The nation still doesn’t know the full extent of President Bush’s obsession with eavesdropping on citizens, but here’s a cheesy new aspect: Phone calls home from American soldiers, aid workers and journalists in Iraq were reported to have been tapped and stored by military agents supposedly searching for terrorist leads.
Two of the listeners told ABC News that the illicit snooping degenerated into a form of amusement, with analysts swapping transcriptions of pillow talk, phone sex and other intrusive details from the lives of “hundreds of ordinary Americans.”
Because the law forbids eavesdroppers from listening to and retaining the conversations of Americans abroad without a demonstrable intelligence purpose, senators on the intelligence and judiciary committees have rightly called for investigations. The sooner the better, with public hearings to follow, if the electronic prying proves as extensive as the monitors reported.
The National Security Agency insists it tightly follows the law and that when monitors come upon innocent communications, they stop listening and make no record.
David Faulk, a former military intelligence officer, told ABC News that his “orders were to transcribe everything.”
It’s not known whether the Iraq monitoring was formally part of the binge of warrantless surveillance that President Bush ordered after 9/11. Mr. Bush and his aides insisted those intercepts were limited to people believed to have links to Al Qaeda. That was always dubious. But it is even more absurd and offensive if many of the people being listened to were American soldiers fighting on the frontlines in Iraq.