From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Jay Bookman

According to President Bush, it was “disgraceful” of U.S. newspapers to report that our government has been monitoring international financial transactions as a way to catch and track terrorists.

That response, strong as it seemed, was mild compared to the reaction of some in Congress and the conservative media, who accused the mainstream media of outright treason and demanded that editors and reporters be prosecuted. Apparently, those critics have become so unhappy with the American system of democracy and a free press that they now prefer a model along the lines of Communist China, where journalists are regularly prosecuted for publishing information the government would prefer to keep secret.

The hysteria and feigned outrage are particularly peculiar because the latest stories about financial surveillance told terrorists nothing they did not already know, in part because the Bush administration itself made it clear right after Sept. 11 that monitoring financial transactions would be an integral part of its response.

Still, public exposure of the financial surveillance programs might have mattered a few years ago, and might really have undercut our efforts to find, kill or capture terrorists. In his excellent new book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Pulitzer-winning journalist Ron Suskind reports that in the first two years after Sept. 11, our intelligence agencies had great success tracing overseas e-mails and phone conversations and monitoring financial transactions. They tracked the flow of terrorist money and information, allowing us to track down and capture or kill al-Qaida members and to understand how their networks operated.

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