Is NSA Spying on Christiane Amanpour?

Who knows? The surveillance program is a secret, remember? This is a convoluted story, and there's no real answer yet, but here's a quick summation--or sort of quick, anyway. Andrea Mitchell interviewed James Risen about his New York Times story revealing the NSA activity and his book, State of War, which goes into the whole thing in more detail. Following up on a general question of whether the program targeted reporters, Mitchell asked, "You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?" Risen replied that he didn't.

John Aravosis wrote about this transcript yesterday at AMERICAblog, but then NBC edited the transcript to remove that follow-up question. Mitchell had some basis for asking the question in the first place, but when Risen couldn't respond, the implied charge just sat out there half formed, neither verified nor denied. What makes the charge even more ominous is the fact that Amanpour is married to former Clinton State Department spokesman Jamie Rudin, who's since gone on to positions as foreign policy advisor to John Kerry and Wes Clark. If Amanpour was a target, did Rudin get caught up in the surveillance, as well? (Or could he have been the actual target?) Aravosis spelled out the implications of this, as well.

A few hours later, NBC issued a statement to the effect that the transcript had been edited because the information had been released "prematurely" and was pulled back so the network could "further continue our inquiry." TVNewser then published a statement from CNN that neither the network nor Amanpour herself were aware of any eavesdropping. That network went further tonight, according to Aravosis, reporting the story on the air. CNN asked an intelligence official about the matter and were assured that Amanpour--or any CNN reporter, for that matter--had never been an NSA target. That was good enough for them, of course, because the NSA would never lie about something like that, would they? Apparently it's case closed, as far as CNN is concerned.

See, I told you it was convoluted. NBC has promised to continue investigating the story, so we'll see if anything further comes of it. In the meantime, let's all join CNN in its Pollyannaish acceptance of the intelligence community at its word. Move along, nothing more to see here.