American spies are completely out of control - Gwynne Dyer
The question to bear in mind, when reading this whole sorry tale, is this: If Americans are, on average, no stupider than Germans, then why are their intelligence services so stupid?
After the most recent revelations about American spying in Germany, there was considerable speculation among members of the Bundestag (parliament) that Germany might “get even” by inviting U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden to leave his Moscow exile and come to Berlin instead. But last weekend Chancellor Angela Merkel, at her traditional pre-summer vacation press conference, rained all over that idea.
“We learned things (from Snowden) that we didn’t know before, and that’s always interesting,” she said—but “granting asylum isn’t an act of gratitude.” Given that one of the things she learned from Snowden was that the U.S. National Security Agency was bugging her mobile phone, this showed admirable restraint on her part, but even Merkel’s restraint only goes so far.
Only a week before, her patience with persistent American spying, even after Snowden’s revelations, snapped quite dramatically: she ordered the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s “chief of station” at the American embassy in Berlin to leave the country. German media reports stressed that such drastic action had only been taken previously when dealing with “pariah states like North Korea or Iran.”
(BIG snip)
Why the big difference?
It’s because the annual budget of the Bundesnachrichtendienst is just under $1 billion, and it employs only 6,000 people.
The United States has only five times as many people as Germany, but its “intelligence community” includes seventeen agencies with a total budget of $80 billion dollars. There are 854,000 Americans with top-secret security clearances.
The American intelligence community grew fat and prospered through four decades of Cold War and two more decades of the “War on Terror”. It is now so big, so rich, so powerful that it can do practically anything it wants. And often it does stuff just because it can, even if it’s totally counter-productive.
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http://www.straight.com/news/689961/gwynne-dyer-american-spies-are-completely-out-control
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