Curiouser and curiouser: the NYT "leak" flap

[magellan]

I posted a thread the other day, arguing that BushCo's ire over the NYT's article is bogus because the NYT originally reported the plan to track international bank transactions back in April 2005, without garnering so much as a public hand-wringing from the WH. (Probably because US gov't officials were interviewed for that article.)

But now I'm puzzled. The NYT has not, to my knowledge, mentioned their 2005 article -- and the WH's utter lack of public reaction to it at the time -- as a defense against the current leak allegations. Instead they've reached all the way back to 2001 for Bush**'s first quote saying the gov't would begin tracking terrorist financial transactions.

So here's my question. Why have the NYT ignored their own year-old story? That's the first place I would have gone if I were them. "Look, we discussed the government's plan to track US/overseas bank transactions LAST YEAR, and they didn't raise a stink about it then!"

Does it have anything to do with the fact their 2005 article is no longer available on the NYT site, as I discovered when trying to link to it the other day from the old DU thread? Or that the Yahoo News piece covering the same 2005 NYT article (the content of which I found on another, unrelated site) is also 'deleted'?

Something smells funny about this. Who within the administration spoke to the NYT last year for their April 2005 article, and are they still with the administration? If they are, why aren't they feeling Bush**'s wrath along with the NYT? Why is the 2005 article no longer available? When did it vanish?

For reference, here's the meat of my post from the other day:

In an article that's no longer on their site, the NYT reported on April 9, 2005 that the Bush** administration was seeking access to international bank transactions. See thread from that date for some of the text from that article:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

A Yahoo News article dated April 10, 2005 -- also since deleted -- repeats the info:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Bush administration is developing a plan to give the government access to possibly hundreds of millions of international banking records in an effort to trace and deter terrorist financing, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions.

Citing interviews with government officials, the newspaper reported that the new initiative, conceived by a working group within the Treasury Department, would vastly expand government access to financial transactions via logs of international wire transfers into and out of U.S. banks.

The plan, still in the preliminary stages, grew out of a brief, little-noticed provision in the intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December, the Times said. It would give the government tools to track leads on specific suspects and to analyze patterns in terrorist financing and other finance crimes, the officials said.

The newspaper reported that the officials, aware of concerns about privacy, want to include safeguards to prevent misuse of the enormous cache of financial records.