Remarks by the Vice President at a Luncheon for Congressional Candidate Adrian Smith June 27, 2006....The second program that The New York Times has now disclosed is the terrorist financial tracking program, just within about the last week or so....... ....The New York Times has now made it more difficult for us to prevent attacks in the future. Publishing this highly classified information about our sources and methods for collecting intelligence will enable the terrorists to look for ways to defeat our efforts. These kinds of stories also adversely affect our relationships with people who work with us against the terrorists. In the future, they will be less likely to cooperate if they think the United States is incapable of keeping a secret. What is doubly disturbing for me is that not only have they gone forward with these stories, but they've been rewarded for it, for example, in the case of the terrorist surveillance program, by being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalism. I think that is a disgrace.

Authorities trying to track money back to bin Laden But crucial financial trail could lead to dead end, anti-terror experts say TERRORISM STRIKES AMERICA THE RESPONSE Sun, The (Baltimore, MD) September 21, 2001......Funding on that scale would not necessarily have required large international bank transfers of the kind often seen in cases involving drug cartels or corrupt regimes. That could limit the ability of the National Security Agency to follow the money through its electronic intercepts of such transactions, which are carried out by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), headquartered in Belgium.........

From .pdf page 11:

30. New emphasis is also being placed by several major banking countries on Financial Action Task Force (FATF) special recommendation VII (see annex IV), which relates to wire transfers. FATF has issued a new proposal for an interpretive note to ensure that basic information identifying the originator of fund transfers is obtained and preserved by banks and intermediaries, and that such information is made rapidly available to law enforcement and other appropriate authorities for the purpose of investigating, prosecuting and tracing the assets of terrorists or other criminals. The Group would like to see the FATF proposal for an interpretive note quickly adopted and implemented by all countries and banking jurisdictions.

31. 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.

Obviously, everyone, (including the Baltimore Sun's loyal, al Qaeda readership) but the right wing chorus, knows and has known to avoid conducting financial transactions that are processed via SWIFT, Fedwire, or CHIPS systems.

The NY Times reporting that is substantive is that the Bush administration continued to broadly mine the data on the SWIFT computers, in spite of the fact that the U.S. administration must have been aware that al Qaeda knew to avoid conducting financial transactions that passed through those clearing systems for the last five years.

The right wing "blowback" is intended to distract from the obvious question, who are the actual intended targets of five years of warrantless, or of vaguely documented warrented data mining of international financial transactions by the U.S. government?

When will the "feelings" based, politcal support for the administration not only become aware that it is being used, but grow to resent it?