Bush under fire over tracking of money transfers

The Bush administration was forced today for the second time in months to account for a controversial spying programme, defending its tracking of millions of financial transactions as an important tool in the war on terror.

The revelation that CIA agents and treasury officials had been secretly monitoring financial transactions routed through Swift, the Brussels-based banking cooperative, caused uproar. It followed intense controversy - and a number of law suits from civil liberty organisations - provoked by the disclosure in the New York Times last December that George Bush had instructed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and emails of Americans without court oversight.

Under the banking surveillance programme, disclosed on Thursday night on the websites of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, agents from the US treasury department and CIA gained access to a trove of international financial transactions.
Although the White House has often spoken of the importance of disrupting terrorist financial networks, it had not previously revealed its methods. But John Snow, the treasury secretary, said yesterday the administration had not intruded unduly on Americans’ privacy.

“It’s entirely consistent with democratic values, with our best legal traditions,” he told a press conference.

But such arguments carried little weight with Democrats and civil libertarians, who said the latest disclosure was further evidence of Mr Bush’s abuse of executive powers as president. “Like the domestic surveillance program exposed last December, the Bush administration’s efforts to tap into the financial records of thousands of Americans appear to rely on justifications concocted without regard to current law,” said Ed Markey, a Massachusetts congressman, in a statement.

Swift, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, provides electronic instructions for money transfers among some 7,800 financial institutions - virtually every bank, brokerage house, and stock exchange. It routes more than 11m transactions each day. The New York Times and LA Times said they had been pressed by administration officials not to report on the existence of the programme.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006