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 do intend to return to my planned series on Matt Bai and the Serious People. But for now, David Sanger asks a question that really needs to be asked: what is going to happen to Pakistan’s nukes? Before I look at the answer Sanger offers, let me point to this one line in the story.
“It’s a very professional military,†said a senior American officialwho is trying to manage the crisis
I found this article on Richard Mellon Scaife’s newfound admiration for the Clinton’s via tristero. It’s a remarkable article, in that it frames Scaife’s purported admiration for the Clinton’s against the background of Scaife’s smear factory from the nineties, all told in a pseudo-objective omniscient third person voice.
Scaife was no run-of-the-mill Clinton hater.
Fill in the blanks:
[ISIS President David] Albright said yesterday that the tubes acquired by ___________ neededto be cut in half and shaped in order to be used as the outer casingsof centrifuges. If ___________ proves that the tubes were untouched, hesaid, it could “shatter the argument” that they were meant for auranium program.
Let’s see, WMD expert David Albright describing doubts about claims that a country was using aluminum tubes to build
I’m going to be a panelist on a conference in Boston a week from tomorrow (Saturday). The conference is:
No News Is Bad News
A freeand independent press is essential for democracy. The press has aresponsibility to inform citizens about both the policies and theactions of the government and about credible challenges to thosepolicies and actions, to report on conditions that may require new ordifferent government initiatives, and to raise timely questions
DBJ at DKos, relating Karl Rove’s speech about “Citizen 2.0” in DC yesterday, makes a good point. When a man who has used the cover of being an anonymous source to leak a CIA operative’s identity–not to mention untold other smears–complains that commenters online can be anonymous pseudonymous, it pretty much discredits that complaint once and for all.
Then it got surreal.
From which we can take the following lessons:It’s unclear that our political system has the fortitude to save itself anymore.If you’re running for President, it’s dangerous to take a stand against torture–even if, like John McCain, you’ve been tortured yourself.It takes a real beating–like the one Alberto Gonzales gave Richard (one good reason not to blog before coffee) Mark Pryor when he AGAG appointed Tim Griffin and attempted to “gum to
Apparently, Crazy Pete Hoekstra’s been complaining again that the Bushies are keeping secrets from Congress. He co-authored a WSJ editorial several weeks ago to complain that only senior leaders in Congress (including Crazy Pete) knew the truth about the Syrian bombing. In the op-ed, Hoekstra sounded like he had found another casus belli.
It has briefed only a handful of very senior members of Congress,leaving the vast majority of foreign relations and
I get asked about press passes a lot–I guess because I once had one. And the more I think about it, the more I’m raring for a constitutional challenge to the way many press passes are assigned in this country.
You see, historically, just about the only meaning of Freedom of the Press that would have made sense to our founders was freedom from having the government choose official reporters by licensing
I’m going to have plenty to say on Shane Harris’ story revealing that the NSA used hackers and foreign cyberhacks as their excuse for illegally accessing customer data prior to 9/11. First, though, I’d like to remind readers of this earlier Shane Harris story (with Tim Naftali)–to my mind the best reporting on this topic outside of the Risen-Lichtblau early scoop.
A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call
I’m going to do a series on Pakistan–and how the blindness of the “serious people” got us into big trouble there. I’m going to use Matt Bai’s inaccurate slam on me as a foil to show how the serious people allowed themselves to get distracted from a brewing crisis that carries real consequences.