NSA. Bush Would Have us Believe They Could Not Predict Illegal Surveillance of Citizens

President Bush convinced Republicans the NSA wire tap program would not target American citizens when making international calls into the U.S..

Unfortunately, while Democrats didn’t believe that would happen, they had been called unpatriotic along with being soft on terrorism. Maybe Republicans can now apologize to our troops for suspecting them of possible terrorist activity, for talking to their wives and girlfriends, planning and plotting their next highly anticipated sexual encounter when they return home.

Miccheck.com put it this way:

The National Security Agency has pledged, along with President George W. Bush, not to eavesdrop on conversations of US citizens overseas. While the NSA is responsible for monitoring phone calls to prevent terrorism, the intent was never to have private citizens’ intimate conversations shared.

But now two whistleblowers are claiming that private conversations, including pillow talk, were the subject of conversation among agents. [ABC] The two whistleblowers do not work at the same facility, nor did they know each other before reporting on the incidents.

“Hey, check this out,” one whistleblower 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’.”

Terrorism suspects? No. “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.”

President Bush said in January of 2006 that what was being monitored was “a phone call of an al Qaeda, known al Qaeda suspect, making a phone call into the United States.”

He then announced in February that “there is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect.”

Well, these phone calls were not al Qaeda suspects, nor were civil liberties being treated with respect.
“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. “This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law.”

Who was right about the easily abused NSA program of government wire tapping, Democrats or Republicans?

We report you decide.