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 been puzzling over something since the temporary FISA amendment passed in August. The Administration has claimed they needed on easy fix: to allow NSA to wiretap electronic communication that starts and finishes on foreign soil, whether or not that communication passes through the US between sender and recipient. Yet both times when Congress sets about providing that easy fix to FISA, the Administration demands much more.
I pointed out a few weeks ago that the ginormous King Ranch is a welfare queen recipient of cotton subsidies. Well, wouldn’t you know it, billionaire and GOP sugar daddy Dick DeVos is a welfare queen recipient of corn subsidies (perhaps we should call him the “High Fructose Corn Syrup Daddy”).
Consider Dick DeVos.
CREW and the National Security Archive won the first part of their fight with the White House–getting a court order requiring the White House to preserve their emails and the back-ups (h/t PJ Evans).
A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies ofall its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had arguedstrongly against.
U.S.
Buried in an excellent article on the difficulties Native Americans have getting someone in USA offices to prosecute serious crime is this Margaret Chiara quote:
“I’ve had (assistant U.S. attorneys)look right at me and say, ‘I did not sign up for this,”‘ said MargaretChiara, who until March was the U.S. attorney for western Michigan,with jurisdiction over several reservations.
My post on Armitage forced me to wade through the archives, where I saw this post.
On July 13, Christine Axsmith posted this on her blog on the CIA’s confidential intranet, Intelink.
Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong.
Not to mention ineffective. Econo-Girl has serious doubts as to whether European lives were saved.
About 6,204 people have emailed me news of Armitage’s mea kinda culpa on Blitzer. The admission of stupidity is really nothing new–Armitage said something similar when he came forward to speak with David Martin last fall.
Since a lot of people have asked what memo he learned of Plame’s identity from–here it is.
I do intend to return to my planned series on Matt Bai and the Serious People. But for now, David Sanger asks a question that really needs to be asked: what is going to happen to Pakistan’s nukes? Before I look at the answer Sanger offers, let me point to this one line in the story.
“It’s a very professional military,†said a senior American officialwho is trying to manage the crisis
I found this article on Richard Mellon Scaife’s newfound admiration for the Clinton’s via tristero. It’s a remarkable article, in that it frames Scaife’s purported admiration for the Clinton’s against the background of Scaife’s smear factory from the nineties, all told in a pseudo-objective omniscient third person voice.
Scaife was no run-of-the-mill Clinton hater.
Fill in the blanks:
[ISIS President David] Albright said yesterday that the tubes acquired by ___________ neededto be cut in half and shaped in order to be used as the outer casingsof centrifuges. If ___________ proves that the tubes were untouched, hesaid, it could “shatter the argument” that they were meant for auranium program.
Let’s see, WMD expert David Albright describing doubts about claims that a country was using aluminum tubes to build
I’m going to be a panelist on a conference in Boston a week from tomorrow (Saturday). The conference is:
No News Is Bad News
A freeand independent press is essential for democracy. The press has aresponsibility to inform citizens about both the policies and theactions of the government and about credible challenges to thosepolicies and actions, to report on conditions that may require new ordifferent government initiatives, and to raise timely questions