They Stand On Guard

From the LA Times:

WASHINGTON — Citing national security concerns, some Republican members of Congress are trying to limit the personal financial information that top federal officials must disclose.

Tucked within the House's 497-page version of the "9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act" is a provision to repeal the requirement that senior-level officials report their personal financial assets valued at more than $2.5 million. It also would end the practice of disclosing the dates of stock transactions.

The proposal to limit financial disclosures initially covered only top-level intelligence officials. It was recently expanded to include all executive branch officials, according to a draft version of the bill.

This is very important, because we wouldn't want terrorists to know that the Vice-President was getting checks from Halliburton. Imagine what al Qaeda could do with the knowledge that administration officials had financial interests in companies that were lobbying them. It's frightening! Armed with this kind of information about stock trading, our enemies might be able to detect insider trading, and undermine confidence in our loyal officials.

Thank goodness we have the attentive House Republicans to quietly insert such provisions into a bill at the conference committee stage, knowing that the many other controversial parts of this bill will distract attention from it, so that those terrorists won't realize how vulnerable we are until this bill passes. And thank goodness they had the power to outvote the Democratic attempts to remove it.