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.
Yet another old-school journalist calls on the Toobz to clean up its acts and adopt the “ethics” of old journalism that have already failed our society. But I’m most amused by the humorous error in his own op-ed calling for accuracy and fairness. Apparently, Professor Helzinki believes that journalists are leading the fight to debunk the “Obama in the madrassa rumor,” rather than propagate it themselves.
The discovery that Bush can turn his own Executive Orders into Pixie Dust provides an explanation for one of the lingering mysteries of the Plame outing: the EO governing declassification authority doesn’t explicitly give the Vice President the authority to declassify information that he has not, himself, classified. But because the President always intended the Vice President to be treated as the President is in that Executive Order, it means Cheney has that authority contrary to the plan text meaning of the EO.
At least that’s what I take from this quote:
In the e-mail version of the Politico Playbook this morning, Mike Allen quotes “a senior administration official” lamenting that “they should have burned the NIE and kept the tapes.” The official was referring to the administration’s debacles with the intelligence community since the new NIE on Iran was released and the CIA revealed that it had destroyed videotaped interrogations.
Guess what? ODNI has told Congress it doesn’t want minimization procedures to be codified in statute because it would make it too hard to change those procedures. That, plus a continued emphasis on Executive Orders that George Bush can turn into pixie dust, suggests they really don’t want to be held responsible for protecting US persons’ privacy when conducting wiretaps.