US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says
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...did I fall asleep and wake up in an alternate universe. This behaviour is ridiculous. The U.S. got caught with their hands in the cookie jar and they're threatening other countries with huge diplomatic consequences because they're willing to stand up and protect the guy who embarrassed them?
How about they just say, "Hey, yeah, we fucked up, we'll fix it. Sorry guys" and be done with it. They're walking down a very bad diplomatic path. If you want to win the war on terror, try making friends instead of enemies; your current path is not leading in that direction.
I'm actually astonished given Germany's strength in Europe that they didn't just say GFY! We're not going to be seen to be bullied by you in front of all of Europe. You don't make the rules here and if you want to play that game, it goes both ways. You already have a significant portion of the middle east unhappy with you - we stood by you on that; you have Russia against you - we stood by you on that too; do you really want to turn Europe, your only remaining ally against you too? Because that's where this path is leading. As mighty as your military is, it would not stand against the rest of the world if you keep up this idiotic behaviour.
There's not many outcomes to that scenario if you look at the budgets involved.
Not sure where you got that idea but the US is a net exporter of both.
> The rest of us are tired of your shit
But apparently not tired enough to actually do anything.
Of course, your entire premise is flawed as we could support ourselves Not sure where you got your numbers from, but they're wrong.
It's exactly this attitude that is gradually turning the world against them.
The full quote :)
As for Europe, sadly Ukraine is reminding us all that the choice is between being American client states or Russian client states. At least as American client states we get rock and roll and blue jeans, right comrades?
There is much truth in jest... :-/
That's an absurd statement.
Germany isn't a sovereign country. Having foreign (US) troops on your soil makes you dependable on the policies of that foreign country. There are many other reasons why Germany cannot (and doesn't want) to "say GFY" to the US.
If the German economy was capable of taking on re-unification costs, Germany could easily handle greater autonomy w.r.t. the US.
It's not like we could not shoulder the economic impact, in terms of the gross domestic product that's a tiny amount, it's rather that in terms of how the political landscape looks like we don't want to. (It would probably also require to sift more budget to the military etc.).
However, I doubt that the US military would give up its Airbases in Ramstein and Frankfurt over Snowden. They're far to important in the current conflicts in the middle east.
Germany wants the money the bases bring and likely the perceived protection they present. If they didn't see the latter then the money point is key. How much does the US spend to maintain those bases and do they pay fees beyond that to have them?
As a Libertarian I would be more than happy seeing us out of every country that is peaceful. We have no real need to be there in this day and age with the ease at which power can be projected. I won't go into the question of being in certain other countries because of disagreements which led to war, declared or not.
Each Chancellor has to sign a paper called Kanzlerakte, that he agrees, to give up sovereignty at lot of cases, e.e. intelligence, military.
We have peace now since more than a few decades. It doesn't need a signed peace treaty to have peace in a country.
The 2+4 contract has explicitly stopped the allied control.
US barracks are extraterritoriality zones, and US soldiers are not under German jurisdiction.
And better read the 2+4 itself, and not 3rd party writeups like Wikipedia.
US barracks are not extraterritoriality zones, please cite your claim.
"US soldiers are not under German jurisdiction", this is only partly true. It's part of the "NATO-Truppenstatut". With Art. 19 Abs. 3 Satz 1 ZA (Zusatzabkommen) the foreign soldiers are part of German jurisdiction.
Again, please cite your claims.
There were plenty of shenanigans going on between the U.S. and German politicians in the early BRD days. But the scanned document everyone's been passing around purporting to refer to the so-called Kanzlerakte is obviously a fake.
I've written about the "journalist" Udo Ulfkotte over the years and was pleased that he seemed to have faded from view, disappearing into the pages of the 9/11 Truther Site of Kopp Verlag. Ulfkotte distinguished himself as a racist and anti-Islam hatemonger, demanding that all Muslims be deported from Germany in order to create more Lebensraum for ethnic Germans. For years he has been publishing articles and books that distort the truth, or are outright lies. A few examples: Ulfkotte claimed that Muslims were waging a "fecal Jihad" against Germans"because Turkish women were allegedly defecating in fields of strawberries that were exported to Germany. He warned Germans to stay away from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, since black African "savages" were planning to rape and murder European visitors. Of course, President Obama is one those black African savages - or at least a 'half-breed" - whom he hates. He lied that Obama was persecuting Christians in the United States, and had given orders to burn Bibles. I could go on and on. Actually, I cannot identify any examples where the "journalist" Udo Ulfkotte reported truthfully about anything.
http://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2015...
All you have to do is put some labels on him, take things of out context, attribute things not said or done to the said person, and pretend to debunk him.
This way you never have to make the counterargument to the argument made by that person. You just dismiss him in whole.
I don't know if that's the case here, but considering the name-calling from the start, the typical labeling (racist, homophobe, islamophobe, Nazi, RT-shill), I'd say it fits.
As a non-Russian and non-US person, I find it way more balanced.
My Russian friends would probably laugh at what you're saying. You have to be very, very naive about what's happening in Russia these days to have that impression.
It's a kind of selection bias: the kind of Russian friends that laugh at RT are the kind of friends a westerner would make (especially if they are involved in entrepreneurship and IT or social media etc).
They are the kind of people with little experience of modern history and a strong western bias that westerners find everywhere (e.g. even in places like the Middle East, and make general examples out of them). They are not representative of the majority of Russian population, though, who predominantly voted for Putin.
Kind of like liberal lefties reading Counterpunch and the like are not representative of the majority of the US population.
Consequences are playing out in other arenas, weakly evidenced by Germany (and other close US allies)[1] joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)[2] which is an organization similar to the World Bank or IMF spearheaded by China.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2015/03/18/by...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Infrastructure_Investment...
Even more astonishing is they're openly admitting it (and thereby admitting weakness). My guess is they have ulterior reasons for admitting it now - perhaps to gain sympathy or be seen less as bullies during negotiations with Greece (http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-poll-kick-greece-out-...)
Trade is important. Some level of cooperation is good. But these are independent, powerful countries (especially Germany), and they ought to act like it.
I'm pretty sure the EU intelligence community is crapping themselves at the thought of a huge leak happening to them.
It's always struck me as bizarre that, at least in discussion forums like HN, the US is regarded as an unusually bad actor when it's simply the leader of the gang.
^The Eu itself doesn't have a spy organisation, but plenty of EU countries do.
Compared to the US, the scale might be rather tame, but that has more to do with the bloated US intelligence budget than with any "respect" for privacy on the part of the european intelligence services.
Meanwhile, in France there would be riots in the streets, ports would be blocked by truckers and the wheels would fall off everything - which is par for the course when anyone upsets the French :P
Friendship from the the US is like that friend who comes by, puts his muddy boots on your desk, tells you to fix his computer, stubs a cigarette out on the carpet, and on his way out punches a neighbour for looking at him funny. Once in a while he'll turn up with some guy he beat up, and tell you that this is evidence of his benevolent protection... and you'd better keep on my good side, bro. You wouldn't like me when I'm mad.
This act alone, if done publicly and loudly, would quite likely decrease any variety of terroristic threat to cooperating nations, merely through the act of disassociation with the USA, thus making their threats utterly toothless.
As it is, however, through TTIP and TPP the world is further embroiling themselves in the affairs of this embattled state, and matters can only worsen.
Democracy is a very, very low resolution way of making decisions. Politicians virtually never run on a platform of foreign policy. It's always domestic issues. Once they get elected on domestic issues they then implement whatever foreign policy they personally feel like.
There are three countries in Europe that, by themselves, have a larger GDP than Russia. The Soviet Union and Red Army are gone. As bellicose as Putin is, he is militarily bogged down in Ukraine. Europe has no need of a US "security blanket."
This is the same BS cold-war narratives in order to justify pressure on Russia, as if Russia will attempt to take over Europe or something, which is laughable. At least in the cold war era USSR was indeed more powerful, and had control over Eastern Europe.
The whole game is about replacing Russian leadership with some friendly Yeltsin like lackey figure, so foreign powers can pillage on Russian natural resources, contracts etc. They could not give a rats arse about "human rights" and the like, they just want to create the same devastation they created elsewhere already.
As if this were anything other than straw man argument:
LOL. There's no "security blanket" and no real security threats. The US and Europe are bigger security threats to the rest of the world than the inverse. You have to believe tons of propaganda to believe there's actually a danger to Western Europe or the US from outside. That's basically BS to justify control of key natural resources, trade routes, etc regions, like Iraq and the like.
The basic reason Europe doesn't say "fuck you" to the US is that for one, European and US elites are mostly working together, and second the US is a 100.000 pound gorilla, where Western European countries, post 1940 are not what they used to be. If France or the UK were the empires they were in the colonial times you'd see much more tension with the US to pursue their particular interests. But as it is, they are toothless, and it's an US world they have to live in.
The odd part is that the media seems to think it's all Putin, but the US is almost always referred to as the entity (as opposed to simply Obama).
Everyone seems to keep expecting the world to react, specifically the EU, but nothing seems to ever happen.
One the one hand, I am quite disappointed at the German government's lack of courage to stand up to the US.
On the other hand, if I was Snowden, I would not go to Germany even if the government was on their knees begging me to come here, given the number of US soldiers and intelligence operatives stationed in Germany. So the whole question if Germany should offer asylum to Snowden seems kind of hypothetical to me.
I'm sure it's the second one. A scared public accepts reforms that strengthen government power and budget shifts to allow more surveillance and less privacy.
Yes, the U.S has the best intelligence agency in the world, but Europe is closer to most hostile nations in the world. If EU said 'no sharing info with the US', wouldn't that be a much larger problem than the other way around?
But still, that's playing hardball.
Scott's fundamental assertion is that the news is a waste of time because it can't possibly influence his actions (apart from politically, but he's happy to vote off of voter information brochures provided with the ballot, a kind of news proxy).
The actors in this particular Snowden story are heads of state: Obama/Kerry/Hillary on the US side, and Merckel/Gabriel on the German side. At it's heart is the revelation by Gabriel to Greenwald (the author of the piece) that the US threatened Germany over Snowden.
We already know that the USG over-whelminging considers Snowden a criminal and a traitor. (And one of his precious few supporters in the Senate, Mark Udall(D-NM) lost his re-election campaign.
We already know that the USG has no moral scruples against taking any action it deems in it's interest. It has tortured and killed innocent people, lied to justify invading foreign countries, invaded the personal privacy of allied heads of state, and invaded the privacy of everyone in the world, including private US citizens and corporations.
We already know that the US public, the final arbiter of what is right and wrong, isn't outraged by any of this enough to make a serious difference at the polls.
What good does it do me to learn about one more way in which my government works against my interests and moral sensibilities?
And Udall is from CO, not NM.
The vice chancellor's statement is phrased to be as incendiary as possible, to throw USG under the bus and make it sound like the German government and USG are two separate entities with some high level information sharing. But given the USG military/listening outputs in Germany, how could anyone possibly think this is the case? The people in both sides' intelligence services are trying to protect against similar "threats" and their perspectives are more alike than different. We've seen specifics with FVEY, and it's prudent to assume that all USG allies are in similar conspiracies, with the countries' relative power just determining how many bargaining chips they have. Make no mistake - The German government is benefiting greatly from this information exchange and would never want to lose access.
Now, please don't peg me as defending this state of affairs. I'd love to see justice be served through political means, and I'd really love to see USG get taken down a few pegs to prevent the otherwise inevitable catastrophic collapse of the US. But justice isn't the driving force here - power is. And power tends to coalesce. If you find yourself thinking of a distinction between strategic information (wouldn't be shared with Russia) and protecting against terrorists threats (should be shared freely), you've entered their operating paradigm wherein governments protect each other by monitoring all individuals for threats.
NSA isn't the only entity doing full takes; it's just a (now prominent) nucleation point. Even if they disbanded tomorrow, many others will still be tapping those cables. The only way to protect against black hats, especially well coordinated global ones, is to secure the communications themselves.
Either that, or Germany would just shrug it's shoulders and resign itself to the fact that it wasn't going to get any of the "good" intel anymore... which seems unlikely to me.
So I think we're safe to assume that the "threat" was for the sake of keeping up appearances.
And Europe is reacting. France is strengthening its ties to the Maghreb and north African states again, Germany plans on increasing it's defense spending the first time since 1990, and from Top-Tier politicians the Idea of combined armed European Forces is voiced more and more. Additionally, The EU is actively charming the non-NATO-members like Finland into participation, and with its East-Europe policy adds more strategic debt and more economic powerhouses in waiting to their territory
Ironically, the Russian actions in Ukraine force Europe to stand closer together, and may as well lead to even tighter integration.
Additionally, if you take the military capability of France, GB, Germany, Italy and Finland, The necessity for an American "Proctection" is scarecely needed. If you add the extremely capable european defence industry, which in big parts was crippled by the "Standardization" enforced through the NATO leading members to buy US defence technology, and the well-educated "Mittelstand", an increasing US-Isolationism would only hurt in the short run.
As much as I would like it to be different, we are still at least one or two decades away from an effective European deterrent against Russian aggression. If only because of our inability to coordinate decisive responses and our unwillingness to pool military resources in a European army, rather than split them into national militaries with incredibly amounts of redundancy and ineffectiveness.
Have there been any? From what I've heard, all this snooping has been good for post-facto analysis, but useless as prior information.
That's the problem, you're not going to hear about how this intelligence worked, or didn't. This leaves the public (and media) to speculate endlessly, and less informed debaters to claim there "is no evidence" of the information stopping an attack.
This little behind the curtain threat, basically reveals (or insinuates) that when the "rubber hits the road" the information is in fact very valuable.
"Our investigation found that bulk collection of American phone metadata"
Also, using "arrests" or case arrests as the sole evidence or set of data is also quite limited. I would imagine, foiled plots don't always result in an arrest.
Details matter, and by the time reports like this hit the media, they get boiled down in to attention grabbing headlines divorced from the original conclusions.
Germany has been forced by the US to make war to Ukraine and Russia and they don't want to follow this path farther.
Europe just wants to preserve the status quo, preserve peace and commerce relationships with Russia that benefit both sides.
US is desperate to break further Euro-Asian integration because it means the facto end to American hegemony in the world, including the petrodollar.
The US does not care about war in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan or Ukraine because it is so far from home, but it is the Europeans who are suffering from avalanches of refugees and instability by war.
So finally they are saying "enough is enough" and showing a little common sense.
Oh the irony.
Being "cut off" from American intelligence should be a no-brainer (as the shout from the attendee showed) for any country that finds the NSA's actions and data sharing to be unlawful or unhelpful.
I understand that for any you-are-with-us-or-against-us mentality this is difficult to swallow.
It's a shame, too, because it can be a true leader that is followed out of respect and not fear. It just chooses the other path, time and time again, since it's easier.
What does "other intelligence matters" mean ? Also historically, what are the cases where this intelligence was useful ? Being more specific would probably help determine if it's even useful.
Nope. Europe is too important to US power to be trusted with their own defense.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31874418
The total armed forces of the countries in the EU are actually pretty large - the one thing they don't have is any sense of unity, which pretty much negates their effectiveness: