Has any effort been made to find the traitor who sold the story about the tracing of money to al-Qaeda? How about the traitor who took the story to the traitorous New York Times? Again, Michael Barone, columnist at US News & World Report, reports:

Last Friday, the Times did it again, printing a story revealing the existence of U.S. government monitoring of financial transactions routed through the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which routes about $6 trillion a day in electronic money transfers around the world. The monitoring is conducted by the CIA and supervised by the Treasury Department. An independent auditing firm has been hired to make sure only terrorist-related transactions are targeted. Members of Congress were briefed on the program, and it does not seem to violate any law, at least any that the Times could identify. And it has been effective. As the Times reporters admit, it helped to locate the mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombing in Thailand and a Brooklyn man convicted on charges of laundering a $200,000 payment to al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan.Once again, Bush administration officials asked the Times not to publish the story. Once again, the Times went ahead anyway. “We have listened closely to the administration’s arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration,” Bill Keller is quoted as saying. It’s interesting to note that he feels obliged to report he and his colleagues weren’t smirking or cracking jokes. “We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

This was presumably the view as well of the “nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives” who were apparently the sources for the story.