2009/11/28

Too many news at once

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We got rid of Jung and Schneiderhahn

Former German SecDef Jung, CDU (who was labour minister in the meantime) and inspector-general (highest German soldier) Schneiderhahn got fired in the past few days because of late fall-out of the Kunduz air strike topic. Actually, the problem was more about the communication than about that incident.

Jung was known to be unfit for cabinet service anyway and was a sub-standard conservative administrator without any drive for excellence. It's a pity that he ultimately fell because of PR failures instead of because of incompetence, though.
He was effectively done after Schneiderhahn had already resigned and his own party had pretty much ridiculed him in the federal parliament Bundestag. Yikes, I won't forget his petrified face during that scene anytime soon.

Schneiderhahn was no better, the 'culture' from Oberst (Colonel) upwards was 'suboptimal' in part due to him. The fish was rotting from the head. His resignation doesn't necessarily mean an improvement, though: There's no really obvious excellent candidate for his succession.




The new SecDef zu Guttenberg, CSU is a media darling and quickly rose from Bavarian state politics to now his second federal cabinet position in just a few months.

He has several issues, such as
* he will very likely do his best to prevent another Kunduz air strike affair while he's in office, thereby restricting the German ISAF troops in their freedom of action (even more)
* the media 'darling' thing will predictably go wrong in about one to three sears. The media isn't actually loyal to its chosen celebrities.
* some very first anecdotes nourish a suspicion that he's going to be a politically correct SecDef - which isn't exactly what the Bundeswehr needs right now.

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Mr. Koch (CDU) has won a (Pyrrhic?) victory in regard to Mr. Brender.
See the earlier article about the scandal here.


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Politicians in the German state Nordrhein-Westfalen (a very large one in regard to population) are discussing additional legislation, supposedly to enhance domestic security. The police law reform bill of the liberal minister of the interior wasn't close enough to police state for their taste.

Their horror list includes among other questionable projects:
general video surveillance
+ eavesdropping on E-mails
+ eavesdropping on phone lines
+ search of people and vehicles for evidence without specific suspicion
+ online search in private computers with malware (all computers in question are already accessible with a search warrant!)

The online search in computers proposal is especially despicable because the state constitutional court had recently sacked the predecessor law in regard to this practice. It is known to be an unconstitutional offence to privacy.

The search of people and vehicles without a real suspicion is KNOWN to be a disastrous competence. Those politicians are either outright incompetent or police state fanatics, as proven by their proposal. The British have long since demonstrated the utter idiocy of such a law:

The Metropolitan Police used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in London.

That compares to almost 72,000 anti-terror stop and searches carried out in the previous year.

Of all the stops last year, only 65 led to arrests for terror offences, a success rate of just 0.035%.

Now guess which party is pursuing such a horror wish list?
The CDU, of course.


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The party "Die LINKE" ('the 2nd grade successor to the East German dictatorship wannabe communists) is supposed to be the prime threat to our liberties. That's the politically correct assumption. (The Neonazis are too dumb and too few too be of relevance on the federal level.)

Meanwhile, CDU (conservative) politicians are chipping and sawing away the citizen's liberties and protection rights against the state for years (to be honest; the process was raised to the new level by the SPD minister of the interior Schily of the Schröder cabinet years ago).

Whenever there's an assault on civil liberties or the foundation of our rule of law state with its many safeties that guard against a return of authoritarianism: The culprits are almost always CDU or CSU politicians, in opposition to the smaller parties' politicians (especially liberals and greens - there's no reason to take the far left seriously in regard to their civil liberties advocacy).

Maybe you wondered why I sometimes dropped a critical remark about the CDU and about in my opinion dangerous CDU politicians (Schäuble, von der Leyen). Here is the reason. They're even working in parallel - towards police state and against independent media (constitution article 5). And that's just the tip of the iceberg!


S O

edit: one more article about Jung/Schneiderhahn

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