US defends use of secret system to track terrorist funds

THE Bush administration has been quietly tracking people suspected of bankrolling terrorism, using a secret programme to track thousands of international financial transactions.

Treasury Department officials said they used broad subpoenas to collect the financial records from an international system known as Swift.

Treasury Secretary John Snow said yesterday the programme was not invasion of Americans’ privacy but vital to anti-terrorism operations.

Snow told a news conference the programme, run by the CIA and overseen by the Treasury Department, was “responsible government, it’s effective government, it’s government that works.”

“It’s entirely consistent with democratic values, with our best legal traditions,” Mr Snow said.

The authorities say the programme is a vital tool against terrorism and have credited it with helping capture a leading al-Qaida figure in south-east Asia.

However, the once-secret programme has drawn protests from Democrats, who said it raises concerns about intrusions on privacy and who saw it as the latest step in an aggressive Bush administration expansion of executive-branch powers.

“By following the money we’ve been able to locate operatives, we’ve been able to locate their financiers, we’ve been able to chart the terrorist networks and we’ve been able to bring the terrorists to justice,” Mr Snow added.

“Since immediately following 9/11, the American government has taken every legal measure to prevent another attack on our country,” Dana Perino, deputy White House press secretary, said. “One of the most important tools in the fight against terror is our ability to choke off funds for the terrorists.”

Under the programme, US counter-terrorism analysts could query Swift’s financial data base looking for information on activities by suspected terrorists as part of specific terrorism investigations, a Treasury Department official said.

They would do so by plugging in a name or names, the official said.

The programme involved both the CIA and the Treasury Department.

Swift, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a co-operative based in Belgium that handles financial message traffic from 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.