OF COURSE TERRORISTS KNEW ABOUT THE BANK SURVEILLANCE

On Hardball last night, Chris Matthews discussed the subject with Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Solution (link via the Mahablog):

...MATTHEWS: Well let me just tell you what you said [in your book]. "Eventually not surprisingly," and we're talking about electronic transfer surveillance, "our opponents figured it out. It was a matter really of deduction. Enough people got caught and a view of which activities had in common provides clues as to how they may have been identified and apprehended. We were surprised it took so long," said one intelligence official.

So in other words, the bad guys figured out how we were catching them.

SUSKIND: Right, it's a process of deduction. After a while, you catch enough of them, they're not idiots. They say, "Well, we can‘t do the things we were doing." They're not leaving electronic trails like they were.

MATTHEWS: So what's Cheney beefing about here?

SUSKIND: The fact is -- look, I'm sure...

MATTHEWS: Or President Bush. That the bad guys found out about it before the "Times" did.

SUSKIND: I'm sure the program is of some value, but I think the White House ought to be straight with people, that this has been a thing of diminishing return for several years now, this kind of electronic surveillance.

MATTHEWS: ... you knew that the bad guys, al Qaeda and there are other people like them around the world trying to hurt us, had resorted to carriers, to physical people, human beings, carrying stuff around.

They used to use the Western Union, which I find fascinating, like reporters used to just file dispatches, they used Western Union and then they used electronic transfers. And then they got smart because they knew we were watching them.

SUSKIND: And the common knowledge in the tops of the intelligence community. Over time, they got smart. They adapted....

MATTHEWS: Do you think, Ron Suskind, that when the president got up today and got excited about this enough to go on television and blast "The New York Times," that he knew that the al Qaeda forces are against us in the world, already knew about this thing months ago, they didn't need to pick up "The New York Times" this weekend.

SUSKIND: I'm not sure what the president knew or didn't. But the fact is this is common knowledge, what's in this book at the top as I see it, the intelligence community, I'm sure he must have known that.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas, also on the show, concurred:

THOMAS: ... I just don't think that this disclosure -- I think as Ron Suskind was saying earlier, I think al Qaeda has known for a long time, has assumed that we -- the United States government does it kind of thing.

After all, we've trumpeted the fact that we do track the terrorist money, that that's one of our tools, so I'd be very surprised if the bad guys didn't know -- didn't already know that they were doing it. They didn't need "The New York Times" to tell them that.

Note (as Matthews does) that Suskind wrote what he wrote in his book well before the appearance of the recent newspaper stories.

Now, you don't have to join me in donning the tinfoil hat, but I'm leaving mine on -- I still think it's quite possible the administration wanted to leak knowledge of a secret program that had outlived its usefulness, in order to attack the Evil Liberal Media.