Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
I asked in my earlier post on the NYT leak of Jim Comey emails what the big rush was in May 2005 that Comey couldn’t use a week to fix the “combined techniques” opinion.
The emails themselves explain the rush–and that rush should have been the NYT story. On April 28, 2005, Comey wrote:
[Alberto Gonzales] mentioned at one point that OLC didn’t feel like it could accede to my request to make
I’m a little late to the the House Judiciary State Secrets Hearing (committee stream here). Jerrold Nadler has had his opening statement–the big news in that was that Holder refused to make a witness available for this hearing. Jim Sensenbrenner is up noting that Obama has adopted Bush’s approach on State Secrets.
For all the blistering that I, and many others here, give to Obama for his continuation of the Bush/Cheney duplicity on wiretapping, privacy, torture and Executive primacy issues, there are similarly a great many areas in which he is so many light years ahead of where we have been moribund for the last eight years that it is hard to remember we are still in the same galaxy. The Cairo speech was a remarkable reminder of the value of Obama.