News:

President Obama must be counting down the last few days till the end of October, for it has been a month of mayhem for US prestige on the world stage. Today, 28th October, the US ambassador to Spain was summoned by the Spanish government to explain the revelations in two Spanish newspapers, El Mundo and El País, that the National Security Agency (NSA) has collected data on 60 million Spanish telephone conversations. Only one week earlier, the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, had said with uncanny prescience at a conference in Brussels that: “Spying activities aren’t proper among partner countries and allies”. He was, at the time, referring to earlier revelations about NSA spying operations on other European Union partner countries.

Earlier this week, a string of revelations from the German media led by Der Spiegel showed that the NSA was even monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, and had been doing so since 2002. Angela Merkel became Chancellor in 2005, which means that the NSA must have been targeting a great many influential German politicians. A further indication of the scale of the spying operation is that it was being run from within the US embassy in Berlin, rather than a hacker’s terminal in New York. The White House refused to deny that the German Chancellor’s phone had been spied on, preferring to insist that currently her phone is not being monitored. As for the claim in Germany’s Bild am Sonntag, that Obama was informed about the monitoring of Angela Merkel’s phone in 2010, the NSA did deny that.

Comment:

These allegations, as well as those made previously about spying on the French and other nations are based upon the huge leak of documents made available by Edward Snowden, who was formerly a US defence contractor. Snowden’s documents also reveal the cost of US intelligence operations, which have a current ‘black budget’ of $52.6 billion. This, however, is dwarfed by the US national debt, which passed the previous ceiling of $16.7 trillion only after Congressional approval for raising the ceiling that was delayed due to internal wrangling. The US was left exposed at the beginning of the new fiscal year on 1st October, and was only days away from a disastrous default on its debts. Tens of thousands of government employees were sent home without pay and services to the American people were put on hold for many days until an agreement was reached. The financial crisis even had ludicrous implications for the spying scandal. The Guardian newspaper reports that the US sent four representatives to a Human Rights hearing today, but that they were exposed to condemnation for being unable to discuss details of the US spying operations on account of: “the October government shutdown prevented them from adequate preparation.”

The fact that the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and that its military might can compensate for its political woes means that for now it can bully its friends and enemies alike. This strange imbalance will not be able, however, to avail it forever.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by

Abdullah Robin