“Editor’s” Note:  The ACLU is one of the most ungodly, anti-American scourges that plague our nation.  They have accomplished little of value and have done much to destroy this nation’s Biblical foundations.  This story is an anomaly; they bungled into getting one right for a change.  By Tom Burghardt

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed new Freedom of Information Act ([1] FOIA) requests demanding that the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the National Security Agency (NSA) disclose “any policies and procedures” that protect Americans’ privacy rights when the ultra-spooky agency “collects, stores and disseminates private U.S. communications.”

The FOIA brief opens a new front in an on-going campaign by the civil liberties’ group to pry information from unaccountable Bush administration spy agencies and their “up-armored” lawyers in the Justice Department.

According to Melissa Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, “the American public needs to know whether the NSA’s procedures are sufficiently protective of our privacy rights. Unfortunately, there is often no meaningful court oversight of the NSA’s surveillance activities and the NSA is left to police itself,” Goodman said in a[2] press release on Wednesday.

Coming on the heels of last week’s report by [3] ABC News that provided new details of the Agency’s illegal spying on hundreds of aid workers, journalists and soldiers stationed in Iraq, the ACLU is charging that the NSA spied on personal phone calls that “were not in any way related to national security.” Indeed, intimate phone calls intercepted by Army communications specialists were routinely shared and swapped like salacious trophies amongst NSA personnel for their amusement.

At a news conference last February, President Bush declared that “there is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect.” A whistleblower, former Navy Arab linguist David Faulk however, put paid to Bush’s lie when he told ABC that “he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad’s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.”

But the network’s belated report on a story initially broken in July 2007 by David Swanson at[4] AfterDowningStreet.org, former U.S. Army Reserve Arab linguist Adrienne Kinne, who was assigned to a special military signals intelligence unit run from the NSA facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia, revealed that illegal surveillance on Americans was widespread.

Prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, NSA operators were forbidden to listen in or collect information on Americans. The NSA was specifically barred from doing so by United State Signals Intelligence Directive 18 ([5] USSID 18).Kinne also told Swanson that many of the individuals the NSA spied upon were journalists, including those staying at a Baghdad hotel that turned up on a U.S. target list.

Despite Kinne’s repeated attempts to bring this information to the attention of Sen. Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was rebuffed by Leahy and his staff. “Now, in response to ABC News picking up the story,” Swanson [6] reported October 10, “Leahy is pretending to be interested in the matter.”For the rest of the article, click here… [7] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10604