U.S. officials, however, long have complained that they cannot get access to financial records overseas and that some requests for cooperation from foreign governments and financial institutions took months, while others were rebuffed.
"The sort of 18th century notions on this stuff drive me nuts," said one senior U.S. counterterrorism official. "Somebody can move money with the click of a mouse, but it takes me six months to find it. If that is the world in which we live, you have to understand the costs involved with that."
The Sept. 11 commission urged the government in its July 2004 report on the U.S. intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks to put more emphasis on tracking the flow of funds, rather than seeking to disrupt them, to learn how terrorist networks are organized.
Lee Hamilton, a former congressman and co-chairman of the commission who said he has been briefed on the SWIFT program, said U.S. intelligence agencies have made significant progress in recent years, but are still falling short. "I still cannot point to specific successes of our efforts here on terrorist financing," he said.
