Author Archive for: emptywheel
About emptywheel
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.
Entries by emptywheel
Joe Lockhart Wanted to Say Blow Job
/in Press and Media/by emptywheelI was on a panel in 2007 with Joe Lockhart and Todd Purdam to talk about political news. We talked a lot about how the press’ insistence on covering the Lewinsky scandal–when the bulk of the country was pretty happy with the President regardless of who had given him a blow job–led to the crisis of legitimacy that let blogs arise.
Hellerstein: Accelerate the Production of the IG Report
/in Torture/by emptywheelThe ACLU just submitted a letter in the CIA IG case–pointing out that Judge Hellerstein had given the government until August 31 to produce the rest of the documents in the FOIA request with the implicit assumption that it produce the IG Report by June 19 June 26 July 1.
The key part of the letter, however, is the note Judge Hellerstein wrote by hand on the ACLU letter, saying:
The Court will
The Scope of the (Hypothetical) Torture Investigation
/in Torture/by emptywheelThere’s some debate about whether a potential torture investigation would get beyond the low level torturers. First of all, those aren’t really low-level CIA people–they’re James Mitchell and friends. More importantly, if you go after Mitchell, you almost certainly will get to the lawyers who approved what he did.