Pres Obama Knowingly Spied on Chancellor Merkel Reports claim
UPDATE: It gets worse…
10/27/13 Berlin (AFP) – US President Barack Obama was personally informed of phone tapping against German Chancellor Angela Merkel which may have begun as early as 2002, according to media reports stoking anger over a spiralling espionage scandal.
Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying that National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander had briefed Obama on the operation against Merkel in 2010.
“Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue,” the newspaper quoted a high-ranking NSA official as saying.
Read more from Yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-aware-merkel-spying-since-2010-german-report
This report contradicts claims President Obama made yesterday that he “did not know her phone was tapped.”
Germany’s outrage over reports of bugging of Merkel’s phone by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) prompted it to summon the U.S. ambassador this week for the first time in living memory, an unprecedented post-war diplomatic rift.
Der Spiegel said Merkel’s mobile telephone had been listed by the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 – marked as “GE Chancellor Merkel” – and was still on the list weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June…
From the Guardian…
…The nature of the monitoring of Merkel’s mobile phone is not clear from the files, Der Spiegel said. It might be that the chancellor’s conversations were recorded, or that her contacts were simply assessed.
Ahead of the latest claims , the German government’s deputy spokesman, Georg Streiter, said a high-level delegation was heading to the White House and National Security Agency to “push forward” investigations into earlier surveillance allegations.
Meanwhile several thousand people marched to the US Capitol in Washington yesterday to protest against the NSA’s spying programme and to demand a limit to the surveillance. Some of them held banners in support of Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor who revealed the extent of the NSA’s activities.
The march attracted protesters from both ends of the political spectrum as liberal privacy advocates walked alongside members of the conservative Tea Party movement….