As If We Needed Any Proof That We Couldn't Trust Bush

With the election less than a month away, and given how incredibly awful Bush has been as president (holding the all-time record low approval rating of 19%) it is quite understandable that most Americans have psychologically put King George in the proverbial rear-view mirror by now.

But even as we bury his presidency, I still think we should throw dirt on the coffin as it sinks into the ground.

Remember the bullshit he tried to pawn off on us when his unconstitutional wiretapping scheme came to light? He promised us that conversations between Americans wouldn't be spied upon-- and even if an American happened to be on one end of an international call, it would only be monitored if it was related to terrorism. And thanks to Bush, there would be no judicial or congressional oversight-- so we had to take his word on that. As it turns out, his word is worth crap.

According to a just-released ABC News report, hundreds of U.S. 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 National Security Agency (NSA). The phone calls of American military personnel, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

39-year-old David Faulk, one of two former intercept operators who have blown the whistle on the operation, 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, alerting office mates to particularly juicy exchanges that were then made 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'." Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

Asked to comment on reports that intimate and private phone calls of military officers were being passed around, a U.S. intelligence official said "all employees of the U.S. government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the Bush's warrantless surveillance program. "This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said.

Adrienne Kinne, another former intercept operator, was recognized for her outstanding performance by the NSA at the very time she was listening to hundreds of private conversations between Americans, including many from the International Red Cross and Doctors without Borders. "We knew they were working for these aid organizations," Kinne said. "They were identified in our systems as 'belongs to the International Red Cross' and all these other organizations. And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on them."

Both Kinne and Faulk said their military commanders rebuffed questions about listening in to the private conversations of Americans talking to Americans.