U.S. tapped intimate calls from Americans overseas, 2 eavesdroppers say
They say government monitors transcribed and passed around embarrassing information for their own enjoyment.
WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence analysts eavesdropped on personal calls between Americans overseas and their families back home and monitored the communications of workers with the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations, according to two military linguists involved in U.S. surveillance programs.
The accounts are the most detailed to date to challenge the assertions of President Bush, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and other administration officials that the government's controversial overseas wiretapping activities have been carefully monitored to prevent abuse and invasion of U.S. citizens' privacy.
Describing the allegations as "extremely disturbing," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the panel had launched an inquiry and requested records from the Bush administration.
The linguists said that recordings of intimate conversations between citizens and their loved ones were sometimes passed around, out of prurient interest, among analysts at an electronic surveillance facility at Ft. Gordon, Ga.
They also said they were encouraged to continue monitoring calls of aid workers and other personnel stationed in the Middle East even when it was clear the callers had no ties to terrorists or posed no threat to U.S. interests.
"There were people who called the States to talk to their families," said Adrienne Kinne, 31, a former Arab linguist in the Army Reserve who worked at a National Security Agency facility at Ft. Gordon from 2001 to 2003.
"We identified phone numbers belonging to nonthreatening groups, including the Red Cross," she said in an interview with The Times. "We could have blocked their numbers, but we didn't, and we were told to listen to them just in case."
Kinne's accounts were echoed by a former Arab linguist for the Navy, David Murfee Faulk, 39, who worked at the same facility from 2003 to 2007 and said in an interview that the government routinely monitored conversations between U.S. troops in Iraq and their spouses or loved ones.
"I observed people writing down, word for word, very embarrassing conversations," Faulk told The Times. "People would say, 'Hey, check this out, you're not going to believe what I heard.' "
Their claims were reported Thursday by ABC News.
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