Merkel Challenges Obama on Surveillance

Merkel Challenges Obama on Surveillance
The News By (www.nytimes.com)

BERLIN — Challenged personally by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany
about American intelligence programs that monitor foreigners'
communications without individualized court orders, President Obama
said Wednesday that German terrorist threats were among those foiled
by such operations worldwide — a contention that Mrs. Merkel seemed to
confirm.
Their exchanges, in private at the start of his state visit and later
at a joint news conference, preceded Mr. Obama's speech to an
estimated 6,000 people at the Brandenburg Gate, near where the Berlin
Wall once stood and other American presidents — John F. Kennedy,
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — had paid tribute to the
German-American alliance against outside threats from communism to
terrorism.

"No wall can stand against the yearning of justice — the yearnings for
freedom, the yearnings for peace — that burns in the human heart," Mr.
Obama said in his speech.

He used the address to propose that the United States and Russia
further reduce their nuclear arsenals. Yet the anticipation of the
speech at the historic site was offset by attention to the controversy
over the revelations of the breadth of American surveillance programs,
which include both Prism, an effort to monitor foreign communications
at American Internet companies like Google, as well as a vast database
of domestic phone logs.

"We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this
information, not just in the United States but in some cases here in
Germany," Mr. Obama said during the news conference. "So lives have
been saved."

He did not provide any details. But Mrs. Merkel, who acknowledged that
Germany has received "very important information" from the United
States, cited the so-called "Sauerland cell" as an example of such
antiterrorism intelligence cooperation.

In that case, four Islamic militants were sentenced to up to 12 years
in jail in 2010 for plotting terrorist attacks against American
targets in Germany. They were apprehended in 2007 and confessed in
2009. The Central Intelligence Agency was presumed at the time to have
tipped off the German authorities, and the case has gotten renewed
attention in Germany since the recent leak that exposed the Prism
program for monitoring foreign communications.

That news has been controversial in Germany, where both the Nazi era
and the postwar surveillance in Communist East Germany have fostered
deep concerns about privacy and civil liberties, and the issue was
expected to loom large in the meeting of the two leaders. Mrs. Merkel
said at the news conference that she and Mr. Obama had talked at
length about the American programs, even indicating that the topic
took precedence over their discussion of subjects like the global
economy and the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan. She made clear
that she had expressed her own concerns, despite her stated
understanding of the need for such intelligence efforts.

"Although we do see the need," Mrs. Merkel said, such activities must
be balanced by "due diligence" to guard against unwarranted invasions
of privacy. "Free democracies live off people having a feeling of
security," she added.

Mr. Obama, repeating defenses he has made to Americans, described how
he had made sure when he took office that the intelligence programs
"were examined and scrubbed." He emphasized that the United States
monitored metadata on phone numbers that were linked to suspected
terrorist activities, and did not eavesdrop on the content of calls or
e-mails without getting a court order. "So the encroachment of liberty
has been strictly circumscribed," he said.

"We do have to strike a balance, and we do have to be cautious about
how our governments are operating when it comes to intelligence," Mr.
Obama said, adding, "This is not a situation in which we are rifling
through the ordinary e-mails of German citizens or American citizens
or French citizens or anybody else."

Mrs. Merkel looked at him he spoke beside her, expressionless but
seeming to listen intently. "It's necessary for us to debate these
issues," she replied. "People have concerns."
The public interplay between the leaders reflected a mutual respect
and even personal closeness that they have developed over recent
years, despite some of their policy differences. Mr. Obama noted that
he had given her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest
civilian honor, and said that spoke to their relationship. He called
the chancellor "Angela" and she, in German, used "du," the familiar
form of the pronoun "you" in addressing him.

On some of the other issues — particularly regarding efforts to
provide more aid to the Syrian insurgency, and plans for international
forces to leave Afghanistan next year — the two leaders agreed,
reflecting discussions they had on Monday and Tuesday in Northern
Ireland with other heads of state at the meeting of the Group of 8
industrialized countries.

Mrs. Merkel, at the news conference, agreed with Mr. Obama that
Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, had lost legitimacy because of his
government's bloodshed and should not be part of the new government
that the United States, Germany and other European allies sought in
Syria. And both expressed hope for resolution even as they
acknowledged the strong opposition to regime change from the Russian
president, Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Assad's ally and chief arms
provider, who forced the Group of 8 to soften its statement this week
on Syria.

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Merkel were vague about their different approaches
to the global economy. The Obama administration has pressed euro zone
countries, in particular Germany, to provide stimulus or at least
soften the demands for continued austerity measures and budget cutting
from indebted European nations. The continent continues to weather
recessions long after the American economy has returned to slow
growth.

On an unseasonably hot day, under cloudless skies, Mr. Obama's state
visit began with the usual ceremonial pomp and red-carpet welcomes. He
first went to the Schloss Bellevue, an 18th-century summer palace now
used by Germany's nonpartisan president, to meet the current
officeholder, Joachim Gauck. Then he continued to the modern
Chancellery building for the business of the day with Mrs. Merkel:
their private meeting, lunch and the news conference, which preceded
the customarily formal dinner.

Berlin was unusually calm, its residents apparently heeding
authorities' pleas to avoid the historic city center, which was
heavily policed and cordoned off near the Brandenburg Gate.

German newspapers carried large headlines, "Welcome to Berlin," with
the Berliner Morgenpost's in English. But the left-leaning Berlin
Daily Taz jabbed Mr. Obama with a headline in English, "Mr. Obama,
open this gate!" along with a photo not of the Brandenburg Gate but of
the prison for terrorism suspects in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that Mr.
Obama, as a presidential candidate, promised to close. The headline
paraphrased Mr. Reagan's line at the Brandenburg Gate when it was part
of the Soviet Union's Berlin Wall separating the Communist East from
democratic West Berlin, and spoke to the resonance of the issue here.

A German reporter asked about it at the news conference. "It's been
more difficult than I hoped" to close the prison given Congressional
resistance, Mr. Obama said, but added that he was going to "redouble"
his efforts.

Amnesty International held a modest protest at the Potsdamer Platz, a
sprawling public square near the Ritz-Carlton hotel where Mr. Obama
and his family are staying. Surrounded by dozens of police officers
patrolling the plaza or looking on from the occasional patch of shade,
14 people in bright orange jumpsuits chained themselves together and
chanted, "Yes, you can! Close Guantánamo!"