Entries by emptywheel

Taliban Taking Over Pakistan

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Well, that’s probably hyperbole. But it does seem like things in Pakistan are getting pretty dire. So says a Pakistani report put together by its Interior Ministry, providing ominous warnings about the increasing power of the Taliban in the country.

The Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was warned this month that Islamic militants and Talibanfighters were rapidly spreading beyond the country’s lawless tribalareas and that without “swift and decisive action,” the growingmilitancy

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The Silence Surrounding Novak’s Testimony

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This post follows on my wildarsed guess that one of the things that appears in the two-page gap is discussion of Libby’s and Novak’s super-secret July 9 meeting. I’d like to point out–and speculate on–several weird bits in Novak’s trial testimony. Full credit: Jeff Lomonaco identified several of these in a conversation with me, but I happen to know he’s at an undisclosed location with crappy Toobz access, so I’m going

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Kontogiannis’ Seal

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Laura asks why the government (and Kontogiannis, in a filing submitted yesterday) would fight to continue to seal the transcripts from his four hearings before Judge Larry Burns.

In an unusual step, Kontogiannis’ guilty plea was done in a secret,closed hearing. The plea agreement was unsealed earlier this month, andlast week Burns ordered that transcripts of four hearings related tothe plea also be made public.

Federal prosecutors objected in motions filed under seal

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Mind the Gap: the Libby-Novak Call

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You wouldn’t think that I–after babbling about this for two years and beating up the press for ignoring it–would miss an opportunity to highlight the super-secret Libby-Novak meeting, do you? Only that’s what I did yesterday, when I was puzzling through the remaining two-page gap in the Tatel opinion. Duh.

My post yesterday made the argument that, in addition to laying out the background for the Cooper-Rove conversation (and Rove’s prevaricating about

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Actually, TWO DOJ Employees Quit This Week

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It’s funny how, now that we’re so attuned to BushCo’s Friday news dumps, something reported on Friday attracts more notice than something reported on Thursday.

On Friday, we learned that Rachel Brand, one of the last remaining DOJ clique-members (and a tangential one at that) will resign on July 9.

Rachel Brand, the assistant attorney general in the Office of LegalPolicy, will step down July 9, the department said in a statement.

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The Two Redacted Pages

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As I said earlier, the most interesting part of the Tatel opinion is the two-page section that remains redacted (thanks again to Jeralyn for making the opinion available), explaining why Fitzgerald suspects Rove perjured himself in his testimony about Novak and Cooper. I believe that section includes:An assertion that Rove lied when he testified that he responded to Novak’s story about Plame by saying, “you heard that too?”A description of some

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This Is How It’s Done

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Tim Walberg is a really awful wingnutty Congressman whose district begins just spitting distance (emphasis on spitting) from my house. One of the local reporters, Susan Demas, had the balls to report that he refused to fire a campaign worker who pled guilty to child abuse, so the Congressman has basically frozen the newspaper out since then.

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WSJ and the AP Finally Get Their Windmill!

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Pow wow is right. One of the best parts of today’s Appeals Court order releasing more of the grand jury material from the Plame investigation is this paragraph:

Even if the Armitage revelation created a compelling public interest in them—and it
is unclear to us why, as Dow Jones asserts, the Special Counsel’s knowledge that one individual leaked Plame’s identity calls into question the validity of his continuing investigation into others who may

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Fred Fielding Lied to the Press Yesterday

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The White House had a super-secret briefing yesterday in which they trotted out Fred Fielding, but then insisted he be referred to solely as a Senior Administration Official. Perhaps they insisted on the absurd background rules because they wanted to make Fred feel free to lie. And lie he did.

In the briefing, a journalist asked Fielding whether Bush’s invocation of privilege meant that he was protecting deliberations he, personally, was involved

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Solicit

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One last post on Clement. I wanted to call your attention to the way Clement pretends that the White House is protecting advice from outsiders that they solicited. Here’s Clement’s language justifying invoking privilege over communications between the White House and those outside of government.

Naturally, in order for the President and his advisers to make an informed decision, presidential aides must sometimes solicit information from individuals outside the White House and

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