Not Too Swift

Via Glenn Greenwald: Bryan Bender writes in today’s Boston Globe that, um, the program to track terrorists through financial transactions, was not exactly a secret secret.

News reports disclosing the Bush administration’s use of a special bank surveillance program to track terrorist financing spurred outrage in the White House and on Capitol Hill, but some specialists pointed out yesterday that the government itself has publicly discussed its stepped-up efforts to monitor terrorist finances since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks….

…a search of public records — government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 — describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.

“There have been public references to SWIFT before,” said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. “The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before.”

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. “A lot of people were aware that this was going on,” said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.

“Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume” their transactions were being monitored, Comras said of terrorist groups. “We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing.”

Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. The system, which handles trillions of dollars in worldwide transactions each day, serves as a main hub for banks and other financial institutions that move money around the world. According to The New York Times, SWIFT executives agreed to give the Treasury Department and the CIA broad access to its database.

I can hear the righties now — the UN Security Council are traitors, too.

Dan Froomkin tells more:

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the international banking cooperative that quietly allowed the Treasury Department and the CIA to examine hundreds of thousands of private banking records from around the world.

But the existence of SWIFT itself has not exactly been a secret. Certainly not to anyone who had an Internet connection.

SWIFT has a Web site, at swift.com .

It’s a very informative Web site. For instance, this page describes how “SWIFT has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and appropriate international organisations, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), in their efforts to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities.”

(And yes, FATF has its own Web site, too.)

Yet yesterday press secretary Tony Snow said he was “absolutely sure” terrorists didn’t know about SWIFT. Sure.

As explained by Ron Suskind on Monday’s Hardball, some time back terrorist organizations deducted that their financial transactions were giving them away.

MATTHEWS: Well let me just tell you what you said. “Eventually not surprisingly,” and we‘re talking about electronic transfer surveillance, “our opponents figured it out. It was a matter really of deduction. Enough people got caught and a view of which activities had in common provides clues as to how they may have been identified and apprehended. We were surprised it took so long,” said one intelligence official.

So in other words, the bad guys figured out how we were catching them.

SUSKIND: Right, it‘s a process of deduction. After a while, you catch enough of them, they‘re not idiots. They say, “Well, we can‘t do the things we were doing.” They‘re not leaving electronic trails like they were.

Matthews was quoting from page 279 of Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Solution. If you start reading on the previous page, you see that Suskind was writing about all manner of “electronically traceable activities — from satellite phone calls to bank account withdrawals.”

And that’s largely how we managed, from early 2002 to late 2003, to know a great deal about al Qaeda, get a sense of who was connected to whom, and capture quite a few suspects, most of whom have vanished into overseas U.S. prisons or similar, maybe worse destinations inside Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Egypt. …

Eventually, and not surprisingly, our opponents figured it out. It was a matter, really, of deduction. Enough people get caught and a view of which activities they had in common provides clues as to how they have have been identified and apprehended.

“We were surprised it took them so long,” said one senior intelligence official. …

…The al Qaeda playbook, employed by what was left of the network, its affiliates and imitators, started to stress the necessity of using couriers to carry cash and hand-delivered letters. This slows the pace of operations, if not necessarily their scale, and that was, indeed, a victory. …

Incarnations of terror cells, meanwhile, were taking shape. Stealthy, diffuse, and largely unconnected to a centralized network, these were self-activated, often self-funded, and ready to download key operational guidance from an explosion of jihadist Web sites. There was no money to trace; no calls up and down the chain of command they needed to make

There’s been some speculation about why the White House doesn’t seem interested in going after who in government leaked the program to the New York Times. Maybe it’s because there was no leaker.

Yet the pile-on continues. The Hill reports that House Republicans leaders are expected to introduce a resolution condemning the New York Times for “leaking” information about the SWIFT program. Howie Kurtz concedes

President Bush calls the conduct of the New York Times “disgraceful.” Vice President Cheney objects to the paper having won a Pulitzer Prize. A Republican congressman wants the Times prosecuted. National Review says its press credentials should be yanked. Radio commentator Tammy Bruce likens the paper to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Even by modern standards of media-bashing, the volume of vitriol being heaped upon the editors on Manhattan’s West 43rd Street is remarkable — especially considering that the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal also published accounts Friday of a secret administration program to monitor the financial transactions of terror suspects. So, in its later editions, did The Washington Post.

That’s because this isn’t about national security. It’s about politics. Republicans are out to smear everybody who stands still long enough to get smeared in order to deflect public dissatisfaction away from themselves. And if GOP party operatives plus the usual useful idiots like Tammy Bruce keep repeating the story that media is the enemy, that will make future propaganda efforts sooo much easier. Although it’s not as if media were getting in the way of the propaganda catapults up to now.

Stars in Their Courses

I got into a disagreement with someone yesterday in a TAPPED comment thread on the matter of astrology. Astrology is in the blog buzz these days because someone discovered Jerome Armstrong once practiced political astrology (or still does, but is keeping quiet about it). A rumor that Jerome also used astrology to choose stocks is making the rounds, but this may not be accurate.

Billmon writes,

Not content with picking through Jerome Armstrong’s dirty laundry at the SEC — at a time when he is expressly forbidden from talking about the case — the werebunnies of Right Blogistan and TNR (is there a difference any more?) plus Mickey Kaus, who flunked out of wererabbit basic training, are having themselves a gay old time making fun of Jerome’s interest in astrology, which I gather he has used in the past to pick stocks, or forecast political trends, or both — I’m not clear.

Nor do I particularly want to be. I’m very familiar with the practice of forecasting financial price trends based on charts of what are essentially random numerical patterns. But on Wall Street they call this “technical analysis,” and they pay thousands of guys millions of dollars to practice the art — even though any number of scientific studies have shown that it works about as well as astrology. (If it did work, the technical traders would own the world by now.) So irrational behavior by an ex-stock picker doesn’t seem like much of a scoop to me.

Like I told the commenter at TAPPED, I don’t see the scandal. Practicing astrology may be stupid, or delusional, or crazy, or a great many other adjectives, but by itself I don’t consider it unethical. If, hypothetically, someone were selling financial advice and telling his clients that the advice was based on in-depth analysis of profits or discounted cash flow or some such, but he was really using astrology, that would be unethical. But if he’s upfront about the astrology thing, what the hell. You pay your money and you take your chances. I’ve heard of people who successfully choose stocks by taping the newspaper stock market section to a corkboard and throwing darts at it.

Once upon a time I couldn’t stand to hear anyone talk about astrology without jumping in and proclaiming how dumb it is. But now I am older and either wiser or more demented; take your pick. I have cleared my head of opinions and judgments. If someone tells me he decided not to take a plane flight because there was a Grand Cross over the airport at the time of departure, I no longer feel an urge to lecture him on his credulity. Likewise, if someone tells me he thinks astrology is bunk, that’s fine with me. Whatever.

I’ve never seen empirical evidence that astrology forecasts specific events, like plane crashes or election results, any better than flipping coins or throwing darts. But I’ve known a few people who were deeply into astrology and who were brilliant at using it to predict general trends. In these cases, I suspect the astrologer (consciously or not) uses star charts to jog intuition. In other words, interpreting star patterns might be helping the astrologer access something he already knows, or believes, at some sub-cognitive level.

Knowing something without knowing you know it isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound. Maybe you’ve had the experience of reading a book or hearing a lecture, when something you read or hear causes an understanding, or realization, to pop into the forefront of your brain. And you recognize that this little eureka had been in your head for a while, but it had been a fuzzy thing dangling at the edge of cognition that you’d overlooked. It took someone else’s words to give it clarity and bring it to your full attention.

Another example: These days we nearly always use the word myth as a synonym for fallacy, but myths, it is argued, can be interpreted allegorically as windows to the psyche, or guides to truths that defy articulation. “For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious,” Thomas Mann said. Dismissing myths because they aren’t historically or literally true misses the point of them.

I’ve come to appreciate that literalness and truth are not at all the same thing, but I’ve yet to be able to explain why that’s so to someone who doesn’t already get it. The ability to realize truth outside of language or conceptual knowledge seems to come naturally to some people but baffles others, possibly depending on how their brains are wired.

Back to astrology — does “believing in” astrology require believing that events here on earth are caused by the alignments of planets and stars many light years away? I don’t think so, but then just because something isn’t literally true doesn’t make it worthless. If interpreting a star chart — or reading tea leaves, or chicken bones, or the I Ching — causes someone to access depths of intuition he couldn’t get to otherwise, I say there’s some value in that.

And if all of this leaves you cold, that’s fine, but you don’t have to get hostile about it. Think of it as a harmless quirk, like saving gum wrappers or eating eggs with ketchup.

This forecast posted in December 2002 was linked to by Garance Franke-Ruta as a shocking example — she called it “Armstrong’s analysis of the causes of 9-11.” However, it’s not about the causes of 9/11. Rather, it’s about the subconscious impulses driving people, mostly President Bush, in a particular direction. The section subtitled “Bush, Republicans, and Varuna” proved to be accurate in many ways. However, I don’t believe it says anything that people weren’t already suspecting in December 2002 without using astrology. And whatever was going on with Pluto and Bush’s south node doesn’t seem to have tripped him up in the 2004 election.

On the other hand, these predictions for likely Democratic presidential candidates, also made in December 2002 by another astrologer, are pretty darn close — well, except for the Kerry section — and I don’t think these predictions could have been constructed from conventional wisdom in December 2002. This is either one amazing astrologer, or she opened the file last year and re-wrote the predictions. I can’t tell. But if this really is what the lady predicted in 2002, look for John Edwards to be a factor in 2008.