Merkel Challenges Obama on Surveillance
BERLIN — Challenged personally by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany about American intelligence programs that monitor foreigners’ communications, President Obama said Wednesday that German terrorist threats were among those foiled by such operations worldwide — a contention that Ms. 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 dispute 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. The programs monitor the communications without individualized court orders.
“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 Ms. 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. Ms. 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,” Ms. 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.”
Ms. 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.
Ms. 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 Ms. 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 Ms. 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!”
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