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.
Wow. Judge Hellerstein is not amused with the CIA’s assertion that the torture tapes–which IG staffers flew to Thailand to view as part of their investigation into CIA interrogation methods–were not part of their investigation. Nor does he buy the assertion that the “special review” is not an investigation. He basically called Bull on the CIA’s assertions in about six different ways.
The most interesting tidbit from John Rizzo’s appearance before HPSCI yesterday is that Rizzo reported lawyers within CIA admitting the 9/11 Commission would probably want to see the torture tapes. If lawyers within CIA recognized the Commission wanted the tapes, then surely George Tenet did. But he declined to mention the tapes to the Commission. No wonder he lawyered up recently.
I’ve long suspected that the GOP has used the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) as a way to spy on domestic enemies even while making their friends rich. CIFA is the organization that collected information on both Jesus’ General and Quakers, then stuck it into a database without requisite privacy protections. And then, when Congress and the Carol Lam started focusing on CIFA, its database on private citizens got quickly disappeared.
I’ve already ranted about how irresponsible it was for Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick to publish Bob Bennett’s statement on behalf of Jose Rodriguez on the same day that John Rizzo testifies before Congress. Nothing like assisting the obstruction of an ongoing investigation. But now that I’ve done my ranting (and enjoyed the sun), here is the dubious timeline offered in Pincus and Warrick’s article.
Today’s article from Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus answers a lot of questions we’ve been asking about the torture tapes–the biggest being that the tapes were stored and destroyed in Thailand. And it has a lot of interesting details. But its evident, overriding purpose, is to allow Jose Rodriguez and John Rizzo to coordinate stories before the latter testifies before Congress today.