James Bamford: "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America."

The Bush administration’s wiretapping program has come under new scrutiny this week. Two influential Congressional committees have opened probes into allegations U.S. intelligence spied on the phone calls of American military personnel, journalists and aid workers in Iraq. Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Arlen Specter of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senator Jay Rockefeller, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, say they want Congress to look into allegations from two former military intelligence officials.

The two whistleblowers–Adrienne Kinne, an Army reservist, and David Murfee Faulk, a Navy linguist–spoke last Thursday to ABC News. While the network claimed that marked the first time the two whistleblowers had come forward, they had both spoken out well before last week.

Blogger David Swanson wrote about them as early as July 2007 and, in her first broadcast interview five months ago, former Military Intelligence Sergeant Adrienne Kinne, detailed the spying on Democracy Now! back in May.

She and Navy Linguist David Murfee Faulk were also interviewed for a new book on the National Security Agency by James Bamford, an investigative journalist and author of two earlier books on the agency. Bamford is among the plaintiffs in a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of journalists, academics, aid workers and lawyers who feared they were targeted by government spying. A federal appeals court dismissed the case last year after ruling the plaintiffs can’t prove they were monitored. The ACLU might re-open the suit to include the new revelations by Kinne and Faulk.

James Bamford, investigative reporter who has been covering the National Security Agency for the last three decades. He came close to standing trial after revealing the NSA’s operations in his explosive 1982 book The Puzzle Palace. His latest book, which comes out today, is the third in his trilogy on the NSA. It’s called The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

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• AfterDowningStreet.com Coverage of NSA Spyng

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