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.
I’ve imagined (and it’s largely imagination) that Condi’s little PR campaign of the last week was a desperate attempt to stave off DOD control over State’s bodyguards–an attempt to retain an army for the exclusive use of the State Department. Condi went to (for her) unheard of lengths to try to play nice and pretend that State could manage a very large band of mercenaries.
Is it just coincidence that that effort
In an email to Laura Rozen and Jeff Lomonaco this morning, I predicted Henry Waxman would be mightily interested in the news that the Blackwater guards involved in the September 16 shooting had been granted immunity.
In any case, I suspect Condi will regret that she didn’t mention thiswhen visiting Congress last week.
Buried in this article on Democrats compromising with Republicans, I noticed this paragraph:
And as Democratic leaders push their own legislation to rein in the wiretapping program, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) has been quietly exploring avenues of compromise with Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.),the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee. CentristDemocrats hope those talks can dovetail with the Senate intelligencecommittee’s own bipartisan measure on surveillance of suspectedterrorists.
Jane Harman, of course, is a
There’s an interesting case study going on over at the Senate Commerce Committee. The Committee is trying to write legislation to return the Consumer Product Safety Commission to its former strength so it can prevent things like lead-filled toys from entering the toddler chew chain. Yet the Commission’s acting head, Nancy Nord, is trying to preserve the Norquistian “ideal” of small government–she’s objecting to Senate plans to give her Commission more
I pointed out the other day that several of the Blackwater guards involved in the September 16 shooting have left Iraq. Now bmaz points to this AP story revealing that all the guards have been given immunity from prosecution.
The State Department promised Blackwater USA bodyguards immunityfrom prosecution in its investigation of last month’s deadly shootingof 17 Iraqi civilians, The Associated Press has learned.
[snip]
Three senior law enforcement officials said all the Blackwaterbodyguards
Back when I taught, at the beginning of the school year each year the school would hand professors a description of the incoming freshman class so the professors could understand what world their students were coming from. It usually read something like:
2007: This year’s incoming freshmen were born in 1989.
The top TV series for most of these students’ teen years was American Idol.
These students matured after the first big judgments against
Kagro X has a post focusing, again, on Michael Mukasey’s evasions about the Constitution. Kagro focuses not on Mukasey’s confusion about whether water-boarding is torture, but whether the President can ignore existing laws.
Any president — and I mean any president — ought to beable to depend on a certain amount of deference from his or herAttorney General, of course.
I’m less interested in the local angle on Mitch McConnell’s placement of earmarks to benefit BAE in this year’s defense appropriations bill than what it says about our military industrial complex.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is pushing $25 million in earmarkedfederal funds for a British defense contractor that is under criminalinvestigation by the U.S.
SJC will meet on Wednesday to take up SSCI’s FISA Amendment. We’ll get to see whether the Administration has sufficiently satisfied Scottish Haggis and Patrick Leahy to get the bill through committee with the telecom immunity still attached.
But there may be other reason to tune in, something I noticed on Selise’s weekly Congressional hearing schedule:
Panel I:
Kenneth L.
Atrios provides some crack former econ professor analysis on the dollar …
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Dollar sinking.Thedollar fell as low as $1.4426 per euro, the weakest since theintroduction of the 13-nation common currency in 1999, before tradingat $1.4420 as of 6:29 a.m. in Tokyo from $1.4393 in late New York onOct. 26.