So much for BushCo’s assurances that FISA is used only against terror suspects and their contacts. From ABC’s The Blotter:
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations “extremely disturbing” and said the committee has begun its own examination.
“We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration,” Rockefeller said Thursday. “The Committee will take whatever action is necessary.”
“These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.
Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”
She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and “collected on” as they called their offices or homes in the United States. …
Former Navy Arab linguist David Murfee Faulk described how
he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.
“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy.’”
George Washington University Law School’s Jonathon Turley says, “This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law.” Yes, but at this point, I wonder whether anyone much will even bat an eye.
Um . . . y’all have nothing to say about this. An eloquent silence.
“I wonder whether anyone much will even bat an eye.” You know, Lotus, I read this earlier on the Progress Report and just shook my head, mmph, mmph, mmph-ing.
I believe we are so desensitized by BushCo, at this point, that nothing, save his running “nekid” through the halls of the White House chasing
CondiLynn Cheney, would make us bat an eye.