Bush and State Dept Official Talk of Bank Records Program long before the New York Times

Glenn Greenwald:

Here is President Bush, campaigning for re-election in Hershey, Pennsylvania on April 19, 2004, boasting about our vigilant efforts to monitor the terrorists' banking transactions:

Before September the 11th, law enforcement could more easily obtain business and financial records of white-collar criminals than of suspected terrorists. See, part of the way to make sure that we catch terrorists is we chase money trails. And yet it was easier to chase a money trail with a white-collar criminal than it was a terrorist. The Patriot Act ended this double standard and it made it easier for investigators to catch suspected terrorists by following paper trails here in America.

And as former State Department official Victor Comraes detailed (and documented) on the Counterterrorism blog, it has long been pubic knowledge that the U.S. Government specifically monitors terrorists' banking transactions through SWIFT...read on