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The independent auditing company hired by the government to review the intel program that gathered data from the Swift banking concern found no abuses. The New York Times buried the lede at the seventh paragraph -- the end of the seventh paragraph -- in a story that focuses on European complaints about the legality of the program even while they decline to end it:
The program, started by the Bush administration weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, allows analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency and other American intelligence agencies to search for possible terrorist financing activity among millions of largely international financial transactions that are processed by a banking cooperative known as Swift that is based in Belgium.The European Union panel will not call for the program to be stopped, officials said. But it is expected to recommend that additional safeguards be put in place to check how financial data are shared with American intelligence officials. For the last three years, a Washington consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, has audited the program, but Mr. Schaar said his panel would recommend that an outside auditor from Europe be brought in to protect against abuses. ...
The Bush administration has strongly defended the effectiveness and legality of the once-secret program as a tool in fighting terrorism, and it sharply criticized The New York Times for disclosing the arrangement in June. Although one government intelligence analyst was removed from the Swift team for conducting improper searches, officials at the Treasury Department and Booz Allen say they have not found any broader instances of abuse in the program.
Critics, including many privacy advocates and some banking industry executives, have questioned the propriety of giving American intelligence officials broad access, without court orders, to sensitive data.
The Swift program actually helped catch al-Qaeda terrorists, ending the career of the senior AQ leader in the Philippines as one example. It broke no laws and it worked, but the Times insisted on neutralizing it by sticking it on the front page of their paper. The original report never even bothered to allege any systemic abuses, and the one person discovered to have improperly searched the records had been dismissed.
Booz Allen came to the program to provide an independent look at the intel program and gave it a clean bill of health. That prompted the ACLU to attack Booz Allen as a government stooge dependent on federal contracts and run by former intel officers. However, they have produced no evidence for such allegations, and Booz Allen rejects them out of hand. It's hard to figure what would satisfy the program's attackers; certainly an investigation by a government inspector would hardly suffice, and Booz Allen has a sterling reputation.
The Times has been proven wrong yet again, no matter how they spin this. Even their own report here mentions that they cannot find any legal analysts that are willing to call the program illegal -- but you have to go to paragraph 14 to find that out.
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