Finding terrorists by following bank transactions have been known

for a long time. I don't get it. What did the NY Times do that was "treasonous"? I thought it was common knowledge. How stupid do the WH think we are? How braindead is the MM? Again, I know that this is going on, who doesn't?

It must be somewhat of an easy game in the white house. What are we going to do to today to fire up our mindless drone base? The number one criteria, amusement for rove.

Why did it take so long for the WH to become so irate over it? It's clearly been done to whip up repugs into a frenzy and further deepen the chasm between the people of this country. When we're all so busy fighting each other, they win.

all that drug money in the usa i wonder how that is laundered...

if they were following financial transactions, I'd have said yes. "Bank transactions"? Still yes. But that doesn't mean "all financial transactions" would be followed, or accessible.

If you asked me which ones, I'd have said anything over $3k transferred inside the US, and sent overseas. I'd have said that they might have been following specific transactions, or transactions involving specific accounts in specific countries. I assumed they were monitoring (as best they could) informal networks, and specific paths.

I wouldn't have said they had nearly unlimited access to SWIFT (I ran across SWIFT years ago when I needed to wire money abroad). If you had said they did, I'd have said 'maybe, but I doubt it'. And I'd have been admitting that maybe they'd be able to easily get permission to check on who got the money I had wired from Paris to Karachi. Or perhaps sent from Houston to Paris, and then forwarded to Karachi through Istanbul by way of Hong Kong. But having access to nearly the entire dataset? I'd have laughed at you.

Having access to the SWIFT data would enable them to show many transfers originating from one person or all arriving in one account or addressed to one person, even if they were routinely routed through intermediaries--information you wouldn't easily or quickly get by tracking one person's money transfers. All kinds of patterns could be pulled out; one bit of additional information would allow you to pick out one for further examination. Could be dangerous information, whether for innocents or for nasties. But the SWIFT data was a week or two old by the time they got it.

In the case of Western Union (something I thought monitoring WU more likely than monitoring SWIFT), they got nearly real-time data. The surprising thing there is the "nearly real-time". Smaller sums, but usually more time-sensitive, I'd imagine.

Like you, I thought, yeah sure, follow the terrorist money. Of course they would be doing that. It makes sense.

My guess is that their outrage is because they know SOMETHING ELSE IS GOING TO BE REVEALED asap. This is the set-up for when for whatever the NYT is going to print NEXT WEEK.

JMHO

real question is if the MSM will pick it up.

I seem to recall, that it was reported by our gov't, that the UAE had funded portions of the 9/11 attack and that this funding was traced through bank transactions. Am I wrong here? Wouldn't that mean that this sort of tracking of terrorists is already out in the open?

Like the telephone wiretaps that Bush first claimed were Us to foreign countrys only, then we find out tens of millions of calls from American citizens to their parents, doctors, places of employment were tapped.
Then the program suddenly was renamed the terrorist surveillance program...

Bush jumped on the Times with both feet because he has been caught FUCKING the constitution once more and he has to distract the gaze of the public.

can you believe it?
I mean, I can't believe the terrorists would ever think in a thousand millon billion years that their phone calls (or bank transactions) weren't secure or were being monitored.

from Bush remarks of September 24, 2001:


But those damn 'librul news outfits went and spoiled the whole thing!

will become the ACCEPTED storyline by most broadcast media.

Why can't they just do their jobs?

wiretapping stuff, I think a lot of people realize that when the government says they're only spying on a few international terrorists, it means they're probably really spying on all of us. Terrorists would certainly expect their activities might be scrutinized, unless they're pretty dense. Your average law-abiding citizen might not have suspected such a thing -- a year ago.

If the terrorists are actually using money transfers that can be traced and investigated, without any laundering, then they are far too stupid to be feared.

So, the bank records their using would be apropos of nothing, since those funds, if the terrorist organizations have a brain in their collective head, they would be laundering the money 10 different ways. Tracking bank records would lead you on tens of thousands of fruitless routes of investigation, meaning we'd learn nothing anyway.

So, it's fundamentally stupid to pursue terrorists this way.
The Professor

out that transactions were being monitored and were using different methods. So, my question still remains, Is the public in general this fucking stupid, that they are going to buy into, yet another tale spun by the Bush Administration?

It makes me so sick to watch the news, I am slowly losing interest. 1st of all, they report dumb shit like this and they do it incompletely. 2nd No matter what this administration seems to do, no matter how outrageous, it seems to fly. It truly makes me sick, sick sick!

The WH just chose to go after NY Times??? Why? Is is something to fire up their base as been reported?