Deny or lie – your choice
Germany canceled a Cold War-era surveillance pact with the United States and Britain on Friday, the first concrete action taken by Berlin in response to revelations by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden about those countries’ alleged electronic eavesdropping operations.
Chancellor Angela Merkel had raised the issue of alleged National Security Agency spying with President Barack Obama when he visited Berlin in June. But with weeks to go before national elections, opposition parties had demanded clarity about the extent to which her government knew of the intelligence gathering operations directed at Germany and German citizens.
Government officials have insisted that U.S. and British intelligence were never given permission to break Germany’s strict privacy laws. But they conceded that an agreement dating back to the late 1960s gave the U.S., Britain and France the right to request German authorities to conduct surveillance operations within Germany to protect their troops stationed there.
“The cancellation of the administrative agreements, which we have pushed for in recent weeks, is a necessary and proper consequence of the recent debate about protecting personal privacy,” Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said in a statement…
The official said Germany was currently in talks with France to cancel its part of the agreement as well…
A natural result of the strategy which seems to be the style of the lawyer in the White House, e.g., if you can claim a distorted “legal” basis for corruption it’s OK. Act surprised when others disagree.
Obama should announce it intends to send those nazi’s a bill for protecting their asses from the Russians and for airlifting shit over the Berlin wall.
Yes. They must obey the new
ReichEmpire.The sour krauts don’t need to obey (they just showed that), but they do need to pay up.
I would immediately remove the American bases from Germany and tell Putin he is free to settle up on that war.
Seriously! Those bases of ours were never really for Germany, they were then and still are, for us. What better place to watch the Russians and the eastern block countries then from their own backyard.
This is a masquerade! it always was.
But still, you could let the jp40 spill all over everything and give them a mask they can’t ever never take off. Negligance? — “no so much”, says many a supervisor.
We should have removed our bases from Germany long time ago. Thumbs up for Germans on this action though, they have recent historical experience with fascism. They understand what NSA program really means.
Well, for once, dusanmal, I agree whole heartedly.
Germany should charge us rent on the bases which we should have cleared out of about 6 months after the Berlin Wall came down.
Actually the Germans will always be worse off if they try to get rid of the American bases. The reason is that in the agreement made in WWII I believe that the ground and everything on the base belongs to the US and Germany would have to pay the America to get everything back.
It is even funnier, the Americans can decide to get rid of the base any time they want and Germany would HAVE to pay them to leave.
At least that is from a German professor who did his mandatory service during the cold war.
Ohhhh! I’m so shockecd that I twisted my lederhosen. Why on earth would Germay be surprised…no one else is.
WOW…. Living in the past is what keeps America down. We have paid enough. you guys have no idea about modern Germany. Nazis? Really? Had to go there on the first comment?
Sad.
Agreed.
Sorry, I recently saw Saving Private Ryan and gig pissed off again. Why did you have to slow stab that poor young American soldier like that?
Shame
Yeah it’s not like the US had any self-interest in that whole thing, right?
By the way, calling germans of today nazis us just low-class. How many of that era’s nazis are alive today?
Also, do you actually think that Germans of that era was somehow evil to start with? No, a financial depression after the first world war coupled with a charismatic leader did that. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Germany.
Grow up, moron.
Yesterdays’ enemies are today’s allies has a corollary: Today’s allies will be tomorrow’s enemies.
Same as it ever was.
From the moment Reagan‘s minion Pointdexter uttered the phrase Total Information Awareness he laid the foundation and ushered in a world of complete and final surveillance and its corollary a world of complete and utter deviousness.
This was all predicted in a 1977 sci-fi novel titled The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert. Herbert just didn’t have the century in which this would happen right.
Well, with elections in Deutschland coming up, the folks there probably are interested in voting for no Stasi. In Amerika, there is little concern over such matters.
http://mercurymedia.org/programmes/stasi/
Does seem like living under the Third Reich does make a government sensitive to complaints of Government Secrecy and Surveillance programs.
NOT sensitive enough not to do it—afterall, we are talking about the evil of concentrated power===but at least sensitive enough to say you will stop when caught doing it.
Raise your hand: who here thinks the spying in Germany will stop?
Good class.
As stated, I don’t really have a “personal issue” with being spied on by my Gubment…. but I do think it makes gubment stupid, lazy, and ineffectual. Kinda like if mpod selected a group of Pedros to be our Congress.
Pros and Cons to all we do. Same with Gubment spying. We will catch a few terrorists. It is very expensive and invasive. It will be misused.
Same as it ever was.
Kinda like if mpod selected a group of Pedros to be our Congress.
As opposed to letting a bunch of self-selected 1%er millionaires get together to figure out how to screw us?
I’d sooner let 535 random strangers be in charge, even if they were all Pedros (what are the odds of that?)
We’d actually get representative government rather than 1%er d0ofusses who think women don’t get pregnant from rape, who think that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for Mexicans, and other acts of sheer stupidity.
Can we shut down NATO now?
It’s purpose is to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. With one fell swoop, all three have been cancelled.
What about the jobs? It’s a jobs program .
A solution is to let the military invade Detroit and then rebuild it. Everybody’s happy.
That solution has been proposed at several points.
Let the <whoever> immigrate to the US but they have to settle in Detroit for a minimum of twenty-five years.
That would rebuild Detroit’s economic base while giving us somewhere to put all of these pains-in-th, uh, troubled people.
That idea has some clever bits to it. But with folks sneaking across guarded borders as they do, whats to stop them from taking the noon train out of Detroit once they learn what Detroit is?
Hmmmm….build a wall around Detroit?…..More clever bits?
Alternate. As I may have mentioned prior , give the LGBT community an incentive to move into parts of Detroit, tax free, for 10-15 years.
In about 5 years, that place would look like Disneyland. Thai restaurants, flower shops, Bistro lounges and twice a year parades. Then the straights might move in to fuck it up with Walmart but it would still be a recovery.
Maybe Germany will experience a piece dividend, now. I say maybe, because the US didn’t, when the Berlin wall came down. The pro-defense politicians can always find a way to spend surplus tax dollars. When the original reason for allocating them, goes away. We’ll have to see (or rather Germans will) if their government is any more honest about refunding its defense surplus marks.