(WMR) -- Republican Rep. Peter King (NY), the chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, has called for the U.S. Attorney General to prosecute The New York Times under the Espionage Act for revealing the existence of a secret program by the Bush administration to spy on international financial transactions involving the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), an international clearinghouse consortium of 7,800 banks in over 204 countries that electronically wires trillions of dollars between banks on a daily basis.

King told Chris Matthews Tuesday on MSNBC, "The New York Times is putting its own arrogant elitist left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people, and I�m calling on the attorney general to begin a criminal investigation and prosecution of the New York Times -- its reporters, the editors who worked on this, and the publisher."

However, WMR has learned that the monitoring of SWIFT by the National Security Agency (NSA), via links with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), a Treasury Department financial monitoring activity located in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, and CIA financial monitoring systems connected to SWIFT mainframe gateways in La Hulpe, Belgium; Culpeper, Virginia; and Zouterwoude, Netherlands, is nothing new and predates 9-11 by almost two decades. The Bush administration has expanded the program to monitor transactions involving smaller monetary transfers.

In fact, during the 1980s and 90s, the NSA and CIA collected intelligence on financial transactions between the United States and Ireland and Northern Ireland involving Irish terrorist groups supported by Peter King. The group Irish Northern Aid (NORAID) funneled money to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) that was used to buy weapons used to blow up civilians and members of the British government, military, and police.

King was an active supporter of NORAID, a tax-exempt front for the IRA. Martin Galvin, King's friend and former NORAID chief, rejected the Northern Ireland Good Friday agreement and supports the agenda of the terrorist "Real IRA."

During the 1980s, NSA's British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), intercepted a number of King's phone calls from the United States and from within Britain, in which his political and financial support for the IRA was discussed. GCHQ relied on Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) to monitor King's domestic phone calls in New York and Long Island since U.S. law, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), prohibited the surveillance of King by NSA assets.

King's financial and political support for the IRA coincided with the terrorist group's alliances with Palestinian, Lebanese, Latin American, Basque, Corsican, German, and Breton terrorist groups and the Libyan government of Muammar el Qaddafi. NSA signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts demonstrate that Libya and Lebanese terrorist groups targeted Americans in terrorist attacks during the 1980s, while King supported their Irish compatriots with money and weapons.

If Mr. King wants the New York Times prosecuted for espionage, he should be prepared to be prosecuted for aiding and abetting acts of terrorism against American citizens and the citizens of America's allies.

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