Archive for category: emptywheel

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. Nonetheless, I look forward to new opportunities to serve this great nation and the American people.

Leonard, of course, is the guy who took on Dick Cheney’s creative theories about classification and declassification. As Secrecy News notes,

In pursuit of that integrity earlier this year, Mr. Leonard famously challenged the Office of the Vice President, which decided in 2003 that it would no longer submit to longstanding classification oversight procedures.

After the Federation of American Scientists filed a formal complaintconcerning the OVP’s non-compliance, Mr. Leonard urged Cheney aideDavid Addington to reconsider its position. When Addington ignored therequest, Mr. Leonard exercised his authority to raise the issue withthe Attorney General, who is obliged by the executive order onclassification to render an interpretation of the order’s requirements.

Althoughno response from the Attorney General was forthcoming, the episodeturned the Vice President and his unchecked secrecy into an object ofpublic ridicule. Read more →

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: Roll Call busts Craig’s bust
August 28: "I am not gay and I have never been gay."
September 1: Craig resigns, effective September 30
September 4: Craig says he may un-resign
September 5: Subpoenas served (to House members)
September 26: Craig says he’s staying put, for now
October 2: Scheduled subpoena date for all House members subpoenaed (and probably Craig too)

Now, Craig was still in Idaho the first week of the month, so I assume he was officially served his subpoena after the House members. Though word of the Wilkes subpoenas may have surfaced by the time Craig did his resignation headfake.

Craig called himself an old friend of Duke Cunningham and claims that he was ignorant to Duke’s bribing ways. But Wilkes Craig also appears to have been a clear recipient of a quid pro quo–where he supported an earmark for Wilkes in exchange for at least $43,500 in donations from Wilkes’ employees. Read more →

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 chatter–that means the conversations that our intelligence community learns about but I had been told by a  member of Congress that there was a specific piece of intelligence about a threat to the Capitol. I found it. It took some work to find it. It’s classified, so I’m not going to tell you specifically what it said but on the face of the document it said that the intelligence community did not deem the source to be reliable. [my transcription]

This is bad enough–that some fan of Big Brother circulated this rumor even though it was, on its face, not a credible threat.

But I wanted to recall the nature of the unreliable sources behind the case for war against Iraq. There were at least three INC-sponsored defectors who had been Read more →

There’s something that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has suggested in the past, but which he has made crystal clear in his testimony today. The Administration has compartmentalized him out of the warrantless wiretapping program as it existed before he became DNI earlier this year. Senator Leahy made this clear–but then dropped the obvious follow-up. Here’s my rough transcript of the exchange:

Leahy: Obviously, you’ve seen the historical justification for these programs.

McConnell: I have not

Leahy: You’re lobbying to have us wipe out these cases retroactively by legislation. Isn’t this kind of asking us to buy a pig in a poke.

McConnell: I object to the word lobbying.

Leahy: I’m going back to July and August. You were advocating for.

McConnell: I’m advocating for what we need to do.

The follow-up Leahy missed, of course, was the question, "How the fuck can you lobby for immunity when you have no fucking clue what the telecomm companies were doing?" (I don’t think Leahy uses that language, but I can guarantee you he has heard it.)

Regardless, the implication is clear: the Administration has sent McConnell out to be their spokesperson for the reasonableness of the Administration’s wiretapping programs. And all the while they have ensured that he Read more →

The most interesting thing about the Dan Rather complaint, IMO, is the description it gave of CBS and Administration attempts to spike the Abu Ghraib story.

In late April 2004, Mr. Rather, as Correspondant, and Mary Mapes, a veteran producer, broke a news story of national importance on 60 Minutes II–the abuse by American military personnel of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. The story, which included photographs of the abusive treatment of prisoners, consumer American news media for many months.

Despite the story’s importance, and because of the obvious negative impact the story would have on the Bush administration with which Viacom and CBS wished to curry favor, CBS management attempted to bury it. As a general rule, senior executives of CBS News do not take a hands-on role in the editing and vetting of a story. However, CBS News President Andrew Heyward and Senior Vice President Betsy West were involved intimately in the editing and vetting process of the Abu Ghraib story. However, for weeks, they refused to grant permission to air the story, continuously insisting that it lacked sufficient substantiation. As Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes provided each requested verification, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to "raise the goalposts," insisting on additional substantiation.

Even after obtaining nearly a dozen, now notorious, photographs, which made it impossible to deny the accuracy of the story, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to delay the story for an additional three weeks. This delay was, in part, occasioned by acceding to pressures brought to bear by government officials urging CBS to drop the story or at least delay it. As a part of that pressure, Mr. Rather received a personal telephone call from General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urging him to delay the story.

Only after it became apparent that, due to the delay, sources were talking to other news organizations and that CBS would be "scooped," Mr. Heyward and Ms. West approved the airing of the story for April 28, 2004. Even then, CBS imposed the unusual restrictions that the story would be aired only once, that it would not be preceded by on-air promotion, and that it would not be reference on the CBS Evening News.

By my count, we’ve got: