Slovak PM wants to fire defense minister over wiretapping of news media

Slovakia’s prime minster, Iveta Radicova,(pictured) says she will ask the country’s president to dismiss defense minister Lubomr Galko, who authorized wiretaps on journalists from the daily Pravda and the TV channel TA3. The journalists were wiretapped by military intelligence. Radicova said she is asking for his recall because the intelligence service reports to him. “We lack elementary controls over secret services, and I have to ask myself why not,” she said. “Maybe it is because we had governments and prime ministers who misused secret services. Wiretapping news people, whether legal or illegal, is incompatible with the principles of democracy on which the present government rests.” She recalled that these were the methods of the Communist secret service before that regime collapsed in the former Czechoslovakia.