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Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials. The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database. Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said. The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview on Thursday. The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records. The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift. That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues....
Bush Condemns Terror Finance Report in Times President Bush on Monday sharply condemned the disclosure of a program to secretly monitor the financial transactions of suspected terrorists. ''The disclosure of this program is disgraceful,'' he said. ''For people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America,'' Bush said, jabbing his finger for emphasis. He said the disclosure of the program ''makes it harder to win this war on terror.'' The program has been going on since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It was disclosed last week by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. Using broad government subpoenas, the program allows U.S. counterterrorism analysts to obtain financial information from a vast database maintained by a company based in Belgium. It routes about 11 million financial transactions daily among 7,800 banks and other financial institutions in 200 countries. ''Congress was briefed and what we did was fully authorized under the law,'' Bush said, talking with reporters in the Roosevelt Room after meeting with groups that support U.S. troops in Iraq. ''We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America,'' the president said. ''What we were doing was the right thing.''....
GOP bill targets NY Times House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records. The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation. The resolution comes as Republicans from the president on down condemn media organizations for reporting on the secret government program that tracked financial records overseas through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international banking cooperative. Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), working independently from his leadership, began circulating a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) during a late series of votes yesterday asking his leaders to revoke the Times’s congressional press credentials. The Standing Committee decides which organizations and reporters can be accredited, according to the rules of both the House and Senate press galleries. Members of that committee are elected by accredited members of those galleries....
Damage Study Urged on Surveillance Reports Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, asked the director of national intelligence on Tuesday to assess any damage to American counterterrorism efforts caused by the disclosure of secret programs to monitor telephone calls and financial transactions. Mr. Roberts, Republican of Kansas, singled out The New York Times for an article last week that reported that the government was tracking money transfers handled by a banking consortium based in Belgium. The targeting of the financial data, which includes some Americans' transactions, was also reported Thursday by The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. In his letter to John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, Mr. Roberts wrote that "we have been unable to persuade the media to act responsibly and to protect the means by which we protect this nation." He asked for a formal evaluation of damage to intelligence collection resulting from the revelation of the secret financial monitoring as well as The Times's disclosure in December of the National Security Agency's monitoring of phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans suspected of having links to Al Qaeda. In London, meanwhile, a human rights group said Tuesday that it had filed complaints in 32 countries alleging that the banking consortium, known as Swift, violated European and Asian privacy laws by giving the United States access to its data....
Bush's Use of Authority Riles Senator Senators on the Judiciary Committee accused President Bush of an "unprecedented" and "astonishing" power grab on Tuesday for making use of a device that gave him the authority to revise or ignore more than 750 laws enacted since he became president. By using what are known as signing statements, memorandums issued with legislation as he signs it, the president has reserved the right to not enforce any laws he thinks violate the Constitution or national security, or that impair foreign relations. A lawyer for the White House said that Mr. Bush was only doing his duty to uphold the Constitution. But Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, characterized the president's actions as a declaration that he "will do as he pleases," without regard to the laws passed by Congress. "There's a real issue here as to whether the president may, in effect, cherry-pick the provisions he likes and exclude the ones he doesn't like," Mr. Specter said at a hearing. "Wouldn't it be better, as a matter of comity," he said, "for the president to have come to the Congress and said, 'I'd like to have this in the bill; I'd like to have these exceptions in the bill,' so that we could have considered that?" Mr. Specter and others are particularly upset that Mr. Bush reserved the right to interpret the torture ban passed overwhelmingly by Congress, as well as Congressional oversight powers in the renewal of the Patriot Act....
Court Review of Wiretaps May Be Near, Senator Says Senator Arlen Specter said Sunday that the White House and Congress were close to reaching a resolution on submitting a National Security Agency wiretap program to judicial review. "I think there is an inclination to have it submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and that would be a big step forward for protection of constitutional rights and civil liberties," Mr. Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday." President Bush and his top advisers have resisted calls for formal legal oversight of the program under which the N.S.A. listens in on phone calls and reads e-mail messages to and from Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes may be linked to terrorists. Only those communications into and out of the country are monitored, administration officials say. Until late 2001, the security agency focused only on the foreign end of such conversations; if the agency decided that someone in the United States was of intelligence interest, it was supposed to get a warrant from the intelligence surveillance court. Now such warrants are sought only for communications between two people in the United States. Revelations about that program have incited debate in Congress and beyond about the president's constitutional authority to order the wiretaps, and lawsuits have been filed against the government and phone companies....
Top Court Upholds No-Knock Police Search The Supreme Court made it easier Thursday for police to barge into homes and seize evidence without knocking or waiting, a sign of the court's new conservatism with Samuel Alito on board. The court, on a 5-4 vote, said judges cannot throw out evidence collected by police who have search warrants but do not properly announce their arrival. It was a significant rollback of earlier rulings protective of homeowners, even unsympathetic homeowners like Booker Hudson, who had a loaded gun next to him and cocaine rocks in his pocket when Detroit police entered his unlocked home in 1998 without knocking. The court's five-member conservative majority, anchored by new Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito, said that police blunders should not result in "a get-out-of-jail-free card" for defendants. Dissenting justices predicted that police will now feel free to ignore previous court rulings requiring officers with search warrants to knock and announce themselves to avoid running afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches....
Hard Knocks With No-Knock Last week, a 5-4 majority led by Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that violation of the "knock-and announce" rule—a custom by which police serving a warrant knock on the suspect's door and wait some decent period of time (which in a previous case had been defined as 15 to 20 seconds)—does not require suppression of evidence found in a search. In the case, police searching for drugs and firearms at the home of suspect Booker T. Hudson announced themselves outside Hudson's home, did not knock, and failed to wait more than a few seconds before breaking down his door. They found drugs and a gun as described in the warrant, and the issue at hand was whether the failure to knock and wait was enough to invoke the "exclusionary rule," barring evidence obtained in an unconstitutional fashion. Scalia argues, and supporters of his decision agree, that there is no constitutional issue involved in the no-knock entry. In a glib editorial preemptively mocking "civil libertarians, especially those on the left," the New York Sun notes that the knock and announce rule is not written into the Fourth Amendment, or any other part of the U.S. Constitution. Instead, it is an English common-law practice dating back to the Middle Ages. (It has been part of federal statutory law since 1917.) The George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr finds no conflict between Scalia's alleged "originalism" and his Hudson decision. Does any of this make sense? If you presume that constitutionality is the full measure of your rights as an American citizen and a human being, maybe. But preserving the idea that American citizens are entitled to some dignity is about more than ruling out whatever wasn't specifically mentioned by the founding fathers. The idea that everybody is entitled to the presumption of innocence isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution either, but this concept underlies a range of customs and common law practices (most of which are also absent from the text of the Constitution) that have long been recognized as part of individual liberty. Presuming innocence doesn't mean everybody is innocent; it means authorities must err on the side of your rights as an American citizen....
Supreme Court Ruling on Police Raids Endangers Citizens Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in its 5-4 decision in the case of Hudson v. Michigan that when police conduct an illegal, no-knock raid, any evidence they seize in the raid can still be used against the suspect at trial, even though the raid was conducted illegally. I’ve spent the last year researching these types of volatile, highly-confrontational, paramilitary raids for a forthcoming report for the Cato Institute. The decision in Hudson is almost certain to lead to more illegal no-knock raids, more mistaken raids on innocent people, and more unnecessary deaths, both of civilians and of police officers. As recently as 1995, the Court ruled in the case of Wilson v. Arkansas that the centuries-old common law notion that police should announce themselves before entering a private home was engrained in the Fourth Amendment. That is, it is an inherent part of the Constitution. The Court issued this ruling unanimously, including votes by Justices Thomas and Scalia. In Hudson the Court didn’t overturn Wilson. The announcement requirement still exists. But the Court did take away the only realistic way of enforcing it, which is to punish police by barring evidence when they break it. In his opinion, Scalia argued that there are better ways to punish police who break the rule, such as suing them. But both the state of Michigan and the U.S. government both acknowledged in their briefs in the case that they couldn’t come up with a single case where such a lawsuit had been successful. In other words, with Hudson and Wilson, the Court has said not only is the requirement that police announce themselves before entering a private home law, it’s in the Constitution, the highest law in the land. Yet the Court has also said it’s not too concerned with enforcing that law. The Rule of Law is a value held dear by most conservatives. Conservatives tend to loathe the fact that we have laws on the books that go unenforced. And rightly so. Unenforced law undermines respect for the law and for the criminal justice process. Yet that’s exactly what has happened with Hudson....
FBI Erred Widely in Moussaoui Probe, Report Says The FBI's mistakes in the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui extended from headquarters officials who dismissed the threat posed by the al-Qaeda operative down to field agents and even a prominent FBI whistle-blower, according to a government report made public yesterday. The report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said "numerous systemic problems" within the bureau prevented the FBI from unraveling Moussaoui's role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror plot when he was arrested a month before the attacks. Moussaoui later became the only person charged in a U.S. courtroom in connection with the attacks. He was sentenced to life in prison last month. Fine concluded that senior FBI managers failed to move aggressively to gain a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings before Sept. 11. But unlike previous public criticisms of the FBI's bungling of the case -- which have focused on senior FBI managers in Washington -- Fine's analysis said there was plenty of blame to go around. The inspector general said former FBI lawyer Colleen Rowley, who gained fame as a whistle-blower when she pointed out the errors by headquarters, had failed to properly guide agents on what type of search warrant to seek. He said agents in Minneapolis, who have been hailed for warning supervisors about Moussaoui, rushed to open an intelligence investigation before realizing that they would need a criminal search warrant. The so-called "wall" that existed at the time between intelligence and criminal investigators has been blamed for the failure to examine Moussaoui's belongings until after Sept. 11. Ultimately, Fine concluded, no FBI policies or procedures were violated in the Moussaoui investigation....
A Busy School for Border Patrol in New Mexico Cadets must double up in dorms, and prefabricated temporary classrooms have sprouted almost everywhere. Scores of agents have been withdrawn from policing the border to serve as instructors. And next year, twice as many trainees as this year are expected to troop through the cramped quarters. All in all, the Border Patrol Academy here in the desert of southeastern New Mexico is bursting at the seams and bustling with activity as the agency strives to train enough cadets to fulfill President Bush's plan adding 6,000 agents by the end of 2008 as part of his border security program. Charles C. Whitmire, the acting chief of the academy, said Thursday at the conclusion of a two-day tour for the news media that the president's goal would be met. "The answer is absolutely," he said. Several of the cadets, a broad range of former members of the military and law enforcement agencies, recent college and high school graduates, and even a few former missionaries, said the physical training was the most difficult. The recruits hit the deck for endless push-ups, situps and other exercises, along with frequent runs in the heat of the desert, to get them in shape for border assignments in often hostile, dangerous terrain where an agent frequently patrols alone. On average, only 1 in 30 applicants ends up an agent....
Border agents return gunfire after smugglers shoot at vehicle U.S. Border Patrol agents attempting to stop a marijuana-laden SUV that entered the country illegally Wednesday got into a gunfight with the smugglers. At about 7 p.m., agents were notified that the camera operations division "had picked up on" a vehicle crossing the border near the Bar K S Ranch just south of the Royal Road subdivision, said Lu Majeda, agency spokesman. "Our agents responded," Majeda said, "and attempted to intercept a gray newer model SUV. While making that attempt the vehicle eventually stopped and a group of people exited the vehicle. At the same time, shots were fired on our agent. We don't know if the shots came from the suspects that came out of the SUV or if there was a scout or someone already in place that was shooting. Majeda explained that it is common for smugglers to have people in place on the ground to watch as drug loads are moved through an area. "The shots hit our agent's vehicle, but did not hit the agent. He did return fire. At this time, we do not know if any of the others were hit or injured."....
Opponent's Gun Permit Is Revoked Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has revoked the concealed weapons license of a retired sheriff's captain who waged a fiery but unsuccessful campaign to unseat him in last week's election, a move the candidate's lawyer called "blatant retaliation." Undersheriff Larry Waldie notified retired Capt. Ken Masse of the move two days after the election, accusing the failed candidate of waging a deceptive and dishonest campaign that "may have damaged the public's confidence in this agency." Masse, who served 35 years with the department before retiring last year, intends to appeal the revocation. Peace officers in California are routinely issued credentials that allow them to carry concealed weapons after they retire. Those credentials can be revoked upon a showing of "good cause" by the department. Police agencies usually take such action only after retired officers are accused of criminal wrongdoing or other evidence indicates they could pose a danger with a gun or law enforcement credentials, said Masse's attorney, Dieter Dammeier. "It happens when there's dangerous conduct, not when somebody is engaged in politics," Dammeier said....