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’m fascinated by the outpouring of moderates’ conversion narratives, from balanced and temperate to, um, shrill. JMM started it:
As Americans I think we need to grapple with what’s happened. And it goes beyond President Bush. He did after all win reelection.He marginally expanded his congressional majorities. In the rough andtumble of the political moment, the fight needs to be taken to thepresident and his party.
First Jonathan Chait and now Spencer Ackerman have escaped Marty’s grasp reached beyond their New Republic home to oppose Lieberman. Chait’s contribution is a logical attack on Joe’s justification for his run (if surprising, given the source).
What’s the point of running to uphold Democratichawkishness when you’re running against the Democratic Party and itschosen nominee?
This is going to be a bit of a wandering post. But I’m going to cover the following and hopefully finish in enough time to go can peaches:Taking Joe at his wordHersh’s portrayal of failureOn how the Neocons may become winners out of losing
Taking Joe at His Word
Mark Schmitt asked the other day,
Can someone explain what Senator Lieberman could possibly mean when he says the following:
“I’m worried that too many people,
mamayaga makes a superb point, in response to Byron Calame’s explanation that withholding the NSA domestic spying story was an issue of fairness:
[C]andidatesaffected by a negative article deserve to have time — several days to aweek — to get their response disseminated before voters head to thepolls.
To which mamayaga asks:
By the same logic, shouldn’t the major news media have held the storyof bin Laden’s conveeeenient new videotape until a few days
So here’s how the plot was going to work. 20 men of South Asian descent, traveling in pairs, buy tickets for flights the US on-line. They pack their carry-ons carefully, with their bottles of acetone and hydrogen peroxide. They’re a little nervous as they approach Check-In, but confident that things will go well.
Byron Calame pretends to come clean today, forcing the NYT to admit that it knew about the NSA domestic spying story before the 2004 elections. Come clean, you say? Then he must have revealed precisely when Risen first had the story, right?
Not really.
Calame comes closest to revealing precisely when the NYT had the NSA story when he says,
Holding a fresh draft of the story just days before the electionalso was
I’m having a little bit of deja vu this morning. When I did my post on the background to Cheney’s Old Man Shooting Party, I reviewed the fundraiser that attracted Bush Pioneers from all over the country–including Katharine “Where’s Waldo of Republican Warmongering” Armstrong, who owns Dick’s shooting range–the annual fundraiser at the Broken Spoke Ranch.
Fred Kaplan tries to teach BushCo a lesson about cooperating with unsavory regimes by pointing out the central role Pakistan played in yesterday’s big terrorist bust.
There’s a broader lesson here, and it speaks to the Bushadministration’s present jam throughout the Middle East and in otherdanger zones. If the British had adopted the same policy toward dealingwith Pakistan that Bush has adopted toward dealing with, say, Syria orIran (namely, it’s an evil
Amidst the hoopla about threats to America yesterday, a Walter Pincus story about a different kind of threat to America kind of fell through the cracks. Pincus reported that the top two officials of the Counterintelligence Field Activity, CIFA, abruptly announced their resignation (effective the end of the month). Justin Rood at TPMM managed to get a copy of the resignation email, which basically described how two guys decided to resign
Scout Prime has a really superb post up on this WaPo article, which in turn talks about the big contractors that failed miserably in their Katrina response, but which have just gotten new contracts for further hurricaine response. From Scout Prime’s post:
Companies that received 4 FEMA Katrina contracts “repeatedly faulted”by the DHS inspector general, congressional auditors and the Senatereceived 4 new FEMA contracts for future hurricane work.