A senior us intelligence official tells us that our colleague Christianne Amanpour has never been targeted by the National Security Agency and nor has any other CNN journalist. The NSA as you know is the eavesdropping intelligence agency - the US government's big ear - and from time to time the offical says wiretaps overseas or other intercepts turn out to include Americans or what they call US persons which includes people who work for us companies and does so inadvertently. But if the NSA finds it has tape and trasncript of such a person by law it is required to be immediately erased, deleted, gotten rid of. US intelligence officials rarely comment on who they may or may not have collected information about, but because of all the web blogosphere attention this was getting today, this senior official was willing to look into it for us, and to be quite clear in his denial -- frankly, I get the impression the NSA is as puzzled by Andrea Mitchell's question, and NBC's decision to put it out on the web, as we were.
(end of transcript thanks to pseud in NC)
Unless of course the Bush administration orders otherwise, remember?
...John has more.
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