(Article changed on November 1, 2013 at 13:21)
By Dave Lindorff
Is Obama spying via the NSA, or is the NSA spying on him? (
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A revealing page-one article in today's New York Times ("Tap on Merkel Provides Peek a Vast Spy Net") reports on how the NSA's global spying program, dating back at least to early in the Bush/Cheney administration, was vacuuming up the phone conversations (and no doubt later the internet communications) of not just leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but opposition leader Merkel before her party took power in Germany.
As the Times puts it, the phone monitoring, which actually dates back to the Cold War Era before 1990, "is hardly limited to the 35 leaders of countries like Germany, and also includes their top aides and the heads of opposing parties."
That's pretty far-reaching, and the paper says that it has learned, primarily courtesy of revelations from the documents released by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the spying went even beyond that, to target up-and-coming potential leaders of so-called "friendly states."
But the Times buys the explanation offered by James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence and ultimate head of the embattled National Security Agency, that the NSA's spying on leaders and potential was and is and has been, first of all, well known to presidents, and secondly that its purpose was simply to see "if what they're saying gels with what's actually going on, as well as how other countries' policies "impact us across a whole range of issues."
That's pretty broad. The first explanation is really a euphemistic way of saying the NSA wants to see if American's purported friends and allies are lying. The second is a euphemistic way of saying that the US is spying to gain inside information about its allies' political goals and strategies, and probably their negotiating positions on things like trade treaties, international regulations, etc.
What the Times does not ask in its entire report on this spying program on leaders and potential leaders is whether there could be another motive for this extraordinary spying campaign on leaders: blackmail.
How else to explain the remarkably tepid response from the leaders who are the victims of this spying by the NSA on their private communications? How else to explain Europe's unwillingness to grant sanctuary to Snowden, who after all has allowed them to know about the perfidy of the US? How else to explain Europe's supine acquiescence to the US in its criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and its unquestioning support of Israel?
Nor does the Times ask the next obvious question, which is: If the NSA is spying on foreign leaders so widely and thoroughly, actually recording the conversations, not just the numbers being called, and submitting the recordings to keyword searches, isn't it likely doing the same thing to leaders in the US? And if it is possible to imagine that the NSA is enabling the blackmailing of foreign leaders, isn't it equally possible that the same thing is going on domestically?
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