[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 86 (Wednesday, June 28, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6600-S6602]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             WAR ON TERROR

  Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I thank my distinguished colleague from 
Texas for outlining so many of the very important issues facing this 
country and the Senate today.
  I will talk about something that is extremely important to families, 
to people through the United States. That is the war on terror. How are 
we going to take the steps to prevent another September 11 attack in 
the United States?
  I don't think anyone who has followed the progress of the 
Islamofascist terrorists who have threatened us believe we are going to 
be safe if we try a fortress mentality, to step back and say no one is 
going to hit us, they don't care about the United States. They do.
  We work in a very secure place. People who visit us have to go 
through all kinds of security. Yes, we have built up some good 
barriers, good protections. High target areas such as the Congress and 
the White House are protected.
  For the vast majority of places in America, there is no way you can 
build a security system such as we have here because of the high 
priority this rates in terms of terrorist interests. After September 
11, we started some very serious consideration of what we needed to do 
to fight against terrorism.
  I will read a very good editorial that appeared September 24, 2001.

       The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track 
     terrorists through money-laundering activity and is readying 
     an executive order freezing the assets of known terrorists. 
     Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the 
     recruitment of specialized investigators and greater 
     cooperation with foreign banking authorities.
       Washington should revive international efforts begun during 
     the Clinton administration to pressure countries with 
     dangerously loose banking regulations to adopt and enforce 
     stricter rules. These need to be accompanied by stronger 
     sanctions against doing business with financial institutions 
     based in these nations.

  That is exactly what the Bush administration did. They set up the 
Terrorist Financing Tracking Program, a very effective program. This 
program went on clandestinely without any public notice or disclosure.
  As the chairman of the subcommittee that funds the Treasury 
Department and as a Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I was 
briefed on it. I was briefed on the effectiveness of it and how 
valuable a tool it is to be able to follow the money because the 
terrorists did not know we could follow when they transferred money 
from al-Qaida or Hamas or Hezbollah to someone in the United States; or 
transferred money from a so-called charity in the United States back to 
a terrorist organization. They did not know how we were doing it. It 
was effective.
  A number of the major terrorist captures we have made, the terrorist 
operations designed for the United States that we have interrupted, 
were enabled by the terrorist tracking program.
  When the 9/11 Commission made its final report of its recommendations 
on December 5, 2005, they gave varying degrees of ratings, from the 
very best being A, to F being a very bad job, to all of the different 
activities we had undertaken to make our country safe, to make our 
homeland safe. Regrettably, many of them only got Bs. The Director of 
National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center, they got 
Bs. Some of them got even lower grades, working with other countries.

  But the one that led the rating was terrorist financing. We were 
doing the best job fighting terrorist threats to the United States by 
terrorist-financing tracking. We were, until last week. Because that 
editorial I read from about the need for that, about the need for 
international cooperation, was a New York Times editorial of September 
24, 2001.
  Well, the New York Times has blown the cover--blown the cover--on 
this very important terrorist-financing activity. Now the terrorists 
know there is a Belgian-based cooperative called SWIFT, the Society for 
Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The SWIFT operation 
has a facility in the United States to which the Treasury Department 
issued narrowly targeted administrative subpoenas to get information on 
specific terrorist organizations and where their money transfers went. 
But now the terrorists know.
  SWIFT is regulated by central bankers. The oversight committee knew 
about it. The oversight committee had in it the Federal Reserve, the 
European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank 
of Belgium. Their committee members overseeing SWIFT knew how this 
program was operating, and they knew it was operating lawfully.
  But the New York Times, continuing its recent tradition, has decided 
that its right to publish is more important than the American public's 
right to be safe from terrorist activities. This is another chapter in 
a very sad series of revelations of our most sensitive intelligence-
tracking activities.
  Newspapers knew in World War II we could crack the codes of the Axis, 
that we were able to monitor the defense and military moves of Germany. 
But they did not expose it. Why? Because they knew our national 
interest required us to be able to keep confidential, to keep out of 
the hands of our enemies, the techniques by which we gathered the 
intelligence, which helped us win World War II--and which had, until 
recent disclosures, helped us be able to win the war against terrorist 
attacks in the United States.
  Well, the New York Times has decided that its right to publish takes 
precedence over America's right to have intelligence collection methods 
that are not disclosed to the people of the United States and, thus, to 
the terrorists we attempt to track.
  Sadly, as I have traveled around the world, meeting with our 
intelligence agencies, our military people--all across the globe--I 
found out, since the disclosures--beginning with the disclosure of the 
renditions of terrorists to other countries, the activities of the 
President's terrorist surveillance program--our intelligence 
capabilities have been compromised. Intelligence operatives tell us 
collections are way down. We don't know how we can replace these tools 
that have been disclosed by the New York Times and others.
  In February, at the open hearing in the Intelligence Committee, I 
asked CIA Director Porter Goss: What has the damage been? What has the 
damage been to our intelligence system from this disclosure? He said: 
It's been very severe. Let me repeat, very severe.
  Then again, when Michael Hayden was in a public hearing on his 
confirmation to be Director of the CIA, I asked him again--and this was 
before the disclosure of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program--I 
said: What has been the impact of these disclosures on our intelligence 
system? He said: These disclosures have now applied the Darwinian 
theory to terrorists because the only terrorists we are capturing are 
the dumb terrorists. The smart terrorists know what we are doing, and 
they know how to avoid it. Therefore, they can plan their attacks, and 
we are severely crippled.

[[Page S6601]]

  Well, disclosure of this Terrorist Finance Tracking Program is a very 
severe blow. This one particular program has had, in my view, as many 
successes as any of the other programs, and it has been a vital part of 
building the intelligence network that we need, gathering the 
information we need to identify and take out those people who are 
planning to launch deadly terrorist attacks in the United States.
  I regret to tell my colleagues, my constituents in Missouri, and the 
people in America that we are much less safe.
  This program, the SWIFT Program, did not need to be exposed. The 
Secretary of the Treasury has written to the New York Times a rebuttal 
to the disclosure they made. They said: Oh, there is a great need for 
the people to know this. Well, unfortunately, when the people of 
America know it, the terrorists know it.
  Secretary John Snow, with whom I have worked on this program, laid it 
out very well. He said in a statement on June 22 of this year: After 
President Bush made it clear that ensuring the safety of our people 
from terrorist attacks was our No. 1 priority, one of the most 
important things the Treasury could do is to follow the flow of 
terrorist money. They don't lie. Skillfully followed, they lead us to 
terrorists themselves and, thereby, protect our citizens.
  He said:

       Given our intimate knowledge of the global financial system 
     and financial flows, along with our close working 
     relationships with financial institutions around the world, 
     Treasury is uniquely positioned to track these terrorist 
     money flows both internationally and domestically.

  He said:

       I am particularly proud of our Terrorist Finance Tracking 
     Program which, based on intelligence leads, carefully targets 
     financial transactions of suspected foreign terrorists. . . . 
     It is an essential tool in the war on terror. . . . It is not 
     ``data mining''. . . . It is not a ``fishing expedition''. . 
     . . today's disclosure [is] so regrettable, because the 
     public dissemination of our sources and methods of fighting 
     terrorists not only harms national security but also degrades 
     the government's efforts to prevent terrorist activity in the 
     future.

  If there are people sending money to help al Qaeda, then we need to 
know about it. We also need to take advantage of that knowledge to 
follow the money trail and thwart them.
  He reports that the 9/11 Commission gave its highest level of 
recognition to this work.
  Well, Mr. President, when we disclose how our allies are working with 
us, we not only give the terrorists information on how to avoid 
disclosure, how to keep their activities secret, what we do, and what 
is very serious, is we tell our allies that we cannot keep a secret. 
Our allies are getting more and more reluctant to deal with us on any 
international cooperative missions when everything we do is blown and 
all of a sudden they read in their papers in the United States how they 
have cooperated with the United States.
  Now, that is not a very popular thing for some of these governments 
to do, and it makes it far more difficult for us to say: Hey, let's 
work together on a clandestine intelligence-gathering program that will 
keep your country safe and our country safe. Bam, they read about it in 
the newspapers. Well, this makes not only terrorists more able to get 
around our existing intelligence-collection assets, but it makes our 
allies far more reluctant to cooperate with us.
  Mr. President, I regret to tell you and my colleagues how serious 
this has been.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of the 
letter to the editors of the New York Times by the Secretary of the 
Treasury, John Snow; a copy of the September 24, 2001, editorial from 
the New York Times; and a copy of the Final Report on 9/11 Commission 
Recommendations, in which they said this terrorist financing program 
was the best.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                         U.S. Treasury Department,


                                     Office of Public Affairs,

                                    Washington, DC, June 26, 2006.
     Mr. Bill Keller,
     Managing Editor, The New York Times,
     West 43rd Street, New York, NY.
       Dear Mr. Keller: The New York Times' decision to disclose 
     the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, a robust and 
     classified effort to map terrorist networks through the use 
     of financial data, was irresponsible and harmful to the 
     security of Americans and freedom-loving people worldwide. In 
     choosing to expose this program, despite repeated pleas from 
     high-level officials on both sides of the aisle, including 
     myself, the Times undermined a highly successful counter-
     terrorism program and alerted terrorists to the methods and 
     sources used to track their money trails.
       Your charge that our efforts to convince The New York Times 
     not to publish were ``halfhearted'' is incorrect and 
     offensive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the 
     past two months, Treasury has engaged in a vigorous dialogue 
     with the Times--from the reporters writing the story to the 
     D.C. Bureau Chief and all the way up to you. It should also 
     be noted that the co-chairmen of the bipartisan 9-11 
     Commission, Governor Tom Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton, 
     met in person or placed calls to the very highest levels of 
     the Times urging the paper not to publish the story. Members 
     of Congress, senior U.S. Government officials and well-
     respected legal authorities from both sides of the aisle also 
     asked the paper not to publish or supported the legality and 
     validity of the program.
       Indeed, I invited you to my office for the explicit purpose 
     of talking you out of publishing this story. And there was 
     nothing ``half-hearted'' about that effort. I told you about 
     the true value of the program in defeating terrorism and 
     sought to impress upon you the harm that would occur from its 
     disclosure. I stressed that the program is grounded on solid 
     legal footing, had many built-in safeguards, and has been 
     extremely valuable in the war against terror. Additionally, 
     Treasury Under Secretary Stuart Levey met with the reporters 
     and your senior editors to answer countless questions, laying 
     out the legal framework and diligently outlining the multiple 
     safeguards and protections that are in place.
       You have defended your decision to compromise this program 
     by asserting that ``terror financiers know'' our methods for 
     tracking their funds and have already moved to other methods 
     to send money. The fact that your editors believe themselves 
     to be qualified to assess how terrorists are moving money 
     betrays a breathtaking arrogance and a deep misunderstanding 
     of this program and how it works. While terrorists are 
     relying more heavily than before on cumbersome methods to 
     move money, such as cash couriers, we have continued to see 
     them using the formal financial system, which has made this 
     particular program incredibly valuable.
       Lastly, justifying this disclosure by citing the ``public 
     interest'' in knowing information about this program means 
     the paper has given itself free license to expose any covert 
     activity that it happens to learn of--even those that are 
     legally grounded, responsibly administered, independently 
     overseen, and highly effective. Indeed, you have done so 
     here.
       What you've seemed to overlook is that it is also a matter 
     of public interest that we use all means available--lawfully 
     and responsibly--to help protect the American people from the 
     deadly threats of terrorists. I am deeply disappointed in the 
     New York Times.
           Sincerely,
                                                     John W. Snow,
     Secretary, U.S. Department of the Treasury.
                                  ____


               [From the New York Times, Sept. 24, 2001]

                           Finances of Terror

       Organizing the hijacking of the planes that crashed into 
     the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took significant sums 
     of money. The cost of these plots suggests that putting Osama 
     bin Laden and other international terrorists out of business 
     will require more than diplomatic coalitions and military 
     action. Washington and its allies must also disable the 
     financial networks used by terrorists.
       The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track 
     terrorists through their money-laundering activity and is 
     readying an executive order freezing the assets of known 
     terrorists. Much more is needed, including stricter 
     regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and 
     greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There 
     also must be closer coordination among America's law 
     enforcement, national security and financial regulatory 
     agencies.
       Osama bin Laden originally rose to prominence because his 
     inherited fortune allowed him to bankroll Arab volunteers 
     fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Since then, he has 
     acquired funds from a panoply of Islamic charities and 
     illegal and legal businesses, including export-import and 
     commodity trading firms, and is estimated to have as much as 
     $300 million at his disposal.
       Some of these businesses move funds through major 
     commercial banks that lack the procedures to monitor such 
     transactions properly. Locally, terrorists can utilize tiny 
     unregulated storefront financial centers, including what are 
     known as hawala banks, which people in South Asian immigrant 
     communities in the United States and other Western countries 
     use to transfer money abroad. Though some smaller financial 
     transactions are likely to slip through undetected even after 
     new rules are in place, much of the financing needed for 
     major attacks could dry up.
       Washington should revive international efforts begun during 
     the Clinton administration to pressure countries with 
     dangerously

[[Page S6602]]

     loose banking regulations to adopt and enforce stricter 
     rules. These need to be accompanied by strong sanctions 
     against doing business with financial institutions based in 
     these nations. The Bush administration initially opposed such 
     measures. But after the events of Sept. 11, it appears ready 
     to embrace them.
       The Treasury Department also needs new domestic legal 
     weapons to crack down on money laundering by terrorists. The 
     new laws should mandate the identification of all account 
     owners, prohibit transactions with ``shell banks'' that have 
     no physical premises and require closer monitoring of 
     accounts coming from countries with lax banking laws. 
     Prosecutors, meanwhile, should be able to freeze more easily 
     the assets of suspected terrorists. The Senate Banking 
     Committee plans to hold hearings this week on a bill 
     providing for such measures. It should be approved and signed 
     into law by President Bush.
       New regulations requiring money service businesses like the 
     hawala banks to register and imposing criminal penalties on 
     those that do not are scheduled to come into force late next 
     year. The effective date should be moved up to this fall, and 
     rules should be strictly enforced the moment they take 
     effect. If America is going to wage a new kind of war against 
     terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial 
     one.
                                  ____


             FINAL REPORT ON 9/11 COMMISSION RECOMMENDATIONS
                           [December 5, 2005]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
                Homeland Security and Emergency Response
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Radio spectrum for first responders............................     F/C*
Incident Command System........................................        C
Risk-based homeland security funds.............................     F/A*
Critical infrastructure assessment.............................        D
Private sector preparedness....................................        C
National Strategy for Transportation Security..................       C-
Airline passenger pre-screening................................        F
Airline passenger explosive screening..........................        C
Checked bag and cargo screening................................        D
Terrorist travel strategy......................................        I
Comprehensive screening system.................................        C
Biometric entry-exit screening system..........................        B
International collaboration on borders and document security...        D
Standardize secure identifications.............................       B-
------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  Intelligence and Congressional Reform
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Director of National Intelligence..............................        B
National Counterterrorism Center...............................        B
FBI national security workforce................................        C
New missions for CIA Director..................................        I
Incentives for information sharing.............................        D
Government-wide information sharing............................        D
Northern Command planning for homeland defense.................       B-
Full debate on PATRIOT Act.....................................        B
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board....................        D
Guidelines for government sharing of personal information......        D
Intelligence oversight reform..................................        D
Homeland Security Committees...................................        B
Unclassified top-line intelligence budget......................        F
Security clearance reform......................................        B
------------------------------------------------------------------------
                   Foreign Policy and Nonproliferation
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maximum effort to prevent terrorists from acquiring WMD........        D
Afghanistan....................................................        B
Pakistan.......................................................       C+
Saudi Arabia...................................................        D
Terrorist sanctuaries..........................................        B
Coalition strategy against Islamist terrorism..................        C
Coalition detention standards..................................        F
Economic policies..............................................       B+
Terrorist financing............................................       A-
Clear U.S. message abroad......................................        C
International broadcasting.....................................        B
Scholarship, exchange, and library programs....................        D
Secular education in Muslim countries..........................       D
------------------------------------------------------------------------
* If pending legislation passes.

  Mr. BOND. I would say also, it is fully compliant with the 
regulations, with the Constitution, and with statutes. If anybody wants 
to know, I will be happy to talk with them. There was no genuine public 
right to know that was satisfied by blowing this program. It was legal, 
and it was effective. No longer will it be effective, and no longer can 
we be as safe as we were before these disclosures started.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Graham). The Senator from New Hampshire.

                          ____________________