Marcy Wheeler et al. at Emptywheel are on a tear today.

Read Marcy’s posts: Who Will the Government Scapegoat Now on the Wuhayshi Leak? and What If the TOR Takedown Relates to the Yemeni Alert?, then consider Jim White’s question: Did Yemen Evacuation Cover Staging of JSOC Troops, Equipment for Attack?.

The leaks about the al Qaeda ‘conference call’ is a serious breach. This goes to a major method used to track actual terrorists. These revelations really will hinder our intelligence efforts. I cannot help but believe that this was supposed to justify the domestic spying program that Snowden revealed. Understand that this has nothing to do with the hoovering of domestic communications. This is what NSA is supposed to be doing. Only a very limited number of people would have the information that was revealed, and they are very senior members of the White House and the Pentagon.

Zero cleared out all of the embassies to prevent another ‘Benghazi’, so the Republican have shifted to complaining that it made the US look like cowards.

The Beeb reports that Zero is mad at Putin and isn’t going to talk to him at recess: Obama cancels Putin meeting over Snowden asylum.

The Russians see things differently: Russia “disappointed” bilateral talks with US cancelled

Russian foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said on Wednesday Russia was not to blame over the Snowden affair.

“This decision is clearly linked to the situation with former agent of US special services [Edward] Snowden, which hasn’t been created by us,” he said during a phone conference with the press.

“For many years, the Americans have avoided signing an extradition agreement,” Mr Ushakov said, “And they have invariably responded negatively to our requests for extradition of people who committed crimes on the territory of Russia, pointing at the absence of such agreement.”

“Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.” Alternately, “What goes around, comes around.”

“What we have here is failure to communicate.” Zero is one of the worst negotiators I have ever seen which leads me to believe he doesn’t even understand the basic concepts involved. This process was escalated to the top way too quickly, and Zero was making demands before he even discovered what the Russians might want. Zero made it impossible for Putin to turn over Snowden without looking like he was caving in to US demands.