The boss is vexed, and not because I’m still fidgeting with the next Vent: The NY Times has blown yet another anti-terror tool’s cover:

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.

It’s the same duo that blew the cover off the NSA’s effort to figure out who inside the US was getting phone calls from al Qaeda. The Times’ excuse to publicize this perfectly legal program is the “public interest.”

Call me crazy, but since the program is legal and since the administration argues it has helped stop terror attacks, isn’t the weight of the public’s interest in this story on the side of keeping the program under wraps so that it can continue to stop terrorists?

When the terrorists finally do succeed, will the Times rush out with an apology for having outed two major anti-terror programs that just might have helped stop it–if they had remained secret? Of course not. We all know what the Times will do–blame Bush.

Speaking of terrorists, Allah’s all over the big story of the night out of Miami. The other big terrorism story of the week had to do with what al Qaeda thugs did to our two captured troops. So what’s got the ACLU hot and bothered this night? Haditha. The ACLU is launching a massive fishing expedition aimed pretty squarely at destroying the US military’s ability to defend itself from any scurrilous attack in realm of ideas. Stop the ACLU has the goods:

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding that the Defense Department publicly disclose investigative files relating to the alleged killing of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq.

The actual FOIA demand is a great deal broader than that:

Specifically, the request seeks the release of all records relating to the killing of civilians by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan since January 1, 2005, including death certificates, autopsy reports, investigative files, documents related to criminal and administrative proceedings, witness interviews, statistics, policy documents (including “rules of engagement”), paperwork for compensatory payments to relatives of victims, photographs, and videos.

I’m curious as to the relevance of events in Afghanistan to what may or may not have happened in Haditha. I’m also curious about that date: Haditha happened on November 19, 2005. Dates as far back as January 1, 2005 are irrelevant if the ACLU is truly only interested in examining the Haditha case. The only motive that ties both Iraq and Afghanistan together with such a wide date selection would be a search for policy that goes above the respective theaters of war; namely, whether Bush administration policies have played a role in any civilian deaths in either country.

One would think the fact that terrorists have been trained to make up allegations of crimes against our troops would be relevant, as would be the source of the lone Haditha video. But the ACLU is uninterested where those are concerned.

The ACLU will do what this data what it did with the last set of data it FOIAed out of the government–use the most salacious bits to paint a picture that’s a lie. In that case, the ACLU has used uncorroborated tales of terrorist abuse at Gitmo to fool Andrew Sullivan and his gullible ilk into thinking that we’re a torture country. They’ll fool him again, only this time we’ll be a murdering country. Watch for it. If the ACLU gets this information, it will feed months and years of press hysteria. St. Andrew of the Sacred Heart-Ache may have an aneurism an hour.

So you have on the one side, the NY Times outing a legal program organized to stop terrorists, and the only beneficiaries of outing this program turn out to be the terrorists who are now warned and the reporters who stand to gain from book deals, Pulitzers and the adulation of their increasingly disgusting peers. On another side, you have the ACLU joined at the hip to Hamas-linked CAIR launching its own freelance investigations into US practices while uttering nary a peep about anything terrorists actually do to harm the civil liberties of Americans and other non-terrorists.

Americans are likely to die because of the actions of these two, the NY Times and the ACLU.

Update: Goldstein wonders what instructions the Moonbat Signal (formerly known by the code-name “Townhouse”) carried in the wake of the NYT story. Patterico rages against the Times.

Me? I’m looking for a clip of the end of Planet of the Apes. Charleton Heston’s final lines pretty much sum up what I think of Rosen, his partner in treason and his employer.

Update: The Times’ they are a-hangin’ together. Both the NY and the LA Times are flogging the Swift story. Both Times have published this leak that helps terrorists dodge the law “in the public interest.” By which they actually mean, in their own and in the terrorists’ interest. The public gains nothing from the disclosure of this program other than increased political acrimony and increase anxiety over the rising possibility of losing this war thanks to the treasonous Times. Both of them.

Walter Duranty would be soooo proud.

It’s interesting that both papers have had access to someone in the know. Which means to find the toad or toads who leaked the existence of this program, find out who knew about it and has recently been in contact with reporters from both papers. This leaker needs to hang. And I’m not talking in metaphors or code language. They need to hang, as in with a rope.