This seems an odd article to express this sentiment on. Whether or not the canard is used in other contexts to whitewash civil liberties abuses, in this specific example, it is being used correctly.

If your spy agencies are not going to gather intelligence on foreign world leaders, who precisely should they be gathering intelligence on? If your answer is that there is no acceptable use of intelligence gathering facilities, that is fine, but that is a much more extreme belief than the one that says it is ok for the NSA to spy on the leaders of France.