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Press TV has conducted an interview with Darnell Stephen Summers, Vietnam War veteran from Berlin about the head of the European parliament requesting Washington provide clarity about spying of Europeans as revealed by hunted whistleblower Edward Snowden. The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.

- I wanted to get your perspective on this, not only on the European Union being involved now in this spying issue - being spied on itself - but overall as a war veteran how do you look at this entire issue?

- Well, it’s reminiscent of the disclosures that were made during the Vietnam war actually with the Pentagon Papers that were provided by Daniel Ellsberg and then given to Senator Mike Gravel to read into the Congressional record.

The United States has had a long history of surveilling its own population and on other governments - this is nothing new. It’s part of a whole program of surveillance that goes back hundreds of years actually. Of course, as technology advances, the capabilities also multiply exponentially.

If we go back to the end of the Second World War we know by the revelations of CIA-released documents that the SS and also the Gestapo agents were recruited into the CIA, which followed the Office of Strategic Services after the Second World War.

And so the question that basically needs to be asked, even with that knowledge, is what input did the Nazis, who were defeated and who were recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency - what input did they have and what effect did that have and what was the result of that even to this day?

As I said this before this is a long standing program, a long-standing effort by the United States government to surveil on its citizens and that’s not going to stop.

Along with that we have to understand that the United States acts with complicity - on the one hand you have Germany with all of its protestations and all of its public posture on this now-revealed surveillance, but on the other hand their intelligence agencies are working hand in hand with the United States.

There is no doubt in my mind that the German secret services and German intelligence know full well and probably acted with and aided the United States in its surveillance of German citizens.

I was a victim of surveillance in the 1970s in the very famous Berlin Club case where the United States was revealed to have had its agents surveilling on United States citizens outside the United States and that was patently against the law.

They have a long history of doing this.

- Are we effectively living in the times such as is spoken in the novel 1984 by George Orwell?

- George Orwell would be shocked today. I think his novel pales in comparison to what is unfolding today. Of course, it was a harbinger of things to come. It kind of gave us a window into the potential of these governments to really oppress their own people - to surveil on their own people; to jail their own people.

In fact it’s a two-pronged attack. On the one hand you are surveilling on your people, but you also want to strike fear in to their hearts. You want them to be intimidated by your actions. Yes.