Perhaps her phone was tapped to target her husband? Was any phone of his tapped, does the helpful, anonymous, NSA lackey know?

Ah, the tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive...

is that you slide over this scenario:

They don't say political operatives didn't listen to the calls before deleting them... nor do you mention how long they held them before deleting them, or where they were stored until they were deleted (that is, were they in a secure location and ANYONE who accessed them could be monitored?)...

That they were 'deleted' is meaningless. what is important is who listened to them before they were deleted.

If any of her calls were recorded inadvertently, the official said, any recordings would have been deleted "by law."

Can this unnamed official explain how it's possible to "inadvertently record" a call on a line that allegedly isn't tapped?

I recommend that folks read James Bamford's The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets and especially about the NSA's longstanding "Eschelon" operation. As Bamford makes clear, the NSA isn't much in the business of doing old fashioned "wiretaps" where they're tapping just specific phone calls. Instead, the NSA harvests entire spectra of electronic signals from satellite links, microwave links, cell signals, etc. capturing everything and then uses computers to pick out the bits they want to focus on.

In this kind of monitoring, nobody is "targeted" at the data collection stage. So neither was Amanpour. The targeting happens in the data analysis. In this sense, anyone whose data wasn't being specifically looked for had it "inadvertently" recorded.

Bamford argues that it's all collected & recorded, but that the NSA does a little wordplay and says what it considers to be "monitoring" applies only to the data it chooses to look at and not to all the data it constantly collects but may or may not choose to look at.

People tend to think "wiretapping" is the same as wholescale electronic monitoring, but it isn't. Keep this in mind when parsing the statements made by administration and intelligence sources on this topic.

Bush and his administration severely damaged their credibility due to the many, many, many fabricated and misleading statements they've made and continue doing so.

Maybe Amanpour wasn't "targeted," but that does not mean the NSA did not "inadvertently" record one or even any number of her conversations. It has been noted that conversations recorded by the DoD (the DIA, or one of the intelligence agencies) were not purged as "required" by law, so how can we believe the NSA complied with the law.

Not to be a ninny - but where does the suspicion about the wiretapping of this particular journalist come from?

I think about that old story about Lyndon Johnson (and I have no idea if this is true) in a close political race ages ago, who ordered one of his aides to circulate a story that his opponent had had some biblical knowledge of the animals on his ranch.

The aide responded, "Jeezus, LB, we can't call the guy a pig-f&%!er!!"

And LBJ quipped, "I don't want to. I just want to make him deny it."

That's what this reminds me of. I don't doubt that the NSA has been up to some unconstitutional wiretapping. But the only "evidence" I hear mention of in this thread is that someone asked a question at a press conference about a particular person.

Was there a reason for that question besides a marital association with someone who used to work for Clinton? I would need a little more to go on.

How would you expect the NSA or the government officials involved to respond if they really weren't guilty of this crime? The accusation is made in this instance through innuendo and supposition rather than any evidentiary process. And I don't trust that type of process any more from The War Room than I do from the GOP.