Then NSA spying on Germany most certainly is.
The German government faced an angry reaction from Turkey and accusations of hypocrisy from its own opposition on Monday after media reports that its intelligence agency spied on its NATO ally.
“Dass ein geheimer Nachrichtendienst dort Erkenntnisse sammelt, kann man ihm nicht vorwerfen. Das ist seine Aufgabe.”
Somebody said that once, not all to0 long ago, after some NSA Aufregung (excitement) about something somewhere. I forget where. But I couldn’t agree more. So, uh, where’s the outrage now?
Now that Germany’s intelligence agency BND has revealed that NATO ally Turkey is one of five countries it is spying on, I mean.
Outrage won’t be necessary this time, I guess. It appears that Germany is finally coming clean and ready to admit to the world that Turkey has officially reached non-friend status so spying in this case is allowed.
Hey, what goes around comes around.
The news reports (of NSA spying in Germany) outraged Germans, leading to favorable attitudes about the United States falling to their lowest levels in years and creating a public and private sense of mistrust. Merkel has repeatedly called the U.S. spy program a breach of trust and noted that “friends don’t spy on friends.”
According to a report today in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German intelligence service BND listened in on at least one telephone call involving former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while she was still in office.
Not only was the eavesdropping “purely accidental,” an unidentified source told the newspaper, but the conversation was also “one of the stupidest, most inane and brain-dead phone conversations I as a spy have ever had to endure. It got so bad I had to start banging my head against the wall and broke off the connection after three minutes. Laber, laber, laber! It’s like her brain is in neutral or something. And they can’t fire me for this either now because I quit!”
Deutsche Regierungskreise bestreiten allerdings, dass es eine systematische Spionage des BND gegen die USA gibt. Vielmehr sei das Gespräch, das Clinton in ihrer Amtszeit aus einer US-Regierungsmaschine heraus geführt habe, nur zufällig aufgefangen worden.
And fall and fall and fall it has. It’s been falling for at least twenty years now.
They ought to just finally get it over with and pull the plug for good. Like they already have on that other German-American whatever-it-used-to-be.
…At the time, West Germany and the United States were facing the first major postwar crisis in their relations. Many West Germans were protesting against the US war in Vietnam while many others, around 500,000 annually at the time, attended the annual fair, which was then held near the barracks in Berlin’s Dahlem district. They came because they liked the United States or American music — or maybe even its beer.
That’s no way to talk!
Just ask this lady here. Her name is Gitta Connemann and she is a member of German parliament (CDU) who just got uninvited as the main speaker at an anti-war event sponsored by the big German DGB union for making Israel-friendly comments. And they were shocking as hell, too.
This broad actually had the nerve to say “Every death is one too many but Israel has been shot at since 2006 and has the right to protect itself.”
What on earth was she thinking? Political sensitivity is clearly not her cup of chai.
“Jeder Tote ist zu viel. Aber seit 2006 wird Israel beschossen und hat ein Recht auf Selbstverteidigung.”
Even when it comes to industrial piracy.
German companies are ranked second in the world for industrial plagiarism, a global study released today has found (only China does it better). The numbers indicate that 1 in 4 plagiarized tech goods are made in Germany.
Of course the only problem with this study is that it was made by the the Federation of German Machine and Equipment Builders (or VDMA) so it may have been plagiarized itself.
And no, this wasn’t in the news tonight.
Für den Ideenklau ist oft nicht ein Produzent im fernen China, sondern der Konkurrent um die Ecke verantwortlich.
From Germany, I mean. It’s complicated.
German businesses are cooling on Russian investments amid anger over Russia’s role in the Ukrainian conflict, while simultaneously warming on another big country hit by Western sanctions: Iran.
According to Küntzel, German leaders have at least two other reasons for helping Iran defy the United States. The first is German resentment of defeat in the Second World War followed by foreign occupation, led by the US. The second reason is that Iran is one of the few, if not the only country, where Germans have never been looked at as “war criminals” because of Hitler.
According to secret Spiegel bugging sources, the Israeli intelligence service has bugged telephone conversations made by American Secretary of State John Kerry while he was busy bugging anyone he could find in the Middle East and elsewhere who might possibly be interested in negotiating a peaceful solution to the current Gaza crisis.
Spiegel sources refused to go into detail here but did confirm that all of these telephone calls were very short ones.
Der israelische Geheimdienst hat offenbar Telefonate von US-Außenminister Kerry abgehört. Nach SPIEGEL-Informationen nutzte die Regierung in Jerusalem die so gewonnenen Erkenntnisse bei Verhandlungen zum Nahost-Konflikt.
Well, for one thing, they know better than anyone that they live in the notorious German Neidgesellschaft.
And for another thing… The figures show that private wealth in Germany is more unevenly distributed than in any other country in the eurozone. While the richest 1% have personal wealth of just short of one million euros on average, a quarter of adult Germans have no wealth or even owe money.
ALDI schönen Sachen!
We all knew somehow that the Germans themselves could not be responsible for this. Now we know why.
Coal mining’s demise in Germany comes as the country is experiencing a resurgence in coal-fired power, one which the U.S. increasingly has helped supply. U.S. exports of power plant-grade coal to Germany have more than doubled since 2008.
“This is a classic case of political greenwashing.”
Observing Hermann 