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.
If the torture program began–as Michael Hayden has said–as a covert op, then it would require Bush to have notified Congress of the plan to torture before it happened. That did not happen. In fact, even according to reports from the CIA, it appears the CIA did not have its presidential finding until a year after the torture started.
Michael Hayden and the rest of the torture apologists have been wandering around all week claiming that the Administration could have won its FOIA case against ACLU and withheld the torture memos.
If this ruling from Juge Hellerstein is any indication, they couldn’t be more wrong. It did five things:Demanded a full “Vaughn” index for the FOIAed materials, describing the people involved and the dates.Refused the government’s attempt to limit production of
As I noted last night, MiniCheney very pointedly avoided claiming that al-Nashiri provided important intelligence as a result of being waterboarded. In a non-sequitur response to Norah O’Donnell’s assertion that waterboarding is torture, MiniCheney offered this as rebuttal to O’Donnell’s point (at 2:15).
There were three people who were waterboarded, and two of those people are people who gave us incredibly important and useful information, information that saved American lives after
Greg Sargent got a hold of Cheney’s FOIA request for the documents that will prove–he claims–that torture was effective. He’s asking for two documents, both of which were stored in his “detainees” file in his files. They are:CIA Report, dated July 13, 2004CIA Report, dated June 1, 2005
(I’m a little confused about what the two different forms refer to, as they seem to refer to the same documents, though of