US president George W Bush today denounced as 'disgraceful' the revelation by the media of a secret US program that tracks international financial records in pursuit of terrorists.
Vice President Dick Cheney also singled out The New York Times for criticism of its reporting on both bank-records searches and a separate anti-terror program involving warrantless eavesdropping on phone calls.
Since the September 11, 2001, attacks The US Treasury Department has been examining data from a Brussels-based financial consortium for evidence of potential activity by terror groups.
Despite the government's efforts to keep the program quiet, The New York Times laid out the program in detail last week and other major U.S. newspapers also reported on it.
Bush said the financial-records monitoring was legal and an important tool for preventing terror attacks.
'Congress was briefed. And what we did was fully authorized under the law. And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful,' Bush told reporters after a meeting with groups supporting the U.S. military in Iraq.
'What we were doing was the right thing. Congress was aware of it, and we were within the law to do so,' he said.
'If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money. And that's exactly what we're doing.'
The disclosure late last year of the warrantless eavesdropping program prompted lawmakers to raise privacy concerns and questions about whether the administration was overstepping its executive powers.
Some lawmakers have raised similar concerns about the bank-records program, but the criticism has been more muted.
Cheney, in remarks at a fundraiser in Nebraska, went further than Bush in lashing out at the news media - in particular the New York Times - over the revelations on both the financial monitoring and telephone eavesdropping programs.
'The New York Times has now twice -- two separate occasions -- disclosed programs; both times they had been asked not to publish those stories by senior administration officials,' Cheney said.
'They went ahead anyway.'
Cheney expressed outrage that The New York Times had won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the telephone surveillance program.
