Terrorism and bank records

I wonder how the Republican's core constituency of wealthy, white men, who have the financial wherewithal to employ accountants, utilize tax-shelters and perhaps hold off-shore bank accounts, I wonder how this group is going to react to the idea of the federal government having a database containing all financial records of the world banking industry. Might make a few nervous, especially if a few years from now, the IRS or the Treasury Department gets to browse this database too. I bet they are less sanguine about it than Diamond-Dick Cheney professes to be.

World's banks let U.S. plumb books

In response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Treasury Department sought to enlist a reluctant ally. The world's banking industry long had been loath to give up data on its customers, so U.S. investigators issued a subpoena for just a narrow slice of information from a worldwide financial consortium.

The reply stunned Treasury officials.

The consortium couldn't extract the bits of data U.S. terrorism analysts were looking for; instead, it offered something far more generous.

“They said, `We'll give you all the data,'” Treasury Secretary John Snow said Friday during a news conference in which he defended the program of reviewing confidential information on money transfers.

And just like that, intelligence teams that once had to scrape for scraps of data from individual banks were given keys to the international banking kingdom--access to a vast database of detailed records on billions of bank-to-bank transfers worldwide.

...
But the enthusiasm for cooperating had limits. Two years into the program Snow referred to as the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, the banks were getting increasingly antsy.

“In 2003, [they] began to ask the question of how long this would go on,” said a former senior government official familiar with the program who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Treasury Department had repeatedly sought to assure SWIFT that the records were being searched only for terrorist-related clues. But SWIFT executives “made the point that oral assurances were no longer enough,” the ex-official said.
...
But nearly five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the program continues, and each month the Treasury Department issues a new subpoena to SWIFT under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. That produced the most expansive database on international financial transactions the U.S. has ever possessed.

So, seems like a perfect time to change the subject, and find some terrorists somewhere to hopefully distract the nation:

Chicago Tribune - Terrorism and Bank Records:

While [Al the Pal] Gonzales and other officials heralded the arrests as a win for proactive law enforcement, there also were signs that the timing and content of the announcement was calibrated for maximum political benefit.

The announcement of the arrests eclipsed reports by major newspapers that the government was secretly tapping a database of confidential international bank transactions in order to track terrorist financing. Unlike many other anti-terrorism surveillance measures, the clandestine monitoring program is controversial because it is not overseen by a judge.

At the same time, Republicans in recent days have renewed their embrace of national security as an issue to emphasize in midterm congressional elections this fall.

and on the same subject:

Muslim leaders on Friday denounced the seven men arrested in Florida as members of a religious cult and implored the media not to refer to them as Muslims.
...
The media may be reluctant to say the individuals are not Muslim because the media might be seen as “watering down the fight against terrorism,” Rehab said.

“That should not be the case,” he said. “We should step up and fight these individuals without having to pull Islam as a religion, and Muslims as a people, [into] the struggle.”

Abdul Malik Mujahid, chair of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, agreed that the descriptions of the group's faith did not sound like Islam.

“They were reading the Bible, not the Koran. They called their place of worship a temple instead of `mosque.' These are not things that Muslims do,” said Mujahid. “So associating them with Islam and Muslims, I think, is not only factually wrong, but will continue to contribute to Islamophobia, which is a form of racism.”

The idea of the group targeting the Sears Tower is ironic, Mujahid said, as the building was designed by Muslim architect Fazlur Khan.

Yeah, good luck with that. These nutjobs will be called Muslim because that is easier for the national press scribes to type. Facts are not really important after all, sometimes they can be dangerous things.

Tags: privacy, /Rethuglicans, /terrorism