WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama should “stop apologizing” for the National Security Agency surveillance program that has “saved thousands of lives,” U.S. Rep. Peter King said Sunday.
Disclosures of the extent of the agency program have upset politicians from Brasilia to Berlin. European Union leaders said last week that they would seek a trans-Atlantic accord on espionage after Der Spiegel magazine reported the NSA targeted German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone and Le Monde newspaper said the agency collected telecommunications data in France.
“The president should stop apologizing, stop being defensive,” King, R-N.Y .,said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “The reality is the NSA has saved thousands of lives - not just in the United States but also in France and Germany and throughout Europe.”
The program gathers “valuable intelligence which helps not just us but also helps the Europeans,” King said.
The agency’s operations have also prompted some Europeans to call for a suspension of talks for a free-trade zone between the European Union and the U.S., while Merkel, whose country is export-oriented, has rejected those calls.
NSA Director Keith Alexander informed Obama in 2010 about secret operations targeting Merkel, and the president didn’t demand the spying be stopped, Bildam Sonntag reported, citing unidentified U.S. intelligence officials.
The agency, in a statement distributed by the White House, denied the Bild am Sonntag report.
“General 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,” the agency said. “News reports claiming otherwise are not true.”
Obama apologized to Merkel in a telephone exchange Wednesday and said that he would have stopped the purported spying had he known about it, Der Spiegel reported, citing unidentified chancellery officials.
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said “the bigger news story” would be “if the United States intelligence services weren’t trying to collect information that would protect U.S. interests both home and abroad.”
“We should collect information that’s helpful to the United States’ interests,” Rogers said.
Rogers offered one of the most vigorous defenses ofU.S. surveillance activities, saying that much of the anger and resentment they have engendered was the result of misunderstandings.
Rogers said the program in question - particularly with regard to 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, “they would be applauding and popping Champagne corks.”
The widely reported notion that the agency had monitored 70 million French phone calls, Rogers said, was “100 percent wrong, and that’s why this is so dangerous.”
Reporters who had seen one security agency slide provided by Edward Snowden, a former agency contract employee, “misinterpreted some of the acronyms at the bottom of the slide and saw this70 million phone call figure - this was about a counterterrorism program that had nothing to do with French citizens,” Rogers asserted.
The congressman said that reports of the monitoring of Merkel’s phone calls were incomplete, fragmentary and, therefore, misleading.
In neither the French nor the German case did Rogers offer any elaboration on the agency’s programs.
The Der Spiegel report, published Saturday, cited a document - apparently from an agency database - that indicated Merkel’s cellphone was first listed as a target of surveillance before she became leader of Germany in 2005.
The disclosure that Merkel’s cellphone may have been monitored since 2002 - the year she became leader of the opposition in Parliament - raised questions about whether other top German leaders had also been monitored, German officials said.
Eavesdropping activities were run out of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin as well as in about 80 other embassies and consulates around the world, including 19 in Europe, the magazine reported, citing another document leaked by Snowden.
If it were disclosed that diplomatic facilities were being used to do spying, “serious harm” could be done to relations with host countries, Der Spiegel reported one document as saying.
But the magazine said it was not clear from the leaked documents whether intelligence agencies had been listening to Merkel’s conversations or whether they had simply been collecting connection data.
German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said Sunday that U.S. intelligence agencies broke German laws if they monitored cellphones in the country.
Information for this article was contributed by Shobhana Chandra, Kevin Costelloe and Carter Dougherty of Bloomberg News; by Brian Knowlton of The New York Times; and by Michael Birnbaum of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/28/2013