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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."
So Slashdot reports that Yahoo News printed an article from AFP that the newspaper Bild am Sonntag heard from a "high-ranking NSA official" that something happened! It's like Obama told me himself....
Quietly spying on the womans cell since 2010, no one else knew but a few NSA lackeys. Even they couldn't see him locked in a dark office, alone, with no sound but the repetitive monkey slapping between his legs and the faint conversation of Merkel in his earpiece. " MMMmmm, I got your cigar Biatch! Daddy's gonna Farfergnugen your strudel, Heidi".....
It's a Democrat thing, ask Bill or John or Lyndon.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Why would anyone believe anything that Obama or NSA lackeys say at this point? It's too late for that. Obama's successor is going to have a huge credibility gap to bridge...
IRS targeting conservatives? Nobody at the White House knew.
Healthcare enrollment website has massive problems? The President didn't know.
NSA tapping German Prime Minister's phone? The President didn't know.
At some point, the American people have to start wondering if the President knows anything.
How do you know the US is the good guy. Unmanned drones killing women and children in the middle east, psychotic banks out of control, eugenics. You sound so emboldened and brash about ur choices considering ur country is becoming completely satanic..
And bear in mind that China and Russia already have an alliance to protect themselves from u. If the EU (inclusing France and UK) joined that - both have nukes - your potential list of allies will have dwindled and you could be alienated internationally.
However, I think u just don't get it. It's not about u or me. It's all a big charade by rich people globally, to hide pillaging from their own countries. And American people seem to be the biggest suckers of them all in this regard.
What do you bet the source was riding behind Hayden on a train?
Well I can think of at least one leader of a country that the NSA would be spying on without the president of the United States knowing...
Well, yes. Obviously if they spy on Obama, they're not going to tell Obama. :)
...but I repeat myself.
Like a spoiled kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Obama needs a good spanking. Amongst genuine "small government" and "limited government" types, this just leads to feelings of frustration and despair. The Tea Party movement seemed promising, until it was hijacked by the religious right. What other chance is there, really, to reign in the US government? It's no wonder that talks about secession and revolution are kicking up again.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Well, maybe the news is that he got told about it only in 2010. You don't really think the NSA hadn't tapped her before 2010, do you?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A textbook example of the Limbaugh Doctrine. For those of you in Rio Linda, CA: the Limbaugh Doctrine states the president had absolutely no idea that something bad was going on, he's just as shocked as everyone else, at the turn of events, but he's going to put a stop to it.
The president had absolutely no clue how big of the train wreck the healthcare.gov web site was going to be, until the day of the launch. As far he knew, everything was going just fine, and he was just as shocked as everyone else, how big of a botch it turned out to be.
The president had no idea that the IRS was harassing his political opponents. He read about it in the papers, when the story broke.
The president did not know that our troops on the ground in Libya called for help several times, when the barbarians attacked the Benghazian embassy, but someone in the military chain of command told them to stand down, and that no help was forthcoming. The president found that out only after the fact.
The president did not know that the Dept. Of Justice was sending illegal firearms to Mexican drug gangs. He was shocked, just shocked, to find out about it, in the papers.
Etc... etc... The president never has any idea what's going on in his administration. Who's running the government anyway?
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.
I can hardly believe that the President of the USofA will know all. Could be that it is in his line of command to know. But I would not be surprised if it was just a general 'we can spy on whomever we want' kind of thing.
I would hope that spying on another country's leader isn't something the U.S. would do as a matter of course - especially if that leader was an ally. How could something like that be done and the president not be told? It's an incredibly risky venture (as we can see now).
And spying on some Afghan village leader is just as bad in my book. Just because he is an Afghan does not mean he is a terrorist or has anything to do with terrorism.
Spying on an Afghan leader might be just as bad morally, but it has nothing like the same international diplomacy consequences.
Given the subject, maybe we can get an actual gibbon to write it this time.
Really, the story is that Obama was unaware of spying for 8 years! How on earth is that possible? 2007 - 2008, he was Chairman of United States Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs, and after that as a president.
I know there is oversight, but geez it must be really loose. You'd think that those two posts would let one know about things.
Everytime you order your "pepperoni pizza", we've detected a financial trail from one of their other customers who also likes "pepperoni pizzas" around the same time. These financial transaction involve non-domestic countries. Therefore, you are a conspirator. The meta-data don't lie.
rewriting history since 2109
She's been spied on since before she became the German leader, the 2010 thing comes out from possible Keith Alexander backers:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24692908#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
"But on Sunday Bild newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying NSA head Keith Alexander personally briefed the president about the covert operation targeting Mrs Merkel in 2010."
Which sounds like Keith Alexander having a go at Obama if anything (or supporters of Alexander).
But what struck me is the sheer naivety of the woman:
"Mrs Merkel - an Americophile who was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 - is said to be shocked that Washington may have engaged in the sort of spying she had to endure growing up in Communist East Germany."
That's why they let her become Chancellor! if she was against America, you can be damn sure they'd be using all that info they have on her to her disadvantage to make sure she didn't come into power. It's not *her* who is the victim here, its the German they spied on to weed him out of the race for Chancellor. And the democracy they undermined in the process.
She should know this from the KGB control of East Germany that ensured only party approved leaders could ever be elected.
They're shaping their 'allies' to make them into 'servants'. I think a few of them know it. 5 eyes countries leaders seems to know they have to tow the US line or be leaked against, and maybe a few others. Some others, might suspect it, but don't want to seem paranoid.
Merkel needs to realize that her surfing history is known too, so is her emails, the public info she read that's known, the open discussions, known. Coutresy of Bullrun, probably even the encrypted one. It's not done for laughs, it's done for control.
Did you notice the agencies that are supposed to provide "deniability" to the President are the ones trying to stick it to him here?
He denied knowing because that's in the script the President is supposed to follow.
Apparently the NSA no longer takes its orders from the President.
In fact, they're pretty sure they can live without him.
I wonder if they're going to try to pull a 'Morsi' on us.
Play Command HQ online
Or, now that the cat is out of the bag, different fractions within the intelligence community are fighting for its future by leaking information to the press and steering the narrative in the direction they want.
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...
" Over the past decade Texas has convicted 51 people of voter fraud, according the state's Attorney General Greg Abbott. Only four of those cases were for voter impersonation, the only type of voter fraud that voter ID laws prevent. .00000013 percent of the votes cast, resulted in convictions or guilty pleas. "
Nationwide that rate of voter impersonation is even lower.
Out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, only 40 voters were indicted for voter fraud, according to a Department of Justice study outlined during a 2006 Congressional hearing. Only 26 of those cases, or about
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/voter-fraud-real-rare/story?id=17213376
And yet I'm sure you think having to wait 3 days to purchase a lethal weapon is a burdensome and onerous infringement on your 2nd amendment rights.
This Sig does not Exist.
To make this more relevant to Slashdot. Consider this:
No one competent in an IT department which handles anything sensitive will be comfortable specifying US produced closed source software ever again.
The issue is not just spying on politicians. It seems the NSA has been involved in 'economic' espionage as well. The company i work for has US competitors, so do most others..It seems that pretty much everything has 'backdoors' - looks like the paranoid were right after all.
It does seem as though someone's trying to throw the POTUS 'under the bus' so to speak here, to save their own hides. If it's the NSA doing an official 'controlled leak' to cast doubt on whether he really knew or not.. and that's all it takes to ruin credibility.. then perhaps the NSA really does believe it is above & beyond any particular administration. I think that's probably been the case for many years. The FBI, CIA and most recently the DHS probably all feel the same way, having been given so much so much power. Re: the POTUS -- just like the NSA I believe he's lying through his teeth like the president before him, and that before him, and so on. It's just painfully obvious now in this particular scandal how deep the lying goes.
Fraud is the only viable reason for fighting against voter ID laws. Your opposition proves the need for such laws.
Does this level of ignorance come naturally for you or do you havve to try hard to achieve it?
I can give you at least one mor viable reason for fighting against the kind of voter ID laws that are implemented now:
They very clearly prevent the poor and less educated people from voting. Voter ID laws lead to more eligible voters not being able to vote than the amount of fraudulent votes prevented.
Politicians may claim that the implement these laws to stop voter fraud, but it's obvious they to it to prevent potential votes for the other party.