WASHINGTON — 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 U.S. 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 United States' 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, a West Virginia Democrat and 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 U.S. citizens and their loved ones were sometimes passed around, out of prurient interest, among analysts at an electronic surveillance facility at Fort 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 any threat to U.S. interests.
"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, 31, a former Arab linguist in the Army Reserves who worked at a National Security Agency facility at Fort Gordon from 2001 to 2003.
"We identified phone numbers belonging to non-threatening groups, including the Red Cross," she said in an interview with the Los Angeles 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 Navy linguist, 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 said. "People would say, 'Hey, check this out; you're not going to believe what I heard.' "
Their claims were initially reported yesterday by ABC News.
