Smoke with no fire
Perusing some other blogs last night, I ran across some nitwit (I’ll spare her from embarrassment by mentoning her name) who titled her blog entry “This country sucks” and justified that particular statement by telling us how the US bombed Somalia for no apparent reason. In other words, she only read the headline of some story somewhere and concluded that we just arbitrarily dropped bombs on some unsuspecting Somalians.
The same thing is happening over this much-ado-about-nothing New York Times story about the Defense Department expanding it’s financial records program. Reading the headline and the first few paragraphs, someone might get the impression that DoD is monitoring all Americans’ financial transaction. Buried in the fourth paragraph, we find that’s not true;
Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say.
That’s not new. My son, who joined the Air Force in 2000, was confronted by his recruiter with his credit report and told he needed to pay off some credit cards before he joined, which my son did from his savings. Notice that was in 2000, before President Bush was president, before Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense.
Even the Washington Post jumped on the bandwagon with their own paraphrasing of the NYT story. Their admission that it only affected military personnel and civilian contractors came dead center of the first paragraph – but I still had to read the article twice before I found it;
The Defense Department has used a long-standing authority to acquire the personal financial records of American citizens in military-related criminal and other investigations as part of an expansion of the Pentagon’s gathering of counterterrorism intelligence at home, officials said yesterday.
The New York Times and WaPo are making a big deal over the fact that suspect military personnel and suspect contractors are being investigated for bribe payments. How big of a stink did they make over government agencies who didn’t catch spies like Robert Hanssen and John Walker who had unusually large bank accounts but went undetected for years because programs like this weren’t being used.
Category: Media
