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.
The third installment in the WaPo’s Cheney series is a bit of a hodgepodge. It includes items that appear to have been thrown into this installment as part of a generic domestic policy article. But what the article is really about is how Cheney has pushed trickle down policies that have been proven failures in the past, once again by serving as a gatekeeper for advice that gets to the President,
Remember that superb article on foreign lobbying I described a while back? Well, apparently the two PR/Lobbying firms that got so badly taken by Ken Silverstein are now accusing him of being unethical.
My story in the July issue of the magazine details how two beltwaylobby shops I approached, on the pretense that I represented a shadyLondon-based energy firm with a stake in Turkmenistan, proposed towhitewash the image of that country’s
Tom Maguire usually takes himself more seriously than this. After reading the WaPo’s series on Dick, he chose to ignore the widespread criticism on the part of hardcore conservatives of OVP’s dismantling of the Constitution and instead claim that the WaPo article was proof–proof at last!!!–that “Fitzgerald’s prosecution of Libby may have been politically motivated.”
To prove that “Fitzgerald’s prosecution of Libby may have been politically motivated,” Maguire ferrets out the abundant
Nico at TP links to this story about the Senate’s thus far unsuccessful attempt to declassify two of SSCI’s reports on WMD. The basic story is that the White House is trying to prevent an effort, supported by both our too-genteel SSCI Chair Jay Rockefeller and by the partisan Pat Roberts, to declassify last fall’s Phase II SSCI reports, the one that compared pre-war assessments and the one that showed the
I’ve talked about Cheney’s and Addington’s Methods. Now I’d like to inventory the sources that Gellman and Becker used for their articles, as a way to understand where the shifting loyalties of the Administration lie. One thing that becomes clear by mapping this out is the centrality of Josh Bolten to many of the more damning accusations against Cheney.
Before I get too deep in the detail of today’s installment of WaPo’s series on Cheney, I’d like to remind you of a point I made in my Take Back America speech. While David Addington’s theories on executive power are tremendously dangerous, Addington does believe in the rule of law. He admitted in his Libby trial testimony, for example, that the “Treated as Top Secret/SCI” stamp that OVP had used with
I’d like to point out a teeny detail in the report that Henry Waxman cites as his source that OVP isn’t providing ISOO with information about OVP’s classification and declassification activities:
PFIAB and OVP did not report data through the SF 311 to ISOO this year. This report, therefore, does not include any data from these two entities.
It was not just OVP that blew off ISOO in 2003.
Okay, now something totally frivolous about the Cheney piece (if you want real analysis, go here). The WaPo piece reveals Cheney’s secret service name:
“Angler,” as the Secret Service code-named him,
Which is of course the name they’ve given the series.
Well, I think it perhaps ironic because, as I understand it, Cheney’s not that great a fisherman.
Via Cannonfire, I see that Pope former-Nazi has finally done something worthwhile with his position: he told the Poodle that God meant it about that commandment that, Thou shalt not kill.
Tony Blair yesterday used his last official foreign engagement beforeleaving office to tell Pope Benedict he wanted to become a RomanCatholic, a Vatican source said last night.
But, in talks lasting more than half an hour, the outgoing PrimeMinister was left
There’s a remarkable paragraph close to the start of Barton Gellman and Jo Becker’s story on Cheney today:
Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president ofpopular lore. Bush has set his own course, not always in directionsCheney preferred. The president seized the helm when his No. 2 steeredtoward trouble, as Bush did, in time, on military commissions.