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
Chertoff Keeps Waiving Laws
/130 Comments/in Unitary Executive/by emptywheelMichael Chertoff sure likes waiving laws, doesn’t he? We know about his waiver of Chiquita’s support for right wing terrorists. We learned today about his intent to set aside environmental laws so he can build his wall on the border. And now, Marty Lederman suggests Chertoff gave John Yoo the go-ahead to exempt the military from laws prohibiting torture.
Pentagon “Closing” CIFA
/20 Comments/in Intelligence/by emptywheelThe Pentagon is “closing” (which probably means “burying under a different name”) CIFA, it’s contractor-friendly domestic spying program. In a remarkable coincidence, it just had to turn over to ACLU a bunch of documents showing that CIFA had abused the National Security Letters program. What a remarkable coincidence.
Jane Harman v. Jello Jay: Compare and Contrast
/19 Comments/in FISA, Intelligence/by emptywheelJane Harman explained her response to the warrantless wiretap program over at TPMCafe. I’m interested in it not so much to determine whether Eric Licthblau or she is right about whether she “switched her view” on the program (I think Harman is actually too sensitive to the charge; as she tells it, she did drastically change her view, but not because of the publicity of Lichtblau’s reporting, but because of the