Germany Just Kicked Out The CIA’s Berlin Station Chief
Now she should kick out the US consulates in Germany, just as Canada is about to expel the Eritrean consulate. Why? For the same reason: the US collection of extra-territorial against alleged US citizens in other countries. The USA is a bad neighbor and a bad ally and has proven that with the imposition of FATCA on every nation in the world–with warlike sanctions as the consequence of not yielding to the demands FATCA.
@northernstar
Thanks! The excerpt from Christopher Hitchens did the heavy lifting.
I’m OK at occasionally connecting the dots – mostly thanks to hard-boiled nuns who pounded grammar, style and rhetoric into my childhood head on a daily basis. But Hitchens’s prose is the Pole Star and Magnetic North combined.
Picked up a talking book version of the big collection of Hitchens essays “Arguably” and spent an entire winter’s ski season listening to it traveling back/forth to various slopes. This was shortly after his sad death from cancer; it was the best kind of haunting. His prose was like colors I’d never seen and sounds I’d never heard before.
In addition to “Imagining Hitler”, highly recommend his essay “The Vietnam Syndrome” about the devastating legacy of Agent Orange birth defects.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/1999/02/hitchens-199902
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/hitchens200608
Meanwhile, Maldives is letting US agents kidnap people off the street; in this case it was a Russian legislator’s kid who was rendered to Guam and charged with computer crimes.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/russia-mps-son-seleznev-arrest-us-secret-service
http://rbth.com/news/2014/07/11/mp_seleznyov_says_lawyers_reach_his_son_detained_by_us_38118.html
Extradition treaty? Who needs an extradition treaty, just invade and grab what you want! Same attitude that the US takes with IGAs.
My question is: What do we do about the Canadians (not naturalized citizens but born and raised here) who remain “wilfully blind” to the fact that the US could be that tyrant? As far as I’m concerned they are just as complicit as the politicians who voted this asinine FATCA into law.
That is a chilling story, Eric. Apparently former East Germans living in West Germany were afraid of being kidnapped and taken back to East Germany. Now the USA is seizing people illegally. Amazing. None of us are safe anymore.
A recent “Spiegel” article reports a sharp decline in the number German students attending university in the US. Translated from an article called “Simply not so far away (Bloss nicht so weit weg):
“Study abroad experiences in the USA have also declined. While in academic year 2001 more than 9,000 Germans were studying there for a university degree, there were only 6,000 in 2013. The USA has fallen back “as the dream destination land for German students” determined Sebastian Fohrbeck of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) in New York. This is due to tuition costs, which increase seven percent annually – at any rate, US universities charges thousand of Euros per year.
The DAAD’s research determined that among German students there is also an “increased skepticism in relation to the political system and life in the USA” – a view that also increased astonishingly often from studying in the USA. A US study abroad experience causes frequently a more sober view and increases the appreciation for Germany, in spite of positive experiences with Americans there. Only 17 percent of German students see life in the USA more positively than before their time there, while 47 percent see it as more negative.
On the other hand, the study showed a run on tuition-free German universities by American students. The number of American students studying in Germany has increased by nearly one-half in the past five years to more than 4,000. The increase is still higher in Berlin, the hip capital city.”