What Happened To Accountability?

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What Happened To Accountability?
By Clarence Page
7/3/2006

I think President Bush does protest a bit too much about the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal’s exposure of his administration’s secret money-tracking program. Bush called it "disgraceful" that the newspapers reported that Treasury Department officials acquired access to the world’s largest international financial database, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, commonly known as SWIFT, after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called for criminal prosecution of the New York Times, whose actions he called "treasonous." But if people think al-Qaida did not know before this story broke that the United States was combing through international banking transactions to follow terrorists’ money supplies, they haven’t been paying much attention to the news.

Less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill pledged to Congress that his department would do nothing less. "The Treasury Department will use every tool we have at our disposal to shut down terrorist fund-raising and dismantle their organizations one dollar at a time."

What’s really new and troubling about these stories is not the secret money probes but how much of it the Bush administration has zealously kept secret from the courts and Congress. Instead of seeking individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, Treasury officials have bypassed the courts to rely instead on broad administrative subpoenas. Some banking and government officials expressed reservations that what began as an urgent, temporary measure without specific congressional approval or formal authorization showed no signs of changing five years later.

Bush said that members of Congress had been briefed in advance on the program, which is true. But some, including Rep. Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said she and many of her colleagues on the panel were briefed by Treasury officials only after the administration learned it would be exposed in the press. That’s the same press that the president called "disgraceful." Yet, with the courts bypassed and Congress kept in the dark, what’s left to hold government accountable in circumstances like this but the press?

Since President Richard Nixon declined to press charges against the New York Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers that revealed the bounty of lies that got us into the Vietnam quagmire, I doubt that the Bush administration will take that step. But, then, Nixon didn’t have today’s echo chamber of conservative commentators to help him distract the public from his coverups.

Bush would rather distract us from the larger story lurking here, which is the return of Total Information Awareness, a massive databank operated by a Pentagon agency to monitor any check-card purchase, bank transaction, medical bill and other electronic transaction in America. Congress took away that program’s funds in 2003 amid public alarm about the dangers it posed to privacy rights. But its research funding continued.

The National Journal reported that Team Bush broke up the program and moved part of it to the National Security Agency, operating it under new names and new secrecy. Instead of making its case to Congress, the courts and the public, Team Bush is treating accountability like one more threat to national security.