Senator Rockefeller Forgets Phone Sex Spying Inquiry
On October 9, 2008, after the public revelations by two military linguists about the U.S. government’s electronic eavesdropping programs, Senator Jay Rockefeller said that he was outraged. The linguists revealed that they had participated in the wiretapping, recording and transcribing of the personal telephone conversations of American soldiers, American diplomats, and aid workers – without a search warrant. These conversations had no suspected relevance to terrorism, and included intimate details about the private lives of the Americans who were spied upon. Recordings of phone sex between husbands and wives were even made, and then passed around among the spies for their personal amusement.
At that time, Senator Rockefeller said that he would lead a Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry into the matter.
Since then, Rockefeller has said nothing more about it. Public records show that there has been no inquiry. Rockefeller, in spite of his promise, has done nothing.
Why would that be? Well, it certainly might have something to do with the fact that Senator Rockefeller led the way in passing the FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively gave the White House the power to conduct such intrusive surveillance of Americans’ private lives, with no judicial control and no real congressional oversight.
If Senator Rockefeller were to conduct an honest inquiry into these abuses, he’d have to follow the trail of information right back to himself. So, instead, Rockefeller chose to break his promise, and just pretend that none of it ever happened.
