Political Skullduggery

The CIA/Treasury program that gained access to international money transfer records--which was portrayed in initial reports as "limited"--turns out to have involved the U.S. receiving "all the data" from the European-based consortium.

Administration officials tacitly acknowledged that the information at their disposal is even greater than the initial press reports about the program indicated.

According to Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, when the administration first requested information from SWIFT after Sept. 11, in subpoenas that were fairly narrowly drafted , the consortium said it couldn't comply because it didn't have the ability to extract the particular information from its database.

"So they said, 'We'll give you all the data,' " Snow said, the idea being that federal agents would design methods of searching it. But he hastened to add that the data were handed over only on condition that strict safeguards would be implemented.

Under various bank secrecy laws passed by Congress over the past 35 years, U.S. banks are forbidden to hand over information about individual customers' accounts, unless government agents obtain a court-authorized subpoena in the course of an investigation.

One Republican Senator sees an interesting pattern here by the administration:

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he had sent letters on Friday to both Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales on the issue. While he declined to release the letters, he said he was concerned about the legal authority for the operation...

The senator said he was particularly troubled that the administration had expanded its Congressional briefings on the financial tracking program in recent weeks after having learned that The New York Times was making inquiries.

"Why does it take a newspaper investigation to get them to comply with the law?" the senator asked. "That's a big, important point."