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 guess if you make sure your contractors can’t reveal what they’ve done in your name, it becomes harder for others to discover what it is that you, personally, have done. But not impossible. The IT companies for the White House are denying that their the company that missed 5 million missing emails in their daily audits.
When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that wentmissing, a White House lawyer
So AT&T says they’ll cut off your broadband if you say anything mean about them. But they say they don’t really mean that.
However, an AT&T spokesperson tells Ars Technica that thecompany has no interest in engaging in censorship but stopped short ofsaying that AT&T could not in fact exercise its ability to do so.
I’m still following up on the question of the way in which the Rather complaint invokes the debate on Hamdi. I wanted to draw extended attention to this article. In it, Tim Grieve susses out precisely what seems to be the reason Rather included the Abu Ghraib details in his complaint.
Did Clement know he was misleading the justices, or was he kept out ofthe loop so that he could avoid revealing
I’ve been meaning to go back to compare the chronology laid out by Dan Rather in his complaint as it pertains to Abu Ghraib with the chronology of the Taguba investigation and the Hamdi case. Two things stick out. First, Myers pretended to be ignorant of the details of the abuse on May 6, several weeks after he called Dan Rather personally to spike–or delay–the story.
Larry Johnson does the math, so I don’t have to. Fitzgerald’s total costs to investigate the deliberate outing of a CIA spy, through March 31, amount to $2,396,283. Ken Starr’s total costs, to investigate a failed land deal and a blow job, amount to $59,463,703. I guess all those cocktail weenies Starr bought for the press really add up, huh?
Now that Larry pulled all these numbers together, though, I’d like to
Via chrisc, Judge Burns has severed the trials of Brent Wilkes and John Michael, on account of the health problems of the latter.
Ajudge Monday severed the trials of ex-defense contractor Brent Wilkesand banker John Michael, who are charged in connection with thecorruption scandal that sent former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham toprison.
U.S.District Judge Larry Burns postponed Michael’s trial indefinitely afterattorney Raymond Granger said his client had been diagnosed with viralmeningitis.Pretrialmotions are scheduled
One lingering suspicion that they’re just moving this off the books:
After several requests from the Homeland Security Committee callingfor a moratorium on the controversial use of spy satellite imagery fordomestic purposes, the Department has heeded the call and delayed itsplanned October 1st launch of its new National Applications Office(NAO). The Department has cited the need to address unanswered privacyand civil liberties questions from Congress – as addressed in theCommittee’s September 6th
Paul Kiel reported this morning that Brent Wilkes doesn’t want the government to mention the prostitutes that Wilkes engaged as part of his bribe scheme to influence Duke Cunningham (here’s the filing). And if the Court doesn’t exclude the testimony about prostitutes, Geragos threatens, he’s going to haul the prostitute whose calendar has been submitted as a business record into court so he can delve into her record-keeping practices.
It may not be the Texas oilmen we’d like to plead guilty, but it is going to make others think twice before they bribe dictators to do their oil deals.
Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt Jr. pleaded guilty Monday to charges that hepaid millions of dollars to Iraqi officials to illegally win contractsconnected to the United Nations oil-for-food program.
[snip]
During the trial, prosecutors demonstrated that Wyatt had such a closerelationship with Iraq that he
Walter Pincus analyzes one of the contracts that Henry Waxman is looking at to determine how much more Blackwater’s mercenaries are costing us than a law-abiding US soldier. Pincus notes that Petraeus makes roughly $493 a day. This doesn’t appear to include benefits; figuring benes make up 1/3 of someone’s compensation–which in the private sector is often about right, but in the military is probably too small–then Petraeus might cost us,