Note: Merkel is not the only world leader upset with Obama. Add in the Brazilian leader, the French and most of the leaders in the Middle East.
In an
angry exchange with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel has compared
the snooping practices of the US with those of the Stasi, the ubiquitous and
all-powerful secret police of the communist dictatorship in East Germany, where she grew up.
The
German chancellor also told the US
president that America's
National Security Agency cannot be trusted because of the volume of material it
had allowed to leak to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to the New York Times.
Livid
after learning from Der Spiegel magazine that the Americans were listening in
to her personal mobile phone, Merkel confronted Obama with the
accusation: "This is like the Stasi."
The
newspaper also reported that Merkel was particularly angry that, based on the
disclosures, "the NSA clearly couldn't be trusted with
private information, because they let Snowden clean them out."
Snowden
is to testify on the NSA scandal to a European parliament inquiry next month,
to the anger of Washington
which is pressuring the EU to stop the testimony. . . . . see The Guardian for the rest of this story.
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