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 wanted to return to the torture index released to ACLU the other day to comment on what the CIA claims to have in terms of records.
First, remember what this index is. The April 21 order required CIA to turn over two things. Records “relating to the content” of the torture tapes “from the entire period of the tapes that were destroyed” (This stuff is referred to as “Paragraph 3”
During the week that Dick Cheney ordered Libby to out Valerie Plame, Mary Matalin told Libby that “Bush” should order everything on the Wilsons declassified (it’s not clear whether Matalin meant this to include Plame’s identity or not). She said “the President should wave his magic wand” to declassify the oppo on the Wilsons.
You’d think after Porter Goss once again failed to refute Nancy Pelosi’s central assertion, “Fact Check” organizations would get the hint.
But no–they’re still out there refuting themselves!!
Here are the details that FactCheck.Org uses to claim that,
So we’re left with Democrats offering one (not always entirely accurate) story and the CIA and some Republicans offering a different (and, again, not always entirely accurate) story.
The NYT is out with another report of the Pentagon stat that 14% of those released after being held in Gitmo subsequently engaged in terrorism.
An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.
Jason Leopold reported on and posted a late update to the ongoing torture tape FOIA exchange. If I read the latest exchange correctly, Special Prosecutor John Durham is at least identifying–and potentially making available through FOIA–a number of recent documents on the torture tape destruction.
Today’s letter does two things. First, it withdraws John Durham’s objection to Judge Hellerstein’s order that:
The government shall produce documents relating to the destruction of the