Updated

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Making Fears Come True

That New York Times story exposing the Bush administration program to track terror financing has created an outcry among privacy advocates, and could cause some of the administration's worst fears about the revelation to come true.

Liberal human rights group, Privacy International, has filed complaints in 17 countries, urging them to pressure the banking industry partner central to the administration's efforts to obtain terrorist financial records to stop working with the U.S.

Times chief editor Bill Keller dismissed the administration's argument that publishing the story would lead bankers to stop cooperating with terror investigators, calling it "puzzling."

Murtha Mischaracterized

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel is now officially backing off a Sunday report claiming that anti-war congressman Jack Murtha said the U.S. presence in Iraq constitutes a greater danger to global security than Iran and North Korea — a story we mentioned here on Monday.

Instead, the paper says Murtha was citing a recent global Pew poll showing that more people think the U.S. is a greater threat.

A Second Opinion

The chief medical officer at Guantanamo Bay said Tuesday that detainees who hanged themselves in their cells three weeks ago were not suffering depression, saying he agrees with military officials who called the deaths an act of "asymmetrical warfare."

Exams performed one to two weeks before the suicides did not reveal evidence that the prisoners were despondent over prolonged imprisonment or maltreatment. The doctor also suggested that the detainees may have been discovered earlier if officials hadn't been following strict Red Cross standards on the treatment of prisoners, including how dark their cells should be at night.

Fighting Mad

Embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill is fighting back after school officials announced their intention to fire him this week, comparing their attacks to the1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial."

Churchill, who compared World Trade Center victims to Nazis, accuses the university's interim chancellor of coming to his conclusion on "explicitly ideological grounds," and charged that the chancellor actively solicited allegations of research misconduct from Churchill's colleagues, while publicly claiming they'd volunteered the information.

The investigating committee contends Churchill has "committed serious, repeated, and deliberate research misconduct" — including plagiarism.

—FOX News Channel's Aaron Bruns contributed to this report.