Twitnuts, Shoot Your Computer!

Because it's treasonous

If you look closely, the monitor above is displaying this page--the homepage of SWIFT, the "supersecret" agency Team Bush is using to "track terrorists...in secret...over there...so we don't have to...you know" etc. etc. etc., they are truly fucking nauseating with their ridiculous and sleazy fearmongering tactics--that is, when they're not advocating the end of independent journalism.

When asked to back up the White House accusation that a recent New York Times story put American lives at risk by disclosing vital secrets to terrorists, the best press secretary Tony Snow could do yesterday was this: "I am absolutely sure they didn't know about SWIFT."

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the international banking cooperative that quietly allowed the Treasury Department and the CIA to examine hundreds of thousands of private banking records from around the world

But the existence of SWIFT itself has not exactly been a secret. Certainly not to anyone who had an Internet connection.

SWIFT has a Web site, at swift.com .

It's a very informative Web site. For instance, this page describes how "SWIFT has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and appropriate international organisations, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), in their efforts to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities."

(And yes, FATF has its own Web site, too.)

An e-mail from White House Briefing reader Tim O'Keefe tipped me off to just how nutty it is to suggest that SWIFT keeps a low profile. Among other things, he explained, "SWIFT also happens to put on the largest financial services trade show in the world every year," he wrote. "Swift also puts out a lovely magazine ."

Furthermore, as I noted in Monday's column , it has been my personal experience that your garden-variety wire-transfer form mentions SWIFT. Mine warned: "With respect to payment orders executed through SWIFT, the SWIFT operating rules shall govern the payment orders."

I wrote in yesterday's column that in spite of leveling a monstrous charge against the New York Times -- of putting American lives at risk and aiding the enemy -- the White House has never definitively explained how any of these disclosures actually impair the pursuit of terrorists.

The reason why they can't explain how these disclosures actually impair the pursuit of terrorists is patently obvious: it doesn't. On the one hand, this gang of dingbats couldn't pursue a box turtle, much less a disciple of bin Laden's armed with box cutters...and second, they don't actually give a shit. Harping on about terrorists is nothing more than an electoral tactic. Hell, when confronted with genuine crises--hurricanes Katrina and Rita--the mix and match of not caring and incompetence was so glaring even the media was forced to report on it.

Unfortunately, they've since crawled back into their holes--so much so that it took Froomkin to notice the Times's "treason" was basically browsing the world wide web.