{"id":55868,"date":"2015-03-23T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=55868"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:25:56","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:25:56","slug":"us-threatened-germany-over-snowden-vice-chancellor-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/03\/us-threatened-germany-over-snowden-vice-chancellor-says\/","title":{"rendered":"US Threatened Germany over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Sean Gallup\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

19 Mar 2015 – <\/em>German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel (above) said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower\u00a0Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country. \u201cThey told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,\u201d Gabriel said.<\/p>\n

The vice chancellor delivered a speech<\/a> in which he praised the journalists who worked on the Snowden archive, and then lamented the fact that Snowden was forced to seek refuge in \u201cVladimir Putin\u2019s autocratic Russia\u201d because no other nation was willing and able to protect him from threats of imprisonment by the U.S. government (I was present at the event to receive an award). That prompted an audience member to interrupt his speech and yell out: \u201cWhy don\u2019t you bring him to Germany, then?\u201d<\/p>\n

There has been a sustained debate\u00a0in Germany<\/a>\u00a0over whether to grant asylum to Snowden, and a major controversy<\/a> arose last year when a Parliamentary Committee investigating NSA spying divided as to whether to bring Snowden to testify in person, and then narrowly refused at the\u00a0behest of the Merkel government. In response to the audience interruption, Gabriel claimed\u00a0that Germany would be legally obligated to extradite Snowden to the U.S. if he were on German soil.<\/p>\n

Afterward, however, when I pressed the vice chancellor (who is also head of the Social Democratic Party, as well as the country\u2019s economy and energy minister) as to why the German government could not and would not offer Snowden asylum \u2014\u00a0which, under international law, negates the asylee\u2019s status as a fugitive<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 he told me that the U.S. government had aggressively threatened the Germans that if they did so, they would be \u201ccut off\u201d from all intelligence sharing. That would mean, if the threat were carried out, that the Americans would literally allow the German population to remain vulnerable to a brewing attack discovered by the Americans by\u00a0withholding\u00a0that information from their government.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time the U.S. has purportedly threatened an allied government to withhold evidence of possible terror plots as punishment. In 2009, a British national,\u00a0Binyam Mohamed, sued the U.K. government for complicity in his torture at Bagram and\u00a0Guant\u00e1namo. The High Court ordered the U.K. government<\/a> to provide Mohamed\u2019s lawyers with notes and other documents reflecting what the CIA\u00a0told British intelligence agents about Mohamed\u2019s abuse.<\/p>\n

In response, the U.K. government insisted that the High Court must reverse that ruling because the safety of British subjects would be endangered if the ruling stood. Their reasoning<\/a>: the U.S. government had threatened the British that they would stop sharing\u00a0intelligence<\/a>, including evidence of terror plots, if they disclosed what the Americans had told them in confidence about Mohamed\u2019s treatment \u2014 even if<\/em> the disclosure<\/a> were ordered by the High Court as part of a lawsuit brought by a torture victim.\u00a0British government lawyers even produced a letter<\/a> from an unnamed Obama\u00a0official laying out that\u00a0threat.<\/p>\n

In the Mohamed\u00a0case, it is quite plausible<\/a> that the purported \u201cthreat\u201d was actually the byproduct of collaboration between the U.S. and U.K. governments, as it gave the British a weapon to try to scare the court into vacating its ruling:\u00a0you\u2019re putting the lives of British subjects in danger by angering the Americans.<\/em>\u00a0In other words, it is\u00a0quite\u00a0conceivable that the British\u00a0asked<\/em>\u00a0the Americans for a letter setting forth such a threat to enable them to bully the British court into reversing its disclosure order.<\/p>\n

In the\u00a0case of Germany, no government official has previously\u00a0claimed that they were threatened by the U.S. as an excuse for turning their backs on Snowden, whose disclosures helped Germans\u00a0as much as any population outside of the U.S. Pointing to such threats could help a German political official such as the vice chancellor justify what is otherwise an indefensible\u00a0refusal to protect the NSA whistleblower from persecution at home<\/a>, though it seems far more plausible \u2014 given far more extremist U.S. behavior in the Snowden case<\/a> \u2014 that Gabriel\u2019s claims are accurate.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, one of two things is true: 1) the U.S. actually threatened Germany that it would refrain from notifying them of terrorist plots against German\u00a0citizens and thus deliberately leave them vulnerable\u00a0to violent\u00a0attacks, or 2) some combination of high officials from the U.S. and\/or German governments are invoking such fictitious threats in order to manipulate and scare the German public into believing that asylum for Snowden will endanger their lives. Both are obviously noteworthy, though it\u2019s hard to say which is worse.<\/p>\n

___________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

19 Mar 2015 – German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}