President Bush Condemns Media Leak on Banking Records

JEFFREY BROWN:

It was the lead story Friday in a number of major newspapers: a secret administration counterterrorism program to monitor financial records that flow through a large international, Belgium-based banking cooperative known as SWIFT.

Once the story was out, Treasury Secretary John Snow held a press conference to defend it and to criticize news organizations for publishing it, after the administration specifically asked the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post not to run it.

Today, the criticism continued, as the president responded to a question about the secret program with a blast at the press.

GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States: Congress was briefed. And what we did was fully authorized under the law.

And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America. And for people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America.

If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money. And that's exactly what we're doing. And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror.

JEFFREY BROWN:

For his part, New York Times editor Bill Keller responded to criticisms in a long letter on the paper's Web site. He described "weeks of discussion between administration officials and the Times" over the story, and his conclusion that the Times had acted in "the public interest."

"Nobody," he writes, "should think that we made this decision casually, with any animus toward the current administration, or without fully weighing the issues."