Which Terrorists Knew What About Terror Finance Monitoring?

From Patterico:

Risen and Lichtblau and Keller (and Clarke), backpedaling furiously, would now have us believe that everyone but you and me knew about the “closely held” SWIFT surveillance program. Well, you, me, and Hambali the Bali Bomber, whom we arrested in 2003:

....

So maybe the authorities thought that if the program had already caught three money men, a courier, and a major terrorist organizer there might be one or two more Al-Qaeda operatives somewhere in the world who hadn’t gotten the memo about the Swift program surveillance…and so it might be a good idea to keep it a secret.

Oh, well: they’ve heard of it now. Thanks, New York Times!

(*I get the feeling that a lot of the cool sources and methods the government would rather not blab about get attributed to the “interrogation of captured Al-Qaeda figures”.)

UPDATE: You know, looking back over that CBC story linked above, I notice that Mohammed Mansour Jabarah’s brother Abdul Rahman Jabarah was also an Al Qaeda operative who was killed by Saudi police in 2003. His father told him in 2002 that the Canadian police were looking for him. Since Mohammed Jabarah was apparently discovered through Swift monitoring, and was being tracked and followed, and both brothers were wanted by the time they met in Dubai in January 2002, it seems logical that Swift surveillance of one Jabarah brother led to the revelation of the other as well—bringing the total to six terrorists probably identified and/or stopped by the secret Swift program. How many more leads these six that we know about turned up, we’ll never know—especially since all of their associates are now busily covering their tracks now that they realize how the Crusader Infidel Army as been tracking them down and picking them off.