"No" is the Answer

You kinda felt the shoe drop today.  Apparently, after all the issues with NSA and the spying done on the Chancellor's phone.....the Administration has come to say while deep into negotiations....they won't agree to include Germany on the no-spying list.

It's a short list of countries that are on the list....the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

Germany kinda hinted in strong language a month ago....that both Germany and France ought to be on the list.  It was the kind of hint that probably went with the word "implications".

They will likely agree to meet and talk more, but they've kinda laid down a card and said they aren't going past a certain point.  I'm guessing the Germans will play the delay game for six months, and then one day.....quietly shock the Americans by pretending to spy on them.

It'll be a laughable moment....some US embassy guy at a cafe with a friend, and then realizing that some guy in the room was the same guy following him on the street an hour earlier.  He'll report the episode, and the embassy security staff will identify that guy, along with forty others....as trackers on certain members of the staff.  They will ask for a private meeting with Berlin political figures to iron out this problem.  The Berlin guys will laugh and say this is simply implications version 1.0.  Then they will laugh and talk of version 2.0 and version 3.0..

A year or two into the implications phase....some embassy member will report his apartment is bugged.  Another will report a GPS-like device found on his car.  Another will comment on neighbors being asked about visitors to his apartment in the evening hours.

This is how things generally deteriorate and turn into a bigger mess.  At some point, five German professors on vacation in Nevada will be picked up and accused of spying on US military installations.

Next year is 2014, and a hundred years will have passed since some Hapsburg prince went off to survey the troops in Sarajevo and got whacked on the second assassination attempt of the day.  If he had taken the first attempt serious.....things might have gone different in history.  You get the impression that these Administration guys haven't studied the true value of history.....that if you forget things.....then they tend to repeat themselves.