USA: Bush’s domestic and international spying scandal: finances

This video from the USA is called Why President Bush wants to continue spying on you.

By Patrick Martin:

Bush, Cheney threaten New York Times over exposure of surveillance programs

28 June 2006

In a brazen effort to intimidate the media and halt any further exposures of illegal US government spying, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and several Republican congressional leaders have denounced the New York Times and suggested that the newspaper could face criminal charges for its report on US government surveillance of international financial transactions.

The Times reported June 21 on its web site and then in its June 22 print edition that the Department of the Treasury had secretly accumulated an enormous database on international financial transactions by obtaining access to the records of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, a Belgium-based clearinghouse for major banks and other financial institutions.

Similar reports were published by the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal June 22, and then more generally throughout the US media.

Bush used a pro-war photo-op at the White House Monday to attack the media reports …

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An earlier post, from 8 May 2006, from the Google cache of my ModBlog: By Patrick Martin:

Sudden resignation of CIA Director Goss: Another tremor in Bush administration

8 May 2006

The resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss, announced abruptly by the White House on Friday, is another demonstration of the instability and vicious infighting within the Bush administration.

Goss ends a relatively brief 18-month tenure at the agency, a period during which he conducted a political purge in which at least a dozen top CIA officials were driven out.

The Goss resignation is the outcome of a protracted and murky conflict within the military-intelligence apparatus, involving John Negroponte, Bush’s choice as the first Director of National Intelligence, the military intelligence apparatus—headed by Stephen Cambone, the most trusted deputy of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld —and multiple factions within the CIA itself.

See also here.