White House goes on attack

The key thing about the infamous New York Times scoop that’s drawn the theatrical wrath of the Bush administration is the last thing you’ll hear from the newspaper’s embattled editors: how little real news it contained. Nobody who’s paying attention could be surprised that U.S. agents monitor international money transfers. Bush has been patting himself on the back about it for years.

The June 28 edition of MSNBC’s “Countdown” led with several video clips of Bush touting U.S. plans for cutting al Qaeda’s cash flow. On Sept. 24, 2001, while the rubble of the World Trade Center was still smoking, Bush announced, “We’ve established a foreign terrorist asset-tracking center at the Department of the Treasury to identify and investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks.”

A veritable barrage of White House press releases has chronicled the government’s work with NATO and international agencies like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to combat money laundering and terrorism. The subject of the Times report, SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), a Belgian consortium that coordinates commerce among 7,800 banks, has been discussed in congressional hearings and U.N. reports since 2002.

The Times’ article concerned not operational details, but worry among some officials that the United States might be casting its net too wide, although it concluded the government was doing nothing illegal. So did same-day stories in the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. In short, the information was of marginal interest to anybody but specialists in international finance.

So how dumb would a terrorist have to be not to know U.S. spies monitor international money transfers? Maybe dumb enough to fall for the White House’s demagogic attack on The New York Times (but not, oddly, The Wall Street Journal or Los Angeles Times) as a left-wing newspaper so consumed with hatred for Bush that it would risk catastrophe to embarrass him.

The New York Times arrogant? Goodness, yes. Condescending, too.

But left wing? Well, the Times, along with the Washington Post, led the 2000 “War on Gore” that basically gave Bush the presidency. Then-columnist and now executive editor Bill Keller actually quoted his 3-year-old daughter’s opinion that the Democratic nominee was a stiff.

After Sept. 11, the Times, along with the rest of the newspaper consortium, buried its finding that had all the legal votes in Florida been counted in 2000, Al Gore would have been president.

Lest we forget, it was reporter Judith Miller’s series of leaked, single-source “exclusives” touting Saddam Hussein’s imaginary nuclear weapons, accompanied by TV appearances by Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney carefully coordinated with Times publication dates, that helped stampede the nation to war. Columnist Keller thought invading Iraq was a terrific idea.

Now the Bush White House, desperate to prevail in 2006 congressional elections, has taken up the cry. Reasonable people never want to believe extremists believe their own rhetoric. But quit kidding yourselves. We’re witnessing mass psychosis. The next terrorist strike, should it happen, will be blamed on the enemy within: treasonous “liberals” who dissent from the glorious reign of George W. Bush.

Unless confronted, it’s through such strategems that democracies fail and constitutional republics become dictatorships.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].