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!"