terrorists.” Please note that, although these groups commit acts that seem to be terrorist acts, such as blowing up bombs in public places and killed innocent civilians, both of these groups are internal in their countries and act much as if they were engaged in a civil war against their existing government.

• So we are not at war with all of the groups I’ve mentioned. We couldn’t be. Many of them have no government for us to declare war on. It is sloppy use of communication to say that we are engaged in a “war on terror” when we really need to understand that there are many such groups around the world, each separate and different, each requiring different tactics, each posing a different type of threat (in some cases, no threat) to our country.

Please remember that next time you hear these words. If you understand what has been said here, you will be able to determine how absurd such a claim is (“war on terror”) and look at what the person saying these words is really trying to do. He or she may be trying to scare you so you don’t think clearly; he or she may be pushing an agenda to take rights away from you; he or she may be saying such words to get elected again; or to be considered “patriotic” or “strong” or “effective”. Always listen to the words and match them to the actions. The outcome may surprise you and open your eyes to what is actually going on.

Who's side would that be?

I'm on MY side.

Here's what concerns me. From an interview with the co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, Thomas Kean

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2006/06/_kean_on_swift.html

Kean said that when he was briefed by the Treasury Department on the program, "I was told very few people knew about this facility," which provides transaction processing services for over 7,000 financial organizations located in 194 countries worldwide.

"I was told that very few financial houses in this country knew about it; it was not well known even by people in banking," Kean said. "The terrorists didn't know the financial transactions went through this one group. Treasury told me, this was a method of financial tracking that people didn't understand, that nobody knew this was how things were done. Top-notch people in the US didn't even know."

"The second thing is that it took a long time to get this program set up. SWIFT is not US-controlled; we had to persuade them to cooperate, convince them that this was so important to the war on terrorism. It was a great coup when all these other countries agreed to go along."

So for even those terrorists who might know of SWIFT, "the idea of the U.S. and CIA having a tap into it is something people would find impossible to believe."

If terrorists actually didn't know that the financial transactions were going through SWIFT, and now they do, could they change the way they conduct transactions so that it doesn't go through SWIFT?

I figured I'd ask this here since Larry knows about banking.

I'm also a bit curious why the chairmen of the 9/11 commission and John Murtha were against the publishing of this, if it actually doesn't threaten national security.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR2006062701708.html

Keller said he spent more than an hour in late May listening to Treasury Secretary John Snow argue against publication of the story. He said that he also got a call from Negroponte, the national intelligence czar, and that three former officials also made the case to Times editors: Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, chairmen of the 9/11 commission, and Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania -- an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq.

Kean and Hamilton knew about t