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.
The charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani were dropped not because he was tortured. So was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, after all, and he’s still being charged. The charges against al-Qahtani were dropped because trying him would have amounted to trying Rummy, Jim Haynes, and Diane Beaver, too. And trying al-Qahtani would have also proved that torture doesn’t work.
The entire opinion disqualifying General Thomas Hartmann in Salim Hamdan’s show trial is worth reading. But I’m particularly struck by the coincidence of timing. The Bush Administration started focusing on show trials at precisely the same time as it was firing a bunch of US Attorneys for political reasons.
I am still catching up on events of the last week and so I don’t have a really good sense of WTF is going on with the FBI raid of Scott Bloch’s house and–according to NPR, via Sara–body cavities. But I wanted to point you to this analysis of a document drafted by a bunch of Office of Special Counsel investigators, listing their complaints about Bloch’s intervention into their investigations.