Who's listening?

The Bush Administration has repeatedly said that they don't spy on the phone calls of ordinary Americans. You believe them? This from Brian Ross, Vic Walter and Ana Schecter, who write for ABC News:


"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.

"'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. . . .

"Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007. . . .

"Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted. . . .

"In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted.

"'It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it,' Gen. Hayden testified."

More on this issue from Jonathan Landay at McClatchey Newspapers here.

I think that I will believe the guys listening in on the calls before I believe the high level party apparatchik.