A Swift Change for the NY Times

Just remember the duplicity of the New Yorks Times should we be attacked again and are unprepared due to the exposure of the Swift program. Carping about freedom of speech won't do much good for them when they're Public Enemy No. 1.

The news is that U.S. authorities will soon lose the cooperation of the European Central Bank on "Swift" financial-data transfers after regulators ordered the bank to start disengaging in April. "Swift" helps U.S. intelligence sift through vast amounts of financial information for counterterrorism purposes in what by all accounts has been a successful and useful (and previously secret) endeavor. But European regulators now find that it violates European Union law, and so the European Central Bank's cooperation must end. If and when other European entities follow suit, the "Swift" program could be crippled.

Huge news, no? You couldn't tell it from the NYT coverage. It buried the story in a 200-word Agence France-Presse wire story on Page A8 on Friday, in sharp contrast to its marathon of splashy A1 stories exposing the program.

It's not hard to see why. The NYT set this chain of events in motion with its exposes by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. Now that a European backlash is underway against a heretofore useful government program, the NYT doesn't want to advertise its role in bringing all this about.