Tip of the hat to joanneleon for part of this story.
First it came out that Obama KNEW all about the surveillance on Merkel.
So some errant NSA person unnamed had piped up:
a report in Bild am Sonntag published Sunday cites an unnamed NSA official who said that the US leader instead ordered the program be escalated.
This has all the earmarks of a CIA hit, but it is attributed to NSA personnel.
Then things really got wooly. Follow me over the orange twist.
So now the Guardian weighs in with some weirdness:
The US National Security Agency was forced on Sunday to deny that its director ever discussed a surveillance operation against the German chancellor with President Barack Obama, as the White House tried to contain a full-scale diplomatic crisis over espionage directed at allied countries.
....in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. It said that when Obama spoke to Merkel over the phone on Wednesday, he assured the German leader he had not previously known her phone had been monitored.
.....the NSA said in a statement that Alexander "did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel. News reports claiming otherwise are not true".
Now the fat is sizzling when it goes whizzing into that fan.
Did Obama know and when did he know it?
WHY did the NSA do such a thing on its own?
Has the NSA turned rogue?
Glenn Greenwald points out that Merkel and other leaders were indifferent to some extent about the thought that their citizens were being targeted by NSA, but it seems to have hit nerves when they discover that they themselves were targeted.
Oh if ONLY all so called leaders were inflicted with all the things they inflict on their citizens!
So here we have a case where, If Obama did not know and congress was NOT informed of the spying on world leaders who IS watching the watchers?
If NSA is so cavalier about spying on everybody, who are they blackmailing? Congress critters? Obama? SCOTUS? FISA Court judges?