Entries by emptywheel

Will DOJ Finally Finish Its “Review” of Faulty White Paper on Illegal Wiretapping on Monday?

Steven Aftergood reports that, as of December 10, DOJ was still “reviewing” the flawed January 2006 white paper that the Bush Administration used to retroactively claim the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force also authorized Bush to ignore FISA. In June 2009, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) asked the Obama Administration to rescind certain classified legal […]

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Time to Reevaluate the Importance of Bradley Manning’s Alleged Leak?

Back when WikiLeaks leaked the Collateral Murder video, I was agnostic about the value of the leak. Surely, exposing the cover-up of the killing of the Reuters journalists was important. But I thought the response focused too much on the soldiers who had been trained to respond the way they had, and too little on […]

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Will Issa’s Fired Spokesperson Expose How Politico “Wins the Morning”?

When news broke yesterday that Darrell Issa had fired his spokesperson, Kurt Bardella, for sharing emails with NYT reporter Mark Leibovich, I suggested, I suspect Issa just fired his spokesperson because Issa cares more about staying in the good graces of Politico than NYT. #WinTheMorning It was John Harris’ complaint that his reporters’ emails had […]

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Liar Calls Access Journalist a Pot

Even before Tom Ricks handed his blog over to Bob Woodward to rip Donald Rumsfeld a new asshole, Ricks shared this quote from H.R. Haldeman about Rummy as a way to introduce Rummy’s dismissal of Ricks’ Fiasco and Woodward’s books. So in my research on the Vietnam War I was paging through H.R. Haldeman’s diaries […]

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American Girl, Made in China, The Reality Show

This is a really cool project. ABC’s World News has a series this week on whether or not a typical upper middle class family can survive without consumer goods made in America. It includes: Footage of a bunch of Americans claiming to buy America ABC’s news team going through the house of one family–the Usrys–and […]

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Bob Woodward, Blogger

Let me just say, without qualification, that of the high profile journalists whose techniques were discussed or entered as evidence in the Scooter Libby trial, Bob Woodward had the best note taking. Judy Miller, Matt Cooper, Bob Novak, Andrea Mitchell (and, I’m sure, Marcy Wheeler)? They all were put to shame by Bob Woodward’s exactitude […]

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If a TBTF Bank Lost Its Quant Code to Chinese Hackers and No One Knew, Would We Still Have a Functioning Market?

Bloomberg has an excellent catch from the HB Gary emails, revealing that Morgan Stanley was one of the 20-200 companies targeted by the Chinese-based Aurora hack in 2009. Morgan Stanley experienced a “very sensitive” break-in to its network by the same China-based hackers who attacked Google Inc.’s computers more than a year ago, according to […]

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“Tactics Developed for Use against Terrorists May Have Been Unleashed against American Citizens”

Hmmm. “Tactics developed for use on terrorists may have been unleashed against citizens.” That sounds like something I would have written about the HB Gary scandal. Twice. It’s nice to see some members of Congress understand what the entire problem with this scandal is about. In a letter to be released Tuesday, Rep. Hank Johnson […]

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