Obama defends spying programme in Berlin

President Barack Obama defended US anti-terrorism tactics on a visit to Berlin yesterday, telling wary Germans Washington was not spying on the e-mails of ordinary citizens and promising to step up efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.

US has thwarted at least 50 threats because of its monitoring strategy

On the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech, Obama made his first presidential visit to the German capital, a favoured destination of US leaders during the Cold War.

He held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel and gave a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in which he unveiled a proposal for new talks with Russia on slashing nuclear arms arsenals.

Obama, who attracted a crowd of 200,000 adoring fans when he last passed through in 2008 during his first campaign for the presidency, remains popular in Germany.

But revelations before the trip of a covert US internet surveillance programme, code-named Prism, caused outrage in a country where memories of the eavesdropping East German Stasi secret police are still fresh.

Merkel said at a joint news conference that also touched on Afghanistan, Syria and the global economy, that the two leaders had held “long and intensive” talks on the spying issue, noting that some questions still needed to be cleared up.

Obama tried to reassure his host, who as a pastor’s daughter growing up in the communist East experienced the Stasi first-hand.

“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,” Obama said.

“This is not a situation where we simply go into the internet and start searching any way we want. This is a circumscribed system directed at us being able to protect our people and all of it is done under the oversight of the courts.”

In a message which seemed designed for her domestic audience, Merkel told Obama that balance was essential in government monitoring of Internet communications.

Obama countered that the US had thwarted at least 50 threats because of its monitoring programme, including planned attacks in Germany.

“So lives have been saved and the encroachment on privacy has been strictly limited,” he said.

A poll last week showed 82 per cent of Germans approve of Obama, but the magic of 2008, when he was feted like a rock star, has faded amid concerns about his anti-terrorist tactics.

In his speech to 4,000 invited guests at the Brandenburg Gate, Obama harked back to Kennedy by stressing what he called common values of openness and tolerance.

“We can be a little more informal among friends,” he joked as he took off his jacket in the sweltering sun on the Pariser Platz square, just east of the Gate that once stood alongside the Berlin Wall dividing the communist East from the capitalist West of the city.

Earlier, at the news conference, he touched on tensions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai over US plans to begin talks with the Taliban to try to seek a negotiated peace after 12 years of war, acknow-ledging “huge mistrust” between the Western-backed government in Kabul and its arch-foes.

“We do think that ultimately we’re going to need to see Afghans talking to Afghans about how they can move forward and end the cycle of violence there so they can start actually building their country,” Obama said.