McCain: Obama owes Merkel an apology

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) says that it was a “mistake” for the United States to spy on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and that President Barack Obama owes her an apology.

“Knowing how angry Angela Merkel was, he should have apologized,” McCain said to German weekly Der Spiegel on Sunday. “You know, I’ve had to do that on numerous occasions in my life. The pain doesn’t last very long.”

Der Spiegel published a report on October 26 which showed Merkel’s cellphone had been listed by the National Security Agency’s Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002, and that her cellphone number was still listed in June 2013.

Reports also revealed Washington used the US Embassy in Berlin as a base for surveillance operations.

But the White House said Obama was oblivious to the fact that the NSA was targeting world leaders, including Merkel, and that he ordered the spy agency to end its espionage program after learning about it.

McCain further said, “Friends spy on friends…We all know that, but there have been certain boundaries. Those boundaries were probably, to some degree, there because we didn’t have the capabilities we have now. But when you go to the point where you invade someone’s privacy, the leader of certainly Europe, if not one of the most foremost leaders in the world, Angela Merkel, then it was a mistake.”

“You don’t have to invade someone’s privacy in that fashion in order to obtain that information,” he added.

The senator also said that there has not been “sufficient congressional oversight” of the NSA.

The NSA came under harsh criticism after Edward Snowden, its former contractor, leaked documents about top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and other US intelligence agencies are snooping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.