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.
Thomas Metzloff poses a question: In re: Nifong: We had a case in Durham, we had a prosecutor who was saying lots of things on TV, everyone remembers the quotable quotes. What is the message that’s learned from Nifong?
Michael Cassidy
More lessons not learned than lessons learned. Brady and lying to court, he was going to be disbarred anyway.
As expected, Mark Geragos is in CA trying to keep Brent Wilkes out of jail. And perhaps to subpoena a bunch of corrupt Congressmen.
Laurie Levenson
Makes a joke about Geragos being in trial or on TV or both.
Talks about loading up your pleadings–“they’re more likely to get it right.” You can comment on public records, so put stuff in your pleadings so you can refer back to it.
Discussion of cameras
Bill Leonard is resigning at the end of the year.
It is with deeply mixed emotions that I inform you I have decided to leave government service at the end of the calendar year.
[snip]
I will miss all the great public servants at the National Archives as I move on to the next phase of my professional life.
Things I’m going to get in trouble for saying publicly at Duke:That 80% of what is out in the blogosphere is crap. Hodding Carter had said half was. But I wasn’t thinking about anyone in this corner of the blogosphere.That we bloggers were parasites on the legal teams of the mainstream media, who pay lawyers a lot of money to make sure things like the Libby grand jury recording gets released
Scout prime has been tracking something I’ve been watching, too. The new AfriCom military command? Well, the entire continent of Africa has told us, “no, thanks.”
The Pentagon’s plan to create a US military command based in Africahave hit a wall of hostility from governments in the region reluctantto associate themselves with the Bush administration’s “war on terror”and fearful of American intervention.
A US delegation led by RyanHenry, principal deputy under-secretary of defence
I’m about to take off for this conference. The conference organizers have assured me there will be wifi, so I’ll likely liveblog the more interesting panels (gosh, it seems so long since I’ve liveblogged Judge Walton; I wonder if I’ll remember how). But otherwise posting may be spotty until Monday. Then again, maybe not.
The Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee are trying to force the Administration to implement procedures for protecting the privacy of Americans before it will approve funding that will fund the Administration’s domestic satellite surveillance program. In their letter to the Democrats who oversee this appropriation, they put a price tag on all the surveillance programs the Administration has had to scrap because they didn’t first implement procedures to protect
Larry Craig’s not gonna go, he says. At least not yet.
That’s not that big a surprise–he had been threatening to un-resign since early in September. Though his decisions to resign and then un-resign correlate curiously with his receipt of a subpoena in the Brent Wilkes trial.
August 13: Subpoenas issued (to House members)
August 27:
The House response to the Brent Wilkes subpoena is now online–it’s 81 pages long. I’ll comment more on the rationale for quashing the subpoenas in an update (I’ve got a talk to go give shortly, but the short version is speech and debate). But some initial details:The subpoena to Ike Skelton has been withdrawnWilkes also subpoenaed:
In what might be the best testament to the wisdom of mounting primary challenges, Jane Harman has turned into a bulldog debunking this Administration’s lies to drum up support for expanded surveillance. On Olbermann yesterday, she revealed that the terror threat the Administration used to scare up support for the FISA amendment came from a source deemed to be unreliable.
Well the chatter was up all summer at the level of pre-9/11