14 DAY TRIAL // The US ambassador in Germany admitted that it wasn’t exactly the greatest idea for the United States to tap the phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel. In fact, it was a stupid one.
“We have done a number of stupid things, Chancellor Merkel’s phone being one of them,” said John Emerson in front of the VBKI trade association at the Waldorf Astoria in Berlin.
He is, of course, referring to the reports from last year indicating that Angela Merkel was one of the many state leaders that the United States was keeping tabs on. Embarrassingly for the White House, the president had just stated that the US did not spy on Merkel when the press report was delivered with this particular information.
The ambassador apologized for the trust issues developed between the two nations following revelations about the NSA’s mass surveillance practices. He admitted that fixing the trust will take a lot of work and will be a lengthy process.
“I understand the differences in the experiences of the German people and the recent experiences of Americans, as well as the impact that these different experiences have had on our respective attitudes to intelligence gathering,” he said.
Emerson also addressed a big question that he was asked, namely if the US was engaging in industrial espionage. Despite the fact that he answered in the negative, reports published so far based on NSA leaked files indicate exactly the opposite.
It was also recently revealed that Merkel wasn’t the only Chancellor the NSA had spied on. A new report indicates that by 2002, Gerhard Schroeder was listed as number 388 on NSA’s espionage targets list.
The European Union as a whole has criticized the United States’ mass surveillance habits, especially when it comes to state leaders and diplomats.