In Latest NSA Spying Scandal, World Learns Obama Lied Again; Congress Furious it Was Spied On

• In Latest NSA Spying Scandal, World Learns Obama Lied Again; Congress Furious it Was Spied On
  by Tyler Durden, www.zerohedge.com 
  In January 2014, during the scandalous aftermath of Edward Snowden’s NSA snooping revelations, one which revealed the US had been spying on its closest allies for years, Obama banned U.S. eavesdropping on leaders of close friends and allies and promised he would begin reining in the vast collection of Americans’ phone data in a series of limited reforms.
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  The president lied, and the privacy concerns of “people around the world” have clearly never once been taken into account in Obama’s policies and procedures.
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  Just three days prior, on January 14 2014, Vermont Senator and current Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders had written an email to then NSA Chief Keith Alexander asking if the NSA has or is currently spying “on members of Congress or other American elected officials.” The letter went on to define spying as including “gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business.”
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  The response: the National Security Agency’s director, responding to questions from independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, says the government is not spying on Congress…. “Nothing NSA does can fairly be characterized as ‘spying on members of Congress or other American elected officials.” Alexander wrote in the letter, dated Friday and released Tuesday.
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  The former NSA head also lied.
  We know this because in the latest WSJ report on the NSA’s spying scandal from this evening, we find that even though Obama announced two years he would curtail eavesdropping on friendly heads of state, the spying continues and “behind the scenes, the White House decided to keep certain allies under close watch. Topping the list was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
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  The spying, or rather counterespionage, was in order to facilitate the US-Iran nuclear negotiations and deal which took place this summer over Netanyahu’s firm objection to scuttle any lifting of the Iran embargo (an embargo whichIran had skirted for years by importing billions of dollars worth of gold from Turkey via Dubai).
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  That in itself would not be quite so scandalous considering the frosty diplomatic relations between the two nations in recent years, if it didn’t also involve the direct and indirect spying by the NSA and the executive branch, on members of Congress.
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  read more.

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