Germans abandon hope of US 'no-spy' treaty
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Unlike the German rabble, its political leaders (with very rare exceptions) are personally invested in the "trans-atlantic partnership". The underlying assumption on the German side is of course that this is a partnership among equals.
Team Merkel is hoping sooo bad that a high-ranking US official will come out to tell them that they haven't been just a bunch of chumps. I wonder how they will react now that it has become clear that that won't happen.
They'll probably just step up their self-delusion game.
Germany should respond by giving asylum to Snowden.
With the current situation in Germany, Snowden would be dead or in a plane to Guantanamo in very little time. And I guess, even the German BND (comparable to the US NSA) would be helping. I would not trust any promises from a current German government -- by the way, how many US troops are in Germany? I guess, there is no count for US spies yet.
We have to remember, we are talking about our government, the same types that while fighting a war on drugs are also making deals with the Cartels that consolidates power under one and permits import of drugs into our country.
There was a person with a German passport years ago, he was wrongly held in Guantanamo for a while ... against all international rights. Even after they concluded, that there is no evidence against him, they still kept him for some years.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murat_Kurnaz
Do you think, only because Snowden has got some German looking waste-paper, the NSA will stop hunting him down?
Dream on!
But most people understand by asylum, that he comes to Germany.
I hope, you don't want to unembarrass Putin ;)
disclaimer: i grew up there
By the way - this is exactly the argumentation neo-Nazi parties parties proclaim all the time [1]. You must be in lack of any information about what is going on in European and German politics to state stuff like this...
It doesn't matter who says it or why. Germany, for better or worse, has little or no sovereignty.
I don't know of any historical countries with 50,000 foreign soldiers in them that were not vassals, let alone sovereigns.
Besides, no EU regulation is ever going to get passed that the German government doesn't want to.
The USA has had it good for a long time and has become very spoiled by it's priviledges.
Essentially, the US overplayed it's hand and there will be blow-back consequences.
I could imagine a terrorist living in Germany and the US asks for assistance obtaining him and the Germans tell the US to fuck off.
It doesn't even have to be a terrorist, it could be a person like Snowden. So, now, instead of assisting the US government, the Germans are actively working against them.
Or, I could see the Germans investing heavily in developing technologies that prevent spying. Germany could become a place where you learn how to NOT be spied on.
All this because the US Government doesn't know how to treat allies and respect sovereignty.
America's economy is it's greatest vulnerability, and other countries could do great damage to it if they banded together and gave them the finger back.
Australia wasn't going to send troops into the illegal Iraq war... then they did and within a couple of weeks signed never-before-seen trade deals with the US that were extremely good for the Australian economy.
When asked if he was pressured into making that decision or lose all trade with the US, the Prime Minster looked straight at the camera with a "what was I going to do" expression, and said nothing.
I don't think that will ever happen. Dismantling a terrorist group is such a decidedly good thing that I'm sure everyone can agree on acting together. (Note though that the terrorist threat is greatly exaggerated (like in: it is several orders of magnitude less dangerous than the media implies).)
> It doesn't even have to be a terrorist, it could be a person like Snowden. So, now, instead of assisting the US government, the Germans are actively working against them.
You are kind of mixing positive and negative visions here. Supporting whistle blowers like Snowden should be a matter of course for a democratic nation.
This is already happening. The Washington Post had a story in November about how Berlin has become a new haven for leakers & privacy activists. Of course, it probably now makes Berlin one of the most heavily spied-on cities in the world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/leakers-privacy-a...
But of course it might harm the US in the future. There might come the day, that people in Germany and in other countries wake up. Also the US behavior hurts them in south american companies and at least in China. The south american people are fed up with the US behavior already!
Presumably you're referring to the US invasion of Iraq.
But I don't think something like the German refusal to cooperate back then is going to happen again. All that matters is money, and German's economy is (solely) based on exports. They need the American consumers for their own good, and German cooperations will make sure they keep their markets.
After the end of the cold war the British reduced their bases to 4 (and those will be gone by 2019 too), the Russians left 1994 and the French, I don't know, would need to look it up.
The US has afair about 40k troops in Germany. They use Germany for their bases to be closer to the hot spots like Iraq and Afganistan. You might say that 40k is not much, but the whole German Bundeswehr has only 186k soldiers, so 40k is quite a lot of foreign soldiers (+ the british and french leftovers). That is of course after a big reduction after the end of the cold war.
You could say that it does not explain or prove anything but it does. It explains why even if Germany were independent economy wise (which their are not) they still wouldn't be able to say "Fuck you NSA".
They could very much say "Fuck you NSA and the horse you rode in on and your little dog as well", and all it would lead to is lengthy diplomatic posturing and economic damage to both sides (and the USA is at least as dependant on Germany economywise as the other way round).
I too was convinced, that the west is so much better than say China or Russia ... Today I still don't like China and Russia, but things have changed ....
I don't belive it at all.
And yes, the US (as well as german) bases pump really much money into local economies. And local economies are suffering from closed down bases a lot.
What happens when your old rules of warfare aren't followed by your new enemy? Do you stand by those rules or adapt to the new reality?
Targeted drone strikes based on human and data intelligence is light years beyond declaring official war and shelling/bombing an entire region to the ground with no regard to what side the inhabitants may be on.
You're creating a false dichotomy between "targeted" drone strikes and shelling and bombing an entire region. By the way, each perpetrator of shelling and bombing entire regions has historically made similar claims of "targeting/precision".
How do we balance our tolerance for casualties with our tolerance of more and more effective weapons?
My point was not to say that drone strikes were wrong or right, only that the technology shouldn't be on trial, the intelligence, effectiveness and purpose should be.
I'm sure when airplanes and modern firearms took over the battlefield many thought they were "unfair" and dehumanized the process or war. And I don't doubt that in the future we'll be equally scared of newer more effective weapons.
I don't agree that as technology gets better that the number of civilian deaths decrease. I would point to the atom bomb and chemical warfare. As drone technology gets cheaper, I don't see why civilian deaths would decrease. This is not an argument for ludditism.
You're presenting regional carpet bombing as the only alternative. This is not the case. There are alternatives other than drone strikes, and regional bombing that you seem to be ignoring.
Using your terms, how many countries is the US at "war" with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili... These are not wars, this is unilateral, self appointed world policing.
Unfortunately, the drone technology is not sufficient to guarantee accuracy. You can tell this because of how civilian deaths have been "redefined" by the US administration and the US military. Both refuse to publish their statistics. Historically, US intelligence has been anything but accurate, maybe the refusal to publish is another example of this.
I question the effectiveness of attacking funerals and weddings half way across the world, under the guise of preventing terrorism. Particularly with spectacular failures recently making the news.
The technology is not on trial, the US's reputation is. The technology has already been shown to be bunkum - the US's defence is that it's cheap bunkum. This isn't progress on any front. The US does not need cheap drone strikes in these countries, nor does it need to bomb the regions.
It's not the weapons people are scared of, it's who is using them.
[0] http://www.livingunderdrones.org/numbers/
[1] http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/25/confessions-of-an-a...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-...
What's next, dial-a-bomb? You do realize you are justifying tyranny with precisely the mechanism of the tyrant: this 'elite' state is 'better' than 'anything else'.
I can think of a 1,000 better ways to solve the peace problem than dropping bombs on kids. The US invests in Death machines. That same technology, with different people, could be just as easily used to deliver tools of life...
But, 'war happens', right? The right to murder another human 'just happens', out there in the big world.. sorry, but no. If you claim sovereignty, then you must not be sad when others disavow you of it. That is the price. The USA respects no sovereign but itself: tyranny.
The weak and fractured governments of Pakistan and Yemen want the US to bomb there. Yemen's being so weak it barely deserves the name.
The takeover of the German state by the National Socialist party was little more than a coup by a gang of thugs, psycopaths and criminals. The persecution of Jews and other minorities was just a convenient scapegoat to drag the majority of the population along. The horrible crimes perpretated during this period cannot in anyway be ascribed as a (popular) uprising.
No? My knowledge of history is rusty.
And of course it didn't help that previous military leaders had been worthless cowards who continued a losing war to a point where they could not longer sue for peace, then leave it to the newly formed democratic government to accept the onerous conditions imposed by the opponents and end up getting blamed for something they had neither caused not any choice in.
German started WW1, btw
So far so good for Merkel and friends. What probably upsetted them was that the German government was spied upon, too. Also, they were just second-grade allies, and the US was probably trading information with the UK for example, which they didn't share with the Germans (see the "Five Eyes" agreements). But it's hard to believe that any of this is news to the German government, if their intelligence agencies are any of their money worth.
So the big question is, why do they tolerate being spied on? I know, diplomacy is complicated, and you have to make a lot of delicate compromises, and there is a lot that you can't see from outside.
Nevertheless... Espionage is already punishable in Germany. If a German citizen is involved, they might even be charged with treason. If I were Merkel, I would just casually mention the possibility of pressing charges in this case (you can file charges against anonymous in Germany), and use this as leverage e.g. when negotiating trade agreements.
That is just theoretical stuff. Yes, theoretical there might be something like "treason" in some old law book .... But, I don't remember one "treason" prosecution in my life time in Germany, with exception maybe to the DDR-Spy with Willi Brand as chancellor ... wow is this long ago! Also, I think there should be filed charges against many people in Germanys current government because they don't stop the US to spy on German people and companies openly. But nothing happens.
Why, because in Germany there is no independent judiciary at all. There will be no prosecution without federal prosecutor, but all of them have to obey the government -- so no member of government or top politician will ever be prosecuted in Germany, whatever evil they do against the country or the people.
Germans should start understanding, that they don't live in freedom at all. It is just a mock-up.
Replace Germans with "Everyone".
After all there's and obvious disconnect between the various spy agencies and political process, with the former typically giving less than lip service to most treaties/laws in the past.
After the reunification many rights of the Nato allies (and especially the US) were still protected.
Germany would need discuss with the allies how to change these older treaties. Plus it would also need to discuss with the US the shutdown of various activities of the US in Germany and against German interests:
* spying on Germany on German ground. The US has lots of installations here.
* spying on Germany from the outside (like tapping communication cables outside Germany which are going to Germany)
* using Germany has a base for various wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, various conflicts in Africa). For example the US has the Central Military Command for Africa in Germany. Drone strikes are coordinated by the US from Germany. The US has logistics centrals for their intelligence agencies in Germany.
* using Germany for various extremely unpopular actions, like using Germany as a transport hub for kidnapped people who were brought to torture camps in Europe or even to places outside Europe
etc.etc.
I would be very meaningful in a symbolic sense. Germany and most of Western Europe are used to seeing themselves as close allies of the US since WW2.
With close allies you expect to be able to reach an acceptable level of trust on topics like spying, even though you know both sides are still going to do it at some level.
By not being able to sign this agreement the message for Germans / US relations is "we trust you just like we trust the Chinese". That will likely lead to a weakening of past alliances...
The National Security Agency was the only American intelligence agency that was aware that East Germany was to take action to deal with the brain drain problem, i.e. the outflow of East-Germans via Berlin. On 9 August 1961, the NSA intercepted an advance warning information of the East German Communist Party's plan to close the intra-Berlin borders between East- and West-Berlin completely for foot traffic. The interagency intelligence Watch Committee assessed that this intercept "might be the first step in a plan to close the border." This warning reached not U.S. President John F. Kennedy until noon on August 13, 1961, who was vacationing in his yacht off the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. While Kennedy was angry that he had no advance warning, he was relieved that the East Germans and the Soviets had only divided Berlin without taking any action against West Berlin's access to the West. However he denounced the Berlin Wall, whose erection worsend the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
"Welcoming the fact that the German people, freely exercising their right of self-determination, have expressed their will to bring about the unity of Germany as a state so that they will be able to serve the peace of the world as an equal and sovereign partner in a united Europe;"
"(1) The French Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America hereby terminate their rights and responsibilities relating to Berlin and to Germany as a whole. As a result, the corresponding, related quadripartite agreements, decisions and practices are terminated and all related Four Power institutions are dissolved."
"(2) The United Germany shall have accordingly full sovereignty over its internal and external affairs."
Sorry to insert fact...
>A government spokesman said the talks between the US and Germany were ongoing and they hoped to “get something in the next three months.”
I hope, that slowly some people in Germany wake up. The success of Merkel shows, that many still dream their econony wonder (German: "Wirtschaftswunder") dream of the 70s. But the Germans do not realize, that they have been mucked around. Germans are the country in Europe that has sold their interests most to the US, maybe with the exception of Britain.
I guess, egoistic behavior and stupidity is just very widespread.
Kinda hits the NSA nail on the head.