Archive for category: emptywheel

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:

Well, faced with losing his job, Michael Drake found a way to un-un-hire Erwin Chemerinsky.

UC Irvine Chancellor Michael V. Drake and Erwin Chemerinsky havereached an agreement that will return the liberal legal scholar to thedean’s post at the university’s new law school, the universityannounced this morning.

With the deal, they hope to end the controversy that erupted whenChemerinsky was dropped as the first dean of the Donald Bren School ofLaw.

Drake traveled over the weekend to Durham, N.C., where Chemerinskyis a professor at Duke University, and the two reached an agreementabout midnight Sunday, sources told The Times.

And Donald Bren narrowly avoided having the UCI law school named the Donald Bren Is an Intolerant Wingnut Law School.

Note to self–those crazy Republicans in Orange County respond quite well to public pressure and embarrassment.

Wildarseguess here. But I have a hypothesis for why Bush pulled his Clement-Keisler headfake this morning.

Recall that, just last week, BushCo made an unusual intervention into the FCC’s deliberations over Net Neutrality.

Well, a lot of people have noted that Keisler’s most notable achievement at DOJ was his role in spiking the tobacco settlement. Now, combine what that says about Keisler’s personality: that he’s willing to abuse the legal process to help out big corporate donors, with this case that he argued for AT&T back when he worked for Sidley & Austin, where Keisler worked in Telecom law.

The Second Circuit recently held in AT&T v. Conboy that transfers of personal information collected by a company do notnecessarily cause injury or give rise to cognizable damages. PeterKeisler of Sidley & Austin argued the case on behalf of AT&T.The decision was announced on February 26, 2001.

AT&Tprevailed over plaintiffs who claimed AT&T had improperly distributed theircustomer proprietary network information (�CPNI�) to AT&T�s former creditcard branch, Universal Card Service (�UCS�), in order to assist in credit-carddebt collection. The Conboys accusedAT&T of obtaining the information through its role as their long-distanceservice provider. The informationallegedly disclosed consisted of their names, unlisted telephone number,billing address, and details Read more →