US threatened Germany over Snowden, Vice Chancellor says

The US is becoming more and more obviously a bully, threatening and punishing to get its own way—e.g., sanctions against Venezuela for human rights abuses (but none against Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or any of our other despot allies), quite clearly not about human rights at all, but like many bullies, the US finds it a challenge to tell the truth.

Glenn Greenwald writes in The Intercept:

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 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…