Since National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed the NSA's ineffective and illegal dragnet surveillance programs in June, the White House has scrambled and dissembled to explain the surveillance. The New York Times reports on the latest Executive branch doublespeak:

New details about the monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone by the National Security Agency further stoked the German government’s anger on Sunday and raised two questions: Why did the United States target her as early as 2002, and why did it take five years for the Obama administration to put a halt to the surveillance?

The N.S.A. statement said that “General Alexander did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel. News reports claiming otherwise are not true.”

On Sunday evening a senior administration official said of the spying on allies that the White House believed that “it’s not that the N.S.A. or the intelligence community were going rogue or operating out of bounds.”

The Executive branch "answers" are more confusing than clarifying. NSA first denied that Obama knew about the surveillance:However, the omnipotent oft-quoted anonymous "senior administration official" attempted to debunk the obvious implication of NSA spying on allied heads of state without telling the President:The government is too busy trying to keep its misleading statements straight and defend itself after being caught red-handed listening in on innocent people to recognize the outrageousness of telling the American public and the world that "The NSA is in the President's control, but doesn't inform the President of a mission to tap the cell phone of close allied heads of state." Either of this incongruous alternatives - an out-of-control surveillance state with an uniformed or intentionally ignorant executive or an executive who sees no qualms about betraying key allies - should be wholly unacceptable in a constitutional democracy.