I'm not sure the protection of the German state is something the US will care about:
Khalid El-Masri (born June 29, 1963) is a German citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian Police, and handed-over to the U.S. CIA, whose officers interrogated, sodomized and tortured him. While in CIA hands, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in a black site, interrogated, beaten, strip-searched and subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, tantamount to torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake and released him.
Technically they can do it but the political implications would be much different. Snowden is not a no-name citizen, abducting him would create an international diplomatic incident.
snowden is a white american. americans don't (in general - see reactions here to nsa) care about foreigners (especially coloured ones - guantanamo), but they get upset if a white american is hurt. so this won't happen with him.
he's gay? maybe that makes him an honorary black? i don't fully understand. any americans here can help me? is there anyone you stick up for? or is it just a big game of last under the bus wins?
maybe this is getting a bit off-topic, but i did live in the usa for a while - my partner had a sabbatical at yale. and pretty much everything in new haven seemed to come down to race. where you lived. what you drove. which shops you used. race was by far the best indicator i found for almost anything i cared to think of.
i guess maybe connecticut is particularly racist and as you go further south things are more balanced - i wouldn't know.
but it's not just me, is it? if we're talking about justice then america's legal system is famous for how it discriminates against coloured people. that and its size are what its known for, internationally. it's pretty much designed to kill blacks, right?
so to say that it's "not much about race" seems pretty weird. that seemed to be the defining characteristic of american culture - and particularly its legal system - to me.
i'm sorry if this comes across as america-bashing. but recently i've been told here so many times that my rights don't matter because i'm not american. so it's got the point where, well, we're just being realists, right? compassion, mutual respect, that kind of thing aren't what life is about...
i guess maybe connecticut is particularly racist and as you go further south things are more balanced - i wouldn't know.
Generally, the stereotype is that the North is less racist and the South is more. Because of the War between the States (1861-1865) - Southern states were slave states and Northern states were free states.
It's more nuanced than that, but that's the main narrative.
Don't you think that you can substitute 'race' in your description of CT with 'money'? Ie - rich people live/drive and shop in different shops from poor people.
I posted this here a while back[0], and it speaks to what you are saying… Even I have been treated better by complete strangers in Northern Africa than I do in the US…
We can play all the PC games, but the undertones are pervasive as it always has been here…
In the words of Langston Hughes: "America never was America to me"
Yes. Exactly. This is the least we can do in the Europe. There are at least 3 reasons to do so:
1. This way we can signal we mean it with the democracy thing.
2. We can prevent random despot to claim moral superiority to EU because of granting the asylum.
3. EU is relatively safe from US revenge, unlike smaller countries.
The fact that Germany was spied on massively and it didn't seem that they were all that aware of it and the fact that the US has well established channels from the cold war there would mean that I wouldn't exactly feel safe if that was my safe haven.
Would be interesting to create a "how safe are you from foreign nations' assassination/capturing etc. here" index.
For the pairing Germany-USA I'd say not very safe.
The CIA can get you anywhere, as can Mossad or pretty much any other agency. Heck, even Libya managed attacks in western countries. It's just that diplomatic repercussions or outright war are usually enough of a deterrent.
In this particular case, the US can't do anything about it. Obama said he won't use fighter jets to get Snowden. If he fails on even that concrete specific and understandable promise, then he can kiss a good deal of American influence in the world goodbye.
Because she is actually in power and would have to live with all the repercussions. Oppositional politicians don't have that problem and can talk all day long about what the people like to hear.
This is exactly why all of Obama's pre-election rhetoric about privacy is coming back to haunt him now. It's easy to sell "change" when you don't have to implement it.
Traditional "Merkelian" politics is basically...wait until stuff blows over and let others make a fool of themselves.
Same policy that Kohl followed ("Aussitzen") :)
I think this has some potential of losing her the elections though. Mostly because it seems the Greens will gain most from all of this.
More or less is inaccurate. They are pushing strong surveillance acts. In fact just today the "Bestandsdatenauskunft" was made law. The law means, “that police and intelligence services will in the future be allowed to obtain extremely personal information about mobile phone users, and do so with the press of a button and without having to face any major legal hurdles”.
When they say "Germany's third largest party" it's important to know that they only hold about 11% of the seats of the German Parliament (Bundestag) right now and are unlikely to affect matters in this case.
True, but due to proportional representation, smaller parties play a much larger role in German politics than, say, the UK or the US. Just a shift of about three percent from the current coalition of CDU and FDP to the SPD and Greens in the upcoming election would end Merkel's reign. And the NSA story might be just the event that moves those three percent from the current coalition to the opposition.
Yes, if anything the Greens as the third largest party play a much bigger role in German politics than someone from an American or Commonwealth background would intuitively expect.
That's definitly right, but the demand of the greens is all over the media here. I don't think, that Snowden will really get safe haven in Europe, but it's nice to see that a lot of Germans would approve it. The outrage reaches the mainstream.
That is because beyond rhetoric. EU countries are mere colonies of the US and EU politicians will not do anything if they do not get a nod from the US.
EU is not independent and is a mere satellite of the US. I feel sorry for feel good hipsters that currently feel superior to the US in terms of freedom and democracy.
"I feel sorry for feel good hipsters that currently feel superior to the US in terms of freedom and democracy."
hmm, not sure why you felt the need to add that part. Were you even responding to my question or just reading off an internal script :P
As far as freedom goes, I can only speak for Belgium, my country. I am certainly envious of the economic freedom you see in the US. We have slid a little too far to the left over here. We also don't have the same level of free speech as the US: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism_(negatio...)
That being said, I won't be jailed for smoking a joint or experimenting with psychedelics. Our government isn't secretive and elusive in the way yours is and I'm not terrified of ever landing in prison here.
> We also don't have the same level of free speech as the US
Don't take free speech at face value. While theoretically you do have free speech, we have a large amount of overly-broad crimes one can commit. If you do or say something that a person of power doesn't like, they can and will use a different law to get you for it. It then boils down to, one being willing to spend years of one's life and absurd amounts of money trying to fight this charge, or just dealing with the charge and hoping it doesn't end horribly.
I know right? First when the hipster artists moved into my neighborhood I was like, this is ok I guess. Rent went up, but then everything gentrified a little. Then came the artisanal hipster bread makers and hipster coffee shops which were kind of convenient, though a little pretentious I guess.
But when the feel good G7 hipsters showed up, I knew everything had changed. I mean they can't even figure out a simple Kyoto protocol, you know?
"Trittin said that in response to the latest revelations, the EU should suspend exchanging banking and flight data with the United States."
I wasn't aware the US actually "exchanges" any passenger data with the EU. I thought it's just EU giving them the data. So he probably means "EU needs to stop giving data to US".
Usually, these deals are one-sided, in that they only serve US.
We give the data to the US and, of course, the US only uses the data to fight terrorism.
I think our politicians knew that the US was doing more with the data than they said. But since this kind of data usage is not really aceptable in large parts of the EU we simply gave the data to the US to get the job done.
Then the politicians could say "we are not using your data and the US is only using it to fight terrorism" but in fact there was much more going on and everybody knew that.
Same thing with the US and "enhanced interrogation". We can say: "oh, we just gave that prisoner to the Saudis and they promised they would treat him appropriately and really, really not torture him, Scout's honor... They did seem to get some information from him that we weren't able to get, though, not sure how. Maybe something was lost in translation..."
Not sure what you're implying here. The EU gives data to the US about Europeans flying to the US. Then the US does the EU's dirt work? And after this "dirty work" is processed does the US play the data back to the EU?
Yes. That is what I am saying. It is not only the data about europeans flying to the US. The US also knows almost every bank transaction made via SWIFT...
It would be great, but in reality Snowden would not be safe in Germany. We still have tens of thousands US military personel (the US central commands for Europe and Africa are here) and lots of US intelligence agencies active here. The US were also using Germany to transfer their secret prisoners to the torture prisons in East Europe.
Khalid El-Masri (born June 29, 1963) is a German citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian Police, and handed-over to the U.S. CIA, whose officers interrogated, sodomized and tortured him. While in CIA hands, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in a black site, interrogated, beaten, strip-searched and subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, tantamount to torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake and released him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_al-Masri