Europeans should be grateful for US spying operations because they keep them safe. a US lawmaker said on Sunday, urging allies to improve their own intelligence and oversight efforts.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers called "disingenuous" foreign governments' outrage over the National Security Agency's large dragnet over communications of several dozen world leaders and ordinary citizens.Mr. Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said that the National Security Agency’s surveillance program in question — particularly in regards France, but also Germany — had been badly misrepresented in news reports. If the French understood that it was designed to protect them and others from the threat of terror, he said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “they would be applauding and popping Champagne corks.
”The congressman also said that reports of the monitoring of phone calls of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany were incomplete, fragmentary and, therefore, misleading. The most recent report, published in the German news magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday, cited a document — apparently from a National Security Agency database — that indicated Ms. Merkel’s cellphone was first listed as a target of surveillance in 2002.
The disclosures, Mr. Rogers said, did not “necessarily fit with what has actually happened, right? So it’s not an exact, correct interpretation of what they’re seeing. They’re seeing three or four pieces of a 1,000-piece puzzle and trying to come to a conclusion.”
In neither the French nor the German case did Rogers offer any elaboration of what, in his view, the National Security Agency was actually doing in France or Germany.
EU-Digest
House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers called "disingenuous" foreign governments' outrage over the National Security Agency's large dragnet over communications of several dozen world leaders and ordinary citizens.Mr. Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said that the National Security Agency’s surveillance program in question — particularly in regards France, but also Germany — had been badly misrepresented in news reports. If the French understood that it was designed to protect them and others from the threat of terror, he said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “they would be applauding and popping Champagne corks.
”The congressman also said that reports of the monitoring of phone calls of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany were incomplete, fragmentary and, therefore, misleading. The most recent report, published in the German news magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday, cited a document — apparently from a National Security Agency database — that indicated Ms. Merkel’s cellphone was first listed as a target of surveillance in 2002.
The disclosures, Mr. Rogers said, did not “necessarily fit with what has actually happened, right? So it’s not an exact, correct interpretation of what they’re seeing. They’re seeing three or four pieces of a 1,000-piece puzzle and trying to come to a conclusion.”
In neither the French nor the German case did Rogers offer any elaboration of what, in his view, the National Security Agency was actually doing in France or Germany.
EU-Digest
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