SNOOPING ON AMERICANS

Amazingly, on the weekend before the election, Vermont's premier newspaper, Burlington Free Press is playing catch-up on a story that's been around for quite a while. It has a front page story about Adrienne Kinne.

If a definitive history is ever written of the challenges to Americans’ civil liberties in the tumultuous aftermath of Sept. 11, Sharon resident Adrienne Kinne might well be one of the sources.

Kinne is more than a footnote in a new book on National Security Agency eavesdropping, and her allegations — widely reported over the past year — have prompted calls for a full investigation by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. and ranking member Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

After she was called to active duty as a sergeant in the Army Reserve after Sept. 11, Kinne said in a recent phone interview, she was assigned to eavesdrop on satellite phone communications over a broad territorial expanse that included Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. The intercepts included calls to and from aid workers and journalists, among them Americans and citizens of U.S. allies. The intercepts began several months after Sept. 11 and continued through the invasion of Iraq until she was demobilized in August 2003, she said.

There are several comments in the Free Press denouncing her (showing a vitriolic, vomituous Vermont you rarely read about).

Ms Kinne has also been featured since last spring on Democracy Now!: look here, here, here, here and here.

I met Ms Kinne when we participated in a sit-in at Leahy's office in spring of 2007. She's also an active member with other Vermonters of Iraq Veterans against the War.