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.
By now you’ve heard the news: Rove is stepping down. So here’s my treatment of possible reasons why he’s leaving, in reverse order of their likelihood:
Time with the Family
As he said to the WSJ, he wants to spend more time with this family. Of course, this is a load of horse puckey–if he had wanted to spend time with his family, he surely would have done it before his son went
Yup, still mono-focused on FISA, but mr. emptywheel is clamoring for dinner, so maybe once I step away from the computer, I’ll remember all the other things I’ve been meaning to write on.
I want to object to the way Kevin Drum is referring to the new details of FISA:
Originally, FISA allowed warrantless wiretapping of anycommunication between two foreigners.
I’m still working through AGAG’s answers to a bunch of questions the Senate Judiciary Committee asked him last year (he only answered early this year). There’s an exchange involving Russ Feingold that is, I think, very instructive for understanding the recent FISA amendment.
You indicated at the hearing that the Administration has agreed to “submit†the program to the FISA court to rule on it if Congress passes the bill the Administration
I’m working on a massive post on how the Administration has gamed the system to sustain their wireless wiretapping program. For the moment, though, I’d like to make a discrete point about the aborted Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) inevstigation into the program.
When Senator Spector asked Alberto Gonzales last year why BushCo refused to give OPR the clearance to investigate the wireless wiretapping program because OPR included many career employees,
Both the WaPo and the NYT have stories today explaining how the crisis in the warrantless wiretap program got so bad that Congress got punked into passing a shitty bill. The story is simple, on its face. The FISC rejected a government subpoena in March, another in May, and those two rulings resulted in the government losing the ability to wiretap a great deal of foreign communication.
No wonder BushCo wanted oversight of FISA totally out of the hands of the FISC. If I’m reading this WaPo article correctly, there were actually two rulings that went against the Administration–one in March, and one in May.
But in a secret ruling in March, a judge on a special court empoweredto review the government’s electronic snooping challenged for the firsttime the government’s ability to collect data from such wires even whenthey
Here’s the way I figure this math, from the Iowa Straw Poll.
They had 24,000 voters in 1999.
They wanted 20,000 voters today.
They got 14,000.
That says, presumably, the Iowa Republican Party wrote off 4,000 votes because Giuliani and McCain pulled out and Thompson’s not in yet (24,000 minues 20,000).
But that still leaves 6,000 people (20,000 minus 14,000) they expected–and didn’t get.
You know how Thomas Friedman’s six months always seem to end up being indefinite forevers? Well, the reverse seems to be going on with Republican accusations that:
For months, congressional Democrats ignored warnings from Director ofNational Intelligence Michael McConnell that FISA’s antiquatedprovisions were tying the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies fromcollecting against terrorist communications.
In fact, it appears that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell actually sat on the information for months, from
Steven Benen writes most of the post I was going to write (thanks Steve!) in response to the news that Pete Hoekstra is a big fat hypocrite about intelligence leaks. Steve links to Justin Rood’s coverage of Hoekstra leaking details about the supposedly secret intelligence budget; RawStory first noticed Hoekstra’s leak.
If you haven’t already, go read Jane Mayer’s article on our methods of torture. The short version: we’re using psychological methods to impose “learned helplessness” and dependency, and as a result, we’re getting some intelligence, a whole lot of garbage, and we’re turning our own interrogators into moral zombies.
I wanted to focus on one aspect of the calculated humiliation she describes: