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SEC mulled national security status for AIG details
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of CNN Money/Reuters


CNN Money/Reuters, January 24, 2010
Posted: February 1st, 2010
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/reuters/MTFH219...

U.S. securities regulators [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] originally treated the New York Federal Reserve's bid to keep secret many of the details of the American International Group bailout like a request to protect matters of national security. The SEC ... agreed to limit the number of SEC employees who would review the document to just two and keep the document locked in a safe while the SEC considered AIG's confidentiality request. The SEC had also agreed that if it determined the document should not be made public, it would be stored "in a special area where national security related files are kept." Emails ... that have become public in recent weeks reveal that some at the New York Fed had gone to great lengths to keep the terms of the bailout private and the SEC may have played a role in contributing to some of the secrecy surrounding the AIG rescue package. "The New York Fed was orchestrating what can only be characterized as an extreme effort to ensure that details of the counterparty deal stayed secret," Rep. Darrell Issa ... said. "More and more it looks as if they would've kept the details of the deal secret indefinitely, it they could have."

Note: So now bank transactions are being considered a matter of "national security." What next? It's becoming ever more apparent that "national security" is used as a catch-all phrase for information that those in power don't want us to know about their secret dealings which benefit themselves at the expense of most of the rest of us.


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