WASHINGTON - Disclosure of a secret program giving the U.S. government access to a massive international data base of financial information was “very damaging” to efforts to catch terrorists, Congress was told Tuesday.

“This disclosure compromised one of our most valuable programs and will only make our efforts to track terrorist financing — and to prevent terrorist attacks — harder,” Stuart Levey, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department, argued before a House Financial Services panel. . . .

Levey said the program played an important role in an investigation that eventually led to the capture of Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, or Hambali, the operations chief of the al-Qaida linked Jemaah Islamiya, a Southeast Asian terror group. Hambali allegedly masterminded the deadly 2002 Bali bombings.

It also appears as though the Justice Department may be getting involved in an investigation into this matter:

Asked whether the government is investigating the disclosure or leak of the program, Levey said the Treasury Department is in consultations with the Justice Department about the appropriate way to go forward.

Of course, some morons in Congress are more worried about why members of the House Financial Services panel weren't kept appraised of this program.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. complained that the Bush administration “has kept Congress in the dark” by not informing her colleagues on the panel about the program years ago.

The terror tracking program was first publicly revealed late last month in published accounts by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal.

The answer to Rep. Maloney's complaints is that she sits on the House Financial Services panel. Keeping a covert operation such as this program a secret is priority #1 in order for it to be effective. The more people who know, however, the harder it is to keep the secret. Given that reality only need-to-know members of Congress were briefed on the existence of this program, and those Congressman sit on intelligence committees and have the necessary clearance to be "in-the-know."

Of course, this raises an interesting quandary for would-be critics of the Bush administration over this issue. If Bush is going to be criticized for not sufficiently briefing Congress on this program then clearly the program was a secret and the New York Times and L.A. Times were wrong to disclose it.

You cannot say that the reporting done by those newspapers was "no big deal" because they didn't reveal anything that "wasn't already known" and then turn around and slam the Bush administration for not telling certain members of Congress what was going on.