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.
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.
Mimikatz already posted Rahm’s first response to Cheney’s wicked theories that he is a branch of government unto himself. And mcjoan has posted his second response.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel issued the followingstatement regarding his amendment to cut funding for the Office of theVice President from the bill that funds the executive branch.
At a hearing before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs this week, Thomas Heffelfinger got asked some questions about how the USA Purge related to his work–and that of Chiara, Charlton, Iglesias, McKay, and Bogden before they were fired. In his testimony, Heffelfinger noted that those USAs on NAIS who were fired were not just on the subcommittee, they were leaders on it.
Since Fred Thompson got into the Presidential race in a big way, I’ve increasingly been getting this creepy feeling. I keep thinking: when was the last time we had a charismatic (if ugly, in this case) candidate who knows nothing about policy and is even less interested in taking a stand on policy, who seems to be hiring the right advisors, but who himself, still seems to be Bush league.
Kagro X says almost all that needs to be said about BushCo’s claims that Bush intended to exempt he and Cheney from rules on classification. I’ll come back later to expand on Kagro’s point about the insta-declassification theory of leaking Plame’s identity. But for now, I’d like to make a teeny tiny point.