Brussels, 17/12/2013 (Agence Europe) - Hearing Edward Snowden, the former NSA consultant at the origin of the spying scandal, as some in the European Parliament would wish (the ECR Group is against and the EPP wants a “live” hearing), is not a good idea, said US Republican Mike Rogers on Tuesday 17 December during a visit to Brussels. The head of the “intelligence” subcommittee of the US House of Representatives - who came to meet, inter alia, the chair of the foreign affairs committee, Elmar Brok (EPP, Germany), and the rapporteur of the fact-finding committee on surveillance, Claude Moraes (S&D, UK) - felt it was not good to hear someone who is being sought, who has stolen documents, and who has been a danger to security. The hearing in question would cause a reaction on the other side of the Atlantic that would not be of a kind to promote constructive dialogue between the two parties (EU and US), the representative warned. Rogers sounded another note of caution to the Europeans, saying that radical measures such as the suspension of Safe Harbour or SWIFT agreements would not be welcome either and could even, at least for Safe Harbour, do more harm to European companies than to US companies. Viviane Reding herself last week told the EP it was not relevant to suspend the agreement backed by nearly 95% of European companies quizzed on the matter. The US representative justified the activity of the NSA and pointed out, on the basis of public figures available, that 54 plots, “US and EU combined” had been defused thanks to surveillance programmes. Rogers even put forward statistics whereby, for every one plot defused in the United States by NSA, three others are defused in Europe. His claims were made the day after a federal judge in the United States considered these surveillance programmes “illegal” and said that there was no proof that such surveillance had thwarted any attack at all. Moraes is to present his preliminary report on Wednesday. (SP/transl.jl)