Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to the programme, described the contents of calls they listened to as "personal, private things" of Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated or have anything to do with terrorism.

Another intercept operator former Navy Arab linguist David Murfee Faulk, 39, talking to 'ABC News', said that he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.

He said they listened in to Americans calling home to talk to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another.

'ABC News' quoted Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), as describing the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination.

"We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration," Rockefeller said ON Thursday. "The Committee will take whatever action is necessary."

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," Kinne said. The network said the accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day-to-day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance programme.

"There is a constant check to make sure that civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect," President Bush had told a press conference in February.

But the accounts of the two whistleblowers, which the network says could not be independently corroborated, raise serious questions about how much respect is accorded to those Americans whose conversations are intercepted in the name of fighting terrorism.

Faulk told the television network that he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions. "I feel that it was something that the people should not have done, including me," he said.

In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen.

Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted. "It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organisations who are affiliated with it," Gen. Hayden testified.

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who testified before Congress on the country's surveillance programme was quoted a saying.

"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," he said.

A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, Michael Goldfarb, was quoted as saying: "The abuse of humanitarian action through intelligence gathering for military or political objectives, threatens the ability to assist populations and undermines the safety of humanitarian aid workers."

Both Kinne and Faulk said that their military commanders rebuffed questions about listening in to the private conversations of Americans talking to their dear ones.

"It was just always, that, you know, your job is not to question. Your job is to collect and pass on the information," Kinne said.

Sometimes, Kinne and Faulk said, the intercepts helped identify possible terror planning in Iraq and saved American lives.

"IED's were disarmed before they exploded, that people who were intending to harm US forces were captured ahead of time," Faulk told ABC News.