Do you think that people who are Internet-savvy, know how to manipulate the media, and have been successful in planning and executing massive attacks are too dumb to figure out that making a financial transfer won’t be monitored?

Peter, just look at what the story itself said:

The Swift data has provided clues to money trails and ties between possible terrorists and groups financing them, the officials said. In some instances, they said, the program has pointed them to new suspects, while in others it has buttressed cases already under investigation.

Among the successes was the capture of a Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort, several officials said. The Swift data identified a previously unknown figure in Southeast Asia who had financial dealings with a person suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they said.

In the United States, the program has provided financial data in investigations into possible domestic terrorist cells as well as inquiries of Islamic charities with suspected of having links to extremists, the officials said.

The data also helped identify a Brooklyn man who was convicted on terrorism-related charges last year, the officials said. The man, Uzair Paracha, who worked at a New York import business, aided a Qaeda operative in Pakistan by agreeing to launder $200,000 through a Karachi bank, prosecutors said.

In terrorism prosecutions, intelligence officials have been careful to “sanitize,” or hide the origins of evidence collected through the program to keep it secret, officials said.

So whether it’s because they’re dumb or sloppy or something else, the program had been working. Your implication is it was ultimately harmless, because no terrorist could ever be so foolish as to get caught in it. Obviously, some have.

Anyone with a familiarity with the banking system knows their transactions could be monitored, just as you say. That doesn’t mean they think all transactions will be monitored, and when you try something a few times on a small scale, and nothing seems to happen, it’s easy to think you’ve found a weakness in the system. That’s probably why prosecutors have worked to hide the origin of their evidence, lest those terrorists find out the perceived weakness was not so weak. But now they all know, and we can thank these newspapers for that.

As for victims: it’s a little difficult to identify victims when the scope and nature of the plans are secret. As noted above, I don’t think that the existence of victims (if any) is part of the reason why this story is newsworthy and in the public interest. The press’s zealotry (if that’s what it is) is justified for other reasons.

I see the presses role as defending the indivudual who is a victim of this ‘zealousness’. If the press could give me a name of a victim and tell me how their specific rights were taken away, they would be on firmer footing. Their work assumes that there will be a victim-

Just as their work, pre-Iraq war, assumed that there were wmd’s in Iraq.

Moreover, “the notion that terrorists could be allowed to use the financial system, without understanding the extent to which they are monitored” is ludicrous. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of how banks work would know that any deposit, withdrawal, or transfer could be monitored. Al Qaeda isn’t the Keystone Kops: they are patient, savvy, and by no means stupid. Do you think that people who are Internet-savvy, know how to manipulate the media, and have been successful in planning and executing massive attacks are too dumb to figure out that making a financial transfer won’t be monitored? To borrow a quote, the idea that the Times piece somehow alerted Al Qaeda to something they didn’t know is an “absurdity too gross to be insisted upon.” The administration told them everything they needed to know long ago.

The suggestion that the Times did this to “hurt Bush” is equally silly. If you wanted to print a story attacking Bush, you wouldn’t write a piece about how the administration is fighting terrorism by tracking financial assets. Would you suggest that the Journal also is trying to hurt Bush by putting the story on its front page?

The story is newsworthy in that it confirms that the administration is doing what it says (if anything, it’s a pro-Bush piece), as well as because there are privacy and legal issues which ought to be discussed in a public forum. Moreover, the American people have the right to know what their government is doing, and the press has the obligation to report it. The limit of press responsibility starts at the point where the publication of a story poses an imminent threat or vulnerability which outweighs the public’s right to know, such as the location of troops or a diagram for building a nuclear weapon. By any definition, this story fails to meet that criterion.