The Bush administration and leading Republicans are lashing out at the New York Times and other media outlets for their reports on the government’s secret monitoring of international bank transactions without court-approval.

• US Treasury Secretary John Snow: “This is a great disappointment, I’ve got to say that, this is regrettable. We try to dissuade people from running these stories, as you know. What the disclosures do is fundamentally degrade, undermine and degrade an important source of information, make that information less useful, and again let me say that the only beneficiaries of that are the terrorists; it only helps the terrorists, so it’s very regrettable.”