Revealing secrets

THE POLITICAL storm that has been stirred up over newspaper stories disclosing a counterterrorism program that tracks suspect financial transactions has been generating more controversy than good sense.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and some members of Congress have indulged in florid attacks on the newspapers that first printed the story: The New York Times (whose owner, the New York Times Co., also owns the Boston Globe), the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Accusations that the papers committed a treasonous act are so intemperate that they seem to derive more from a partisan campaign by anxious Republicans than a simple concern to protect Americans from terrorist attack.

The excesses of the campaign against the papers obscure a clash of interests and principles that is healthy in an open society -- a clash that deserves to be considered and debated rationally and without partisan rancor.

Officials defending the Terrorist Tracking Finance Program say it has helped locate a terrorist suspect wanted for the Bali resort bombing of 2002. They say it has also revealed connections between would-be terrorists and their sources of financing, and in some cases has expanded the scope of an investigation already underway. Defenders of the program insist it has been ringed with safeguards to protect the privacy of financial transactions, and that data has been sought only for terrorist investigations and only on the basis of intelligence leads. Valid as these points may be, they constitute an argument primarily for the operational utility of the program. They do not add up to a persuasive argument that the papers should help the government keep the program secret.

Even if the program may have been useful in pursuing terrorist investigations, there are enough serious questions about the program's skirting of domestic and international banking privacy laws to establish a public interest in knowing what the government is doing. And though administration officials may be entitled to complain about any news story that could reveal intelligence sources and methods, they would have to be extremely disingenuous to claim that the government's tracking of financial transactions by suspected terrorists had truly been a secret. Less than two weeks after Sept. 11, Bush declared: ``We're putting banks and financial institutions around the world on notice; we will work with their governments and ask them to freeze or block terrorist ability to access funds in foreign accounts."

The terrorist threat is not imaginary. It is the government's job to do everything it can, within the law, to protect Americans from terrorist attacks. It is the job of a free press to let the public know what secrecy-obsessed administrations are doing in the name of the American people. The institutional interests of government and the press will inevitably clash at times, and in clashing preserve the tensile strength of an open society.