Smoke Bombs Made in USA

The German delegation sent to Washington to get answers about the National Security Agency affair has probably been courteously informed of two things: First, Obama really does wish to end the spying on allied leaders. Second, the Senate intelligence committee, at the urging of Obama’s fellow Democrat Dianne Feinstein, is supposed to be investigating why the NSA kept their surveillance of Merkel a secret from the president for so long.

This sounds like a desire to put all the facts on the table — if Sen. Feinstein didn’t take the preliminary results and try to use them to pull Obama out of the line of fire. She describes the scenario as “bad” spies against a “good” president who knew nothing about any of it. The extent to which the White House is committed to damage control is evident in the fact that Obama’s staff has launched this at The Wall Street Journal: The president just found out about the surveillance of Merkel this summer and gave the order to stop. In light of yesterday’s report that the NSA and the U.S. Department of State were both involved in eavesdropping on world leaders, there is a strong impression that the U.S. government is setting off a lot of smoke bombs to shelter Obama. That is not good news for the visitors from Germany.