By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, June 22 — Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.

Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.

The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview on Thursday….

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Well to my knowledge they, the Government, are not targeting US citizens. Unless of course you are talking to a known terrorist or suspected terrorist, then in that case I am cool with them looking at you closely.

By leaking this; the NYT has helped to hurt our chances of stopping those that wish to kill us all. It doesn’t matter if you are liberal, conservative, and indifferent. If you are not Muslim these murderers want to kill you, unless of course you subscribe to their 14^th century ideology. Not sure about you but I really do not want to go back to push a horse and cart just to plow my garden.

Now I am not saying that the times should be tried as a whole. However the people that leaked this to the press should be tried for treason and punished according to the constitution. If the reporters will not release the names then they should be brought up on conspiracy charges or something similar and sentenced accordingly.

I do know that if the Democrats weren't so batty they would probably control one or both houses of Congress and probably the Presidency by now. Luckily for us they have moved so far to the left that the majority of Americans do not recognize the party that was for the little guy back in the 60’s. The NYT, LAT and company are just mouth pieces for this radical fringe. That brings me to my next point I read somewhere that 90% of journalists identify themselves as liberals and we know responsibility and Liberal go together much like water and oil