U.S. Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says

German Vice Chancellor and Economic Minister Sigmar Gabriel, left, talking with Chancellor Angela Merkel. (AP / Markus Schreiber)

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has said the U.S. government threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin gave asylum to the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel there.

“They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,” Gabriel said in Homburg.

Glenn Greenwald writes at The Intercept:

The vice chancellor 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 Putin’s 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 don’t you bring him to Germany, then?”

There has been a sustained debate in Germany over whether to grant asylum to Snowden, and 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 country’s economy and energy minister) as to why the German government could not and would not offer Snowden asylum — which, under international law, negates the asylee’s 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.