The Memory Hole yields further information regarding the extent of the Bush administration's spying, with two more recent whistleblowers to add to the chorus that also includes Russell Tice, Michael Klein, Babak Pasdar, and Thomas Tamm:
"These [people we listened to] 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." …
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. …
The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program.
Fortunately, this doesn't matter. Why, you say? Well, because when you think about it, Bush was entirely trustworthy by virtue of holding the office of the president, and "whistleblower," in the original Finnish, means "disgruntled vendetta-holder." Every one of these whistleblowers is making things up for fun, profit, job loss and ignominy. Or, at least, Congress too often seems to agree with that assessment. But now PBS has done some interesting digging.
Check out this preview of their upcoming investigative piece, in which they claim the NSA had plenty of knowledge about bin Laden before the advent of Bush's expansion of spying. PBS says it was a lack of communication that seems to have doomed the NSA effort, not a lack of ability to listen on the kind of calls whistleblowers are claiming were eavesdropped upon.
It's in everyone's best interest to shed some sunlight on information gathering and sharing in order to do what actually works while following our own laws. Should be worth hearing more of this:
