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.
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.
Judge Bates, the same judge who rejected the Wilsons lawsuit against Dick and Libby and Karl and Dick, basically issued the same opinion he did in the Wilsons’ suit: It’s a great idea, but, no, not going to let it happen. All the more reason to figure against immunity for the telecoms.
Sheldon Whitehouse revealed that Bush has turned his Executive Order governing surveillance of Americans overseas into Pixie Dust. But that’s not the only EO Bush has done that with; he also turned his EO governing the treatment of classified information into Pixie Dust. In fact, he didn’t bother to tell the guy whose job it is to enforce that EO that it was Pixie Dust until four years after the fact!
Marty Lederman tells us not to worry about the legality of the OLC opinions Senator Whitehouse revealed last Friday. But he tells us we may need to worry about the constitutional bad faith that Whitehouse’s revelations imply. This post begins a discussion about what happens when all the President’s Executive Orders turn to Pixie Dust.