Your Friend Is Listening, Too

Psst! Did you hear that Angela Merkel’s phone was tapped — by her friends in the United States? I don’t know what to say. On TV they’re saying it was the National Security Agency (NSA) that did it. How come they’re Merkel’s friends, anyway? Well, in any case, she called her friend Barack Obama right away to complain. He got the Nobel Peace Prize, so the chancellor probably thought — in the name of peace — he might be able to convince the NSA to stop such shenanigans. Maybe she doesn’t read many newspapers; otherwise she would already know that he not only orders phones to be tapped, he uses the information to pinpoint the caller’s location and then he hits them with an unmanned drone and blows them away with the push of a button. In Pakistan alone, more than 3,600 people were wiped out just since 2004 — and 900 of them were civilians. Mrs. Merkel and her intelligence services occasionally help Obama out by giving him their telephone numbers. She says she can’t recall doing anything like that, but maybe she’s just shocked to find out that telephone monitoring is just the first step in the war on terror and this business with the drones is the second.

But seriously, Obama doesn’t allow killer drones to operate in Germany. He hasn’t even allowed any telephone eavesdropping. At least, that’s what he says. His spokesperson assured Mrs. Merkel on Wednesday that the U.S. isn’t monitoring her phone calls now and that they would not do that in the future, either. But the spokesperson wouldn’t say they had never done it. I guess you can draw your own conclusions from that. But even most politicians would be in over their heads as well, as their comments show. It was fraud and hypocrite hour.

For example, the current Defense Minister, Thomas de Maizière, explained that if the allegations were true, it would be pretty bad. And what about the consequences? He further explained that the Americans are, and would remain, our best friends. If you read that, you read all the commentaries because they all said the same thing. They were all disappointed and upset and let’s drink to our friendship — except for the Left Party and the Greens, who have always beat up on the coalition for playing down the issue. Mrs. Merkel has always said she has no reason not to believe our American friends. And Minister of the Interior Hans-Peter Friedrich told us as early as last summer that all the allegations of spying made by former NSA employee Edward Snowden had simply evaporated into thin air. Chief of Staff of the German Chancellery Ronald Pofalla officially closed the books on the matter saying the accusations had been taken off the table. In other words, the German government couldn’t care less if millions of German citizens and businesses had been — and would continue to be — spied on by U.S. intelligence agencies. Only Merkel and her ilk get upset if uninvited guests show up on unannounced on their telephone connections.

That’s a Unique Interpretation of Constitutional Law, To Say the Least

Katja Kipping, chairperson of the Left Party, made a curious commentary in telling the German press agency DPA that if the allegations were true, they would constitute the most serious breach of trust between friends imaginable. Maybe she has read too much Schiller in saying, “I would be — grant me this request — the third in your band!” That appears to be bitterly necessary because the U.S., according to Kipping in an interview she gave to der Spiegel magazine at an earlier date, inflicted irreparable damage to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s security architecture with its behavior. She added it was regrettable that Merkel’s cell phone had to be tapped before she finally realized so late that the U.S. didn’t really want a powerful Europe.

Had Merkel had such an epiphany, she would certainly have called and informed Kipping about it but kept it from the public. But then the NSA would have known about it anyway.