{"id":10609,"date":"2014-05-03T13:30:12","date_gmt":"2014-05-03T20:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=10609"},"modified":"2014-05-03T13:29:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-03T20:29:51","slug":"obama-sorry-you-heard-about-it-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=10609","title":{"rendered":"Obama: Sorry You Heard About It, Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/BradBlog.com\/Images\/ObamaMerkel_RoseGarden_050314.jpg\" hspace=\"6\" vspace=\"3\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\">Near the end of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/the-press-office\/2014\/05\/02\/remarks-president-obama-and-german-chancellor-merkel-joint-press-confere\">his joint press conference at the White House on Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel<\/a>, a question was asked about whether &#8220;personal trust [has] been rebuilt&#8221; between the two otherwise allied countries, following last year&#8217;s disclosure by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/world\/angry-european-and-german-reactions-to-merkel-us-phone-spying-scandal-a-929725.html\">U.S. had been spying directly on Merkel&#8217;s personal cell phone<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>President Obama included this in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/05\/03\/world\/europe\/merkel-says-gaps-with-us-over-surveillance-remain.html?_r=0\">his response<\/a> [<i>emphasis added<\/i>]:<\/p>\n<div class=\"media\">OBAMA: &#8230;Germany is one of our closest allies and our closest friends, and that&#8217;s true across the spectrum of issues &#8212; security, intelligence, economic, diplomatic.  And Angela Merkel is one of my closest friends on the world stage, and somebody whose partnership I deeply value.  And so <b>it has pained me to see the degree to which the Snowden disclosures have created strains in the relationship<\/b>.<\/div>\n<p>Got that? It was the &#8220;Snowden disclosures,&#8221; apparently, not the actual U.S. policy of spying on her personal calls, that has &#8220;created strains in the relationship&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>So he&#8217;s not sorry we spied on her, he&#8217;s simply &#8220;pained&#8221; that we got caught.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Near the end of his joint press conference at the White House on Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a question was asked about whether &#8220;personal trust [has] been rebuilt&#8221; between the two otherwise allied countries, following last year&#8217;s disclosure by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the U.S. had been spying directly on Merkel&#8217;s personal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,239,621,695,107,61,126],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability","category-barack-obama","category-edward-snowden","category-germany","category-national-security","category-nsa","category-rights-and-freedoms"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10609"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=10609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}