Bhutto and State
Bob Novak and the AP present dueling sides of a debate over whether the US did enough to support Benazir Bhutto’s safety.
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.
Bob Novak and the AP present dueling sides of a debate over whether the US did enough to support Benazir Bhutto’s safety.
McClatchy reports that, on the day she was killed, Benazir Bhutto was about to hand over proof of the ISI’s plans to steal the Pakistani election to Arlen Specter. It raises new reasons for concern that Cheney is in charge of our Pakistan “policy.”
My supposition that one reasons Dana Priest’s black site article precipitated the torture tape destruction is because the tapes were dangerous to the country on whose territory the CIA tortured Abu Zubaydah led to me to read something I should have already read–the COE report on European participation in the US HVD program. This post lays out what it says about Poland.
If Mary McCarthy’s allegations about the testimony of a senior CIA official in June 2005 are true, then it seems clear that one purpose of destroying the terror tapes–among many–was to destroy evidence that the official lied to Congress.
Remember Mary McCarthy, who was fired from the CIA for allegedly leaking details on European black sites to Dana Priest? This post looks at what details of her firing might reveal about the destruction of the terror tapes.
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane have done good reporting on the terror tape story. But their latest installment reads like an attempt on the part of the CIA to get its story straight. While it appears to present a nice coherent narrative people with CIA officers acting rationally, it raises more questions than answers.
One thing it does appear to support, though, is that the tapes were destroyed, in addition to an effort to prevent the tapes from coming out as Congress was trying to outlaw torture, because they were trying to protect the European ally on whose soil the torture took place.
Everyone’s spoiling my Bhutto thread with their damn trash talk, so I’ll put up this one, a whole day early. Jeebus, you put the Pats on TV and people get all uppity. (Incidentally, this Pats-on-three-channels thing started after John Kerry complained; where was all this gumption in 2004 when we needed it???)
That said, as much as I’m hoping the Pats win (and recognizing that, even without Shockey, the Giants have a
Digby and Steve Benen are right. Bush’s impending veto of the military spending bill is just weird. It’s weird in that Bush has had months to push a very compliant Congress to write the bill precisely as he wants. And it’s weird because the stated reason for the impending veto doesn’t make any sense.
I don’t have much wisdom about the Bhutto assassination. Pretty much everyone agrees her death devastates our Pakistan policy. But since so little is clear about who killed Bhutto–and particularly the Pakistani government’s role in her death–I think it remains impossible to forsee what will come next.
I just finished Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency. As I’ve been reading, I’ve been focusing primarily on the insight it might offer onto the Terror Tape Destruction. But I appreciated Goldsmith’s book, too, for the way that reading an intelligent and sincere conservative helps me to see my disagreements with conservatives more clearly.