Did Lying NSA Chief Alexander Just Accuse Obama of Lying?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/28-3



I noted the other day the reason the non-denial confirmation that NSA wiretapped Angela Merkel raised the stakes for what President obama told the Chancellor in June about the spying. Did he give assurances she hadn’t been tapped?
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander.

If he did, anonymous leakers from the NSA’s vicinity suggest, he knowingly lied.

In Germany, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS) had listed Merkel’s phone number since 2002. The number was still on the list – marked as “GE Chancellor Merkel” – weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June, raising the possibility that the German leader had been under surveillance for more than a decade. In an SCS document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a “not legally registered spying branch” in the US embassy in Berlin, the exposure of which would lead to “grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government”.

The White House refused to comment on that report – or others that emerged in Germany overnight, raising questions about how much Obama personally knew about the spy operation.

[snip]

The German tabloid Bild reported that Obama was personally informed about US surveillance against Merkel by the director of the NSA, Keith Alexander, in 2010, and allowed the operation to continue. The newspaper cited “a secret intelligence employee who is familiar with the NSA operation against Merkel”. The Bild article also claimed that intelligence gathered by US spies based in Berlin was not channelled to NSA headquarters in Forte Meade, Maryland, but directly to the White House.