Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2015/08/05/germanys-top-prosecutor-fire.html
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Wow. Way to avoid throwing good money after bad, Germany.
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I wish I knew what got into Range’s brain about this. German officials aren’t known for being particularly acquiescent to US and Brittan’s raving about treason and secrecy and terrorisms (I imagine their recent history makes rhetoric more terrifying in a very different way than intended) and the fact that Range towed that party line makes me wonder who he’s been hanging out with after hours. Maybe there’s some sort of secretly US-loyal cabal of German officials I just don’t know about? So weird.
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Haha the sheer idiocy of this whole thing. Didn’t they know what happened the first time when they tried prosecuting journalists? Five ministers lost their job and the political career of the sixth, Strauss, was ruined.
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You know, over in another thread people are blaming America’s mass shooting problem on mental illness. This one, though, I honestly wonder. Is he developing dementia or something? It’s hard to believe he could have done his job for long enough to be one year from retirement and end up getting himself fired for calling out a government minister in public (which is the real thing that got him fired, not the charges - he’d be retiring happily soon if he’d just dropped those when asked).
One would expect Germany’s lead federal prosecutor general to know that his office is not part of the independent judiciary (he’s had this job for a while, after all). This means that the federal minister of justice is his boss, and if the guy tells him “jump” he is to ask “how high?”, not complain about “interference”.
Here in Germany, judges are independent and could rightly take offense at being told what to do (or not to do) by the minister of justice, but the office of the federal prosecutor general is not.
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There still are Germans that tend to the authoritarian mindset, who are so incensed that anyone would dare question Authority that they feel a deep need to punish those heretics. Couple this with an all too human to double down rather than admit wrongdoing, and you have a recipe for this sort of idiocy. If he hadn’t been forced into retirement, chances are he would have gone scorched earth just to prove how you don’t fuck with him.
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