Yet another anti-terrorist program ruined by the New York Times

The NYT is exposing yet another classified program (H/T Polipundit):

WASHINGTON, June 22 — 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.

Similar to other programs, expect the Democrats to start yelling loudly about this just before we find out that a number of them had been briefed and raised no objection.

Will Feingold dust off his resolution calling for Congress to ignore Article III of the Constitution?

I'll have more on this later. But in the meantime, I've started the countdown for the reflexive and robotic automatic declaration that it's illegal from the left blogosphere.

10... 9... 8...

Update (8:50am EST): First entry is this breathless headline at the Huffington Post: "Bank Data Secretly Reviewed By Bush Admin. Without Warrants Or Subpoenas..." - here's a screenshot:

Yet the NYT article that Arianna links to says subpoenas were indeed issued:

Indeed, the cooperative's executives voiced early concerns about legal and corporate liability, officials said, and the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control began issuing broad subpoenas for the cooperative's records related to terrorism. One official said the subpoenas were intended to give Swift some legal protection.

I suppose reading the article was too much to ask.