[Peace-discuss] US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says

Mon Mar 23 11:30:53 EDT 2015

And if the German government would give Snowden asylum, I could guarantee
you that the CIA et, al, would PRODUCE a false flag terrorist incident in
Germany so that the U.S. government could say   We told you so .

US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says

Description: German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel with Angela Merkel.
Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

 <https://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Educate!
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/edward-snowden/> Edward Snowden,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/germany/> Germany,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/glenn-greenwald/> Glenn Greenwald,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/nsa/> NSA 
By Glenn Greenwald,
<https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/19/us-threatened-germany-snowden
-vice-chancellor-says/> www.firstlook.org
March 22nd, 2015

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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 Edward Snowden or otherwise
arranged for him to travel to that country. They told us they would stop
notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters, Gabriel said.

The vice chancellor
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7Shqr0Yvo&feature=youtu.be> delivered a
speech 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 Vladimir Putins autocratic Russia 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: Why dont you bring him to
Germany, then?

There has been a
<http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-political-debate-over-offerin
g-snowden-asylum-in-germany-a-931497.html> sustained debate in Germany over
whether to grant asylum to Snowden, and
<http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-parliament-divided-over-
snowden-subpoena-in-nsa-investigation-a-964293.html> a major controversy
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 behest of the Merkel government. In response to the
audience interruption, Gabriel claimed that Germany would be legally
obligated to extradite Snowden to the U.S. if he were on German soil.

Afterward, however, when I pressed the vice chancellor (who is also head of
the Social Democratic Party, as well as the countrys economy and energy
minister) as to why the German government could not and would not offer
Snowden asylum  which, under international law,
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/chen-guangcheng-asylum_n_1475519.h
tml> negates the asylees status as a fugitive  he told me that the U.S.
government had aggressively threatened the Germans that if they did so, they
would be cut off 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 withholding that information from their government.

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, Binyam Mohamed, sued the U.K. government for
complicity in his torture at Bagram and Guantánamo. The High Court
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/10/binyam-mohamed-torture-ruling-
evidence> ordered the U.K. government to provide Mohameds lawyers with
notes and other documents reflecting what the CIA told British intelligence
agents about Mohameds abuse.

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
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/10/binyam-mohamed-torture-ruling-
evidence> reasoning: the U.S. government had
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/europe/15britain.html?_r=0>
threatened the British that they would stop sharing intelligence, including
evidence of terror plots, if they disclosed what the Americans had told them
in confidence about Mohameds treatment 
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/12/obama-threatens-to-limit-us
-intel-with-brits/> even if the disclosure were ordered by the High Court as
part of a lawsuit brought by a torture victim. British government lawyers
even
<http://www.reprieve.org.uk/press/2009_05_22torturecoverupcontinuesbritishgo
vernment/> produced a letter from an unnamed Obama official laying out that
threat.

In the Mohamed case, it is  <http://www.salon.com/2009/05/12/obama_101/>
quite plausible that the purported threat 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: youre putting
the lives of British subjects in danger by angering the Americans. In other
words, it is quite conceivable that the British asked the Americans for a
letter setting forth such a threat to enable them to bully the British court
into reversing its disclosure order.

In the case of Germany, no government official has previously claimed that
they were threatened by the U.S. as an excuse for turning their backs on
Snowden, whose disclosures helped Germans as 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
refusal to protect the NSA whistleblower from
<https://freedom.press/blog/2013/12/if-snowden-returned-us-trial-all-whistle
blower-evidence-would-likely-be-inadmissible> persecution at home, though it
seems far more plausible  given
<http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/02/world/americas/bolivia-presidential-plane
/> far more extremist U.S. behavior in the Snowden case  that Gabriels
claims are accurate.

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 citizens and thus deliberately leave them vulnerable to violent
attacks, 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
its hard to say which is worse.

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