Administration resents "swift" kick: after the press reported that a secret operation following the money trails to terrorists was including financial dealings of innocent citizens, the neo-conservatives lashed back.(Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)

On June 23, Vice President Dick Cheney harshly criticized the nation's news media for disclosing information about the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. According to the disclosure appearing in the New York Times for June 24: "The program [Swift], run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, has allowed counterterrorism authorities to gain access to millions of records of transactions routed through Swift from individual banks and financial institutions around the world. The data is obtained using broad administrative subpoenas, not court warrants."

Responding in his typically confrontational style, Cheney told a group at a Chicago Republican fund-raising luncheon: "What I find most disturbing about these stories is the fact that some of the news media take it upon themselves to disclose vital national security programs, thereby making it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people. That offends me."

Constitutionalist Americans should also be offended. They should be offended that members of a presidential administration, each one of whom has sworn, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so cavalierly disregard the protections stated in our Bill of Rights. Not only has this administration violated the Fourth Amendment's protection of the people's right to be secure in their persons, houses, paper, and effects, and against unreasonable searches, but our vice president compounds the violation with his obvious contempt for the First Amendment's protection of freedom of the press.

Even more outrageously, on June 25, according to the AP, Representative Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he will write Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, urging him to "begin an investigation and prosecution of the New York Times--the reporters, the editors ...