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German Report: Obama Aware of Merkel Spying Since 2010
First time accepted submitter pupsocket writes "Yesterday the German newspaper of record, Frankfurter Allgemeine, reported that the President told German Chancellor Merkel that he would have stopped the tap on her phone had he known about it. Today, another German paper, Bild am Sonntag, quoted U.S. Intelligence sources that the President had been briefed in 2010. 'Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue,' the newspaper quoted a high-ranking NSA official as saying."
I've been reading Der Spiegel for 25 years. I've never seen them get angry about anything, not even when Russia shut off the natural gas pipeline running to Central Europe to mess with the Ukraine and whacked Germany in the process. They're white hot mad about this. The German Interior Minister is talking about bringing the NSA to justice. The SPD is pushing to drop trade talks with the US unless Washington does something real about it. Meanwhile, Obama wants to talk about immigration and fly off to visit schools in Crown Heights rather than deal with this directly. Caught in lie after lie after lie about the NSA he owns this now, and he owns the consequences for the entire world if he doesn't deal with it.
Consider, fellow Americans, what goes if Germany goes. That's NATO and the EU. That's all our happy European client states cheerily playing along when Washington wants to force the President of Bolivia's plane down and search it. That's an economy bigger than ours, a continent whose population is much bigger than ours, suddenly not playing ball with us any more and pushing back hard on everything. That's a profoundly different world for American geopolitical power that will have material consequences for every American.
This, the government shutdown, the near default, the promise of more of the same in February, it all has everyone who has been on our team the last 50 years looking for the exits at once. The American government has proven it can't even get a website right; there's no way in hell they can deal with all of this at once. A fat, happy American middle class would have been a bulwark against it, but the elites have spent 20 years scraping out their substance. Most of us are running mighty thin. The risk of a trigger event, like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or the Rodney King verdict, bringing it all down is growing.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Some corrections. The IRS wasn't targeting conservatives per se. It was targeting ALL political groups that were applying for tax exempt status under new absurd rules handed down from the (SCOTUS) Ivory Tower.
Nice talking point that has been shown to be a lie. They were "on the lookout" for all groups, which is what you are claiming. They "prevented registration" only for conservative groups. Two different things and you are hoping people are too stupid to know the difference, or you are the stupid one. No conservative group got their tax exempt status for 2 years, a process that is supposed to take no more than 90 days. NO liberal groups were similarly restricted and when Congress had hearings the DNC was unable to find a SINGLE group on their side similarly targeted, but the GOP found 172 of them.
Don't lie and cover up for assholes. Its people like you that have enabled what is going on now because no matter what they do they know someone like you will come along and defend them.
Calling "BILD am Sonntag" a newspaper is a joke by itself. I'm German, so I know this first hand, taking a look at their website, however, should convince everyone else to a similar degree I presume you don't even have to understand German in order to see what sort of 'newspaper' we're dealing with, here.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Oh, well if an AC on the internet says the president is a liar, it must be true. I've got chain-emails that say so...
How about actually getting a fair and reasonably comprehensive assessment from an unbiased source? Crazy, right?
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yes, if Fox news showed topless women, we would have Bild.
The other sources include Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel, who are in the top tier of journalistic respectability.
Der Spiegel reports that Merkels was on a list provided to Presidents since 2002.
The only exclusive that Bild got was the 2010 briefing to the President by the senior NSA officials.
You know, the ones who are supposed to provide the President deniability.
Just remember Seimens (a German company) has sold nuclear tech to Iran.
The Iranian nuclear program was actually started by the US "Atoms for Peace" program, Siemens (actually KWU which was part of Siemens at that time) was a major supplier for the Busher programme which was cancelled - ironically - by Khomeini who thought all weapons of mass destruction as un-islamic. The contracts were terminated with the islamic revolution in 79 and the Russian government (via Rosatom) helped build that reactor and other nuclear facilities. A lot of western companies did supply parts for that, not only Germans but also american companies since many contracts went through Rosatom puppets.
I have no problem with what Bush and then Obama did.
And if Seimens were to sell to North Korea, I say we start bombing.
The French supplied Pakistan with the technology (CEA), the US helped the Indian program (notably with Uranium and Thorium delivered by the Bush administration), so go and bomb France and your hometown...
Proven a lie? Obama himself apologized and the targeting guidelines literally had the very words that were being used by conservatives. You would be up in arms if this happened under Bush with an identical scenario focused on things like "progressive".
Fox Still Ignoring That IRS Targeted Progressives
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/21/fox-still-ignoring-that-irs-targeted-progressiv/195511
The problem with a lot of the coverage on the IRS non-scandal was that the Inspector General's report did not investigate all the facts, the Republican chairman of the oversight committee was only selectively releasing information from the incomplete IG report, and then he got very pissy after the ranking Democrat on the committee aired out all the laundry.
Guess what the facts showed?
Spoiler: that the IRS was targeting progressive groups as well.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!