Another Day, Another Diversion. Ho-hum....

A bait and switch to New York Times from a Saudi terrorist funding cover-up? Nah, this administration would never do that...

Niagara Falls Reporter Opinion: "DETROIT -- The attacks on the media, especially The New York Times, over revelations that the Bush administration has been secretly rummaging through international banking transactions, deflects attention from a far more serious issue.

The real story is not that our government is looking at networks financing terrorist operations -- a legitimate and necessary activity -- but how poorly that job is done and how the greatest source of terrorist funding escapes serious scrutiny.

Lenny Wallace, a Florida-based financial consultant, has spent nearly five years trying to get to the bottom of a $5 billion series of loans involving Citigroup and a Saudi prince. The deal saw money bouncing from Singapore to Scotland to Miami. Wallace was retained to facilitate the loans and assist the bank in investing the proceeds. What he thought was a legitimate business venture turned into a mysterious shuffle of funds for nebulous purposes.

Jack Blum is a Washington lawyer and skilled investigator who has spent years following the trail of dirty money. William Greider reports in 'The Nation' on Blum's assessment of phony furor over The New York Times blowing the lid off the government tracking international banking data.

'The scandal here is not government overreach, he tells me. The scandal is the pitiful reluctance of this administration (and others before it) to get serious about the problem,' Greider reports. Blum told Greider the monitoring system the Times reported on seems 'unexceptional' and 'so narrowly focused' it ends up producing empty information.

'Meanwhile, the biggest purveyor of terrorist money, as everybody knows, are accounts in Saudi Arabia,' Blum said. 'Nobody will deal with it because the Saudis own half of America.'"