Bush Flays the Press

George Bush says that leaking information about the data mining of banking transactions was disgraceful. The New York Times was one of the papers to break the story and here is how they report Bush’s admonishment: Bush Says Report on Bank Data Was Disgraceful. The problem is that Dick Cheney and George Bush have lied so relentlessly about all matters of security that we simply cannot trust a word they sau about the efficacy of this latest secret initiative. Does it really only target “bad guys”? Or is it another wholesale scooping up of data? The administration has lost all credibility, except among the most rabid of its supporters, so I think we need a long, hard, and independent look at what they are doing with all this information.

Besides, how can “outing” the program possibly harm national security and help “the enemy”? Any enemy, even the most dim witted, would surely know that electronic transfers of cash would be an obvious target for the secret police, especially in a country like the US that has an extensive, rampant, and unsupervised secret police.

Alternatively, if this “enemy” is sufficiently clueless to have used electronic money transfers, why haven’t we caught them?