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.
Top of the morning to one and all. As Marcy and family hit the road on their much delayed Christmas expedition, it occurs to me that it is time to grease the wheels of justice and get them rolling down the road of accountability. EW and Mad Dog are right about the implications of the new AP article.
The AP has a story out that seems to clear all the White House lawyers of supporting the destruction of the torture tapes. All of them, that is, except David Addington.
But it also raises still more questions about timing, focusing (as a WaPo article yesterday did) on discussions in 2004. If the substantive discussions happened in 2004, then why did the tapes get destroyed in 2005?
McClatchy has a long story out detailing how indictments for the New Hampshire phone-jamming case got stalled. The whole thing is worth reading. But I’m particularly intrigued by the role of Terry O’Donnell, who was apparently responsible for getting Tobin’s indictment stalled until after the 2004 election. That’s rather curious, since O’Donnell is actually Dick Cheney’s personal lawyer.
In all fairness to Dana “Pig Missile” Perino, she probably doesn’t want to become the next Scottie McClellan, forced to say things from the podium while Dick Cheney is hiding his criminal ways behind those public statements. Still, Dana comes off very badly in yesterday’s attempt to explain why anonymous sources at the White House are saying one thing and she’s saying another.
The White House has gone to the trouble of making the NYT correct their headline indicating that news of the involvement of Addington and Gonzales in discussions of the terror tapes differs from the story the White House was pitching–that Harriet Miers was the only one involved.
While the White House is correct that they never officially claimed that Harriet was the only one involved, someone has certainly been shopping that story for over a week. Which is why it behooves those who received that story to out their source, particularly if that person is in the White House.
Yes, the NYT story tells us something we were safe to assume: that David Addington and Alberto Gonzales were involved in the torture tape destruction conversations. But I’m more interested in that news in light of the mounting evidence that Jose Rodriguez got legal advice that he could destroy the tapes in seeming isolation from all the discussions about the wisdom of destroying the tapes or even the explicit court orders regarding the torture tapes.