Hypocritical Journalism Watch

"Follow the Money" reads the headline of today's New York Times editorial, which--along with the news story that inspired it--rank among the most hypocritical journalism I have read in a while. The editorial laments that,

Nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there is still a seemingly limitless stream of cash flowing to terrorist groups from private charities and contributors in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar. According to classified State Department cables recently released by WikiLeaks, governments in all three countries--all close American allies--are not doing enough to shut down that flow of money.

The news story explains that "millions of dollars are still flowing largely unimpeded to extremist groups worldwide." And the story and the editorial identify several causes--reluctance of the Gulf governments to face the problem, and the cheap cost of terrorist operations, to start with. But there's an additional problem that neither mentions: It's a lot harder to "follow the money" these days, Why? One reason is that the New York Times, in a story by one of the authors of the current lament, Eric Lichtblau, decided to blow the unambiguously-legal SWIFT program--a covert program which was devoted to . . . tracking terrorist financing. Here is how Lichtblau described in his book the program he and a coauthor publicized just in case any terrorists were wiring money (which they were):

Soon after the September 11 attacks, [SWIFT]--an obscure but enormously powerful banking consortium in Brussels . . . that routes the bulk of the world's financial transactions--began turning over millions of records from its vast repository to American intelligence officials. Matching the data against their own lists of suspected terrorist financiers and operatives, analysts at the CIA pored through the records looking for any hints of dirty terrorist money. . . .

While Lichtblau says that the program mostly led to "dead ends" and "trails that led nowhere," he also reports "notable hits"--including the capture of the Indonesian terrorist leader, Hambali. I don't know anyone knowledgeable about efforts to track terrorist financing who thinks the publication of this story had anything other than a decidely negative impact on U.S. counterterrorism operations. Ironically, the Saudi government has dramatically improved its efforts at controlling terrorist financing in recent years, a point the current Lichtblau story underplays. Despite the improvement, however, his story quotes a February cable noting that the Saudis remain "almost completely dependent on the C.I.A." for tips and leads on financing. But of course, those tips and leads are harder to get now that the Times splashed the SWIFT program on its front page. As Jack wrote in a devastating review of Lichtblau's book,

[T]he Times incorrectly evaluated both the legality of the SWIFT program and the impact on national security from its disclosure. Lichtblau implicitly responds to this criticism when he claims that the aim of the Times "was never to declare the program legal or illegal, effective or ineffective." Its objective was instead to "lay out the facts of the program and let people decide for themselves what they thought of it." And Lichtblau adds that the story was, "above all else, an interesting yarn about the administration's extraordinary efforts since 9/11 to stop another attack," as if its aesthetic merit were relevant to the decision to publish. This is hardly the careful exercise of judgment about whether public accountability warrants a compromise of national security that Lichtblau and the Times promised us. It is, instead, the casual renunciation of such judgment.

Having causally renounced such judgment with respect to the tracking of terrorist money, the least that Lichtblau and the Times can do now is stop lamenting the difficulty of the project.