Putin is 'like a bored kid in the back of the classroom' says Obama
Published: 2013 August 10 06:22:28 (4535 Views)
President Barack Obama on Friday denied he has poor relations with Vladimir Putin after cancelling their Moscow talks, but said the Russian president can sometimes appear "like a bored kid in the back of the classroom."
U.S.-Russian relations plunged to one of their lowest points since the Cold War this week after Russia granted temporary asylum to fugitive former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden. Obama retaliated by abruptly cancelling a Moscow summit with Putin planned for early next month.
At a White House news conference on Friday, Obama insisted that he does not have bad personal relations with Putin.
The two men had a testy meeting in June in Northern Ireland and from the photos of them at the time, it looked as if they would both rather have been somewhere else.
"I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he's got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom. But the truth is that when we're in conversations together, oftentimes it's very productive," Obama said.
Putin's sending of a telegram wishing former President George W. Bush well after a heart procedure this week was viewed by some Kremlin watchers as a sign that Putin was sending an implicit message to Obama.
The White House says Obama pulled out of the Moscow summit not just because of the Russian decision to grant asylum to Snowden, who is wanted in the United States to face espionage charges.
U.S. differences with Russia have piled up recently over Moscow's support for the Syrian government in that country's civil war, as well as human rights concerns and other grievances.
There was no immediate response from Moscow to Obama's description of the Russian president. But at a news conference in Washington after talks on Friday between the Russian and U.S. foreign policy and defense chiefs, the Russians emphasized how positive the meeting had been. They even invited the Americans to participate in a tank competition later this year.
"We don't have any Cold War. Instead we have close relations," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. "Edward Snowden did not overshadow our discussions."
Meanwhile, the US government's striking response to the reported terror threat in recent days has coincided with a wave of unprecedented skepticism about the NSA's sweeping surveillance programs since Snowden's disclosures.
When Snowden began releasing secret documents two months ago, Obama said he welcomed a debate on the tradeoffs of NSA surveillance and privacy. But the debate has grown far larger than administration officials anticipated, with lawmakers of both parties in Congress and half of Americans in polls calling for curbs on the agency.
On Thursday, two small companies providing secure email to customers added their voices to the pushback. Lavabit and Silent Circle announced that they would shut down their email services rather than give in to what they suggested was government pressure to make customers' messages available to the NSA.
In a message on his website, Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, said he was forced "to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit." He said he was prohibited by law from explaining what had happened over the last six weeks, but the suggestion was that he was fighting a government demand for access to the email of one or more customers.
Snowden's disclosures have had a continuing, even escalating impact as journalists have continued to pore over them. On Thursday, for instance, The New York Times wrote that the NSA was examining all email messages in and out of the country and searching them for clues associated with terrorism or foreign intelligence.
On Friday, The Guardian, the British newspaper that has published many of Snowden's revelations, wrote about a clause in NSA rules that permits the agency to search for Americans' names and identifying information in data about foreign targets gathered from large Internet companies.
In his remarks Friday, Obama said he was satisfied that the NSA programs were both necessary and respectful of Americans' privacy. He acknowledged the "instinctive bias of the intelligence community to keep everything very close." But he said he had urged America's spies to err on the side of making more details public.
"Let's just put the whole elephant out there, and examine what's working," he said.
- Reuters/Boston.com
U.S.-Russian relations plunged to one of their lowest points since the Cold War this week after Russia granted temporary asylum to fugitive former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden. Obama retaliated by abruptly cancelling a Moscow summit with Putin planned for early next month.
At a White House news conference on Friday, Obama insisted that he does not have bad personal relations with Putin.
The two men had a testy meeting in June in Northern Ireland and from the photos of them at the time, it looked as if they would both rather have been somewhere else.
"I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he's got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom. But the truth is that when we're in conversations together, oftentimes it's very productive," Obama said.
Putin's sending of a telegram wishing former President George W. Bush well after a heart procedure this week was viewed by some Kremlin watchers as a sign that Putin was sending an implicit message to Obama.
The White House says Obama pulled out of the Moscow summit not just because of the Russian decision to grant asylum to Snowden, who is wanted in the United States to face espionage charges.
U.S. differences with Russia have piled up recently over Moscow's support for the Syrian government in that country's civil war, as well as human rights concerns and other grievances.
There was no immediate response from Moscow to Obama's description of the Russian president. But at a news conference in Washington after talks on Friday between the Russian and U.S. foreign policy and defense chiefs, the Russians emphasized how positive the meeting had been. They even invited the Americans to participate in a tank competition later this year.
"We don't have any Cold War. Instead we have close relations," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. "Edward Snowden did not overshadow our discussions."
Meanwhile, the US government's striking response to the reported terror threat in recent days has coincided with a wave of unprecedented skepticism about the NSA's sweeping surveillance programs since Snowden's disclosures.
When Snowden began releasing secret documents two months ago, Obama said he welcomed a debate on the tradeoffs of NSA surveillance and privacy. But the debate has grown far larger than administration officials anticipated, with lawmakers of both parties in Congress and half of Americans in polls calling for curbs on the agency.
On Thursday, two small companies providing secure email to customers added their voices to the pushback. Lavabit and Silent Circle announced that they would shut down their email services rather than give in to what they suggested was government pressure to make customers' messages available to the NSA.
In a message on his website, Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, said he was forced "to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit." He said he was prohibited by law from explaining what had happened over the last six weeks, but the suggestion was that he was fighting a government demand for access to the email of one or more customers.
Snowden's disclosures have had a continuing, even escalating impact as journalists have continued to pore over them. On Thursday, for instance, The New York Times wrote that the NSA was examining all email messages in and out of the country and searching them for clues associated with terrorism or foreign intelligence.
On Friday, The Guardian, the British newspaper that has published many of Snowden's revelations, wrote about a clause in NSA rules that permits the agency to search for Americans' names and identifying information in data about foreign targets gathered from large Internet companies.
In his remarks Friday, Obama said he was satisfied that the NSA programs were both necessary and respectful of Americans' privacy. He acknowledged the "instinctive bias of the intelligence community to keep everything very close." But he said he had urged America's spies to err on the side of making more details public.
"Let's just put the whole elephant out there, and examine what's working," he said.
- Reuters/Boston.com
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