Reuters
President Obama’s Remarks in Germany: The president delivered remarks at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on Wednesday, nearly 50 years after John F. Kennedy spoke in front of the iconic landmark.
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 terrorist threats there were among those foiled by such operations worldwide — a contention that his German counterpart 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 Brandenberg Gate, near where the Berlin Wall once stood and other American presidents — John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — paid tribute to the German-American alliance against outside threats from communism to, more recently, 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.
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 anti-terrorism intelligence cooperation.
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