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
They’re Monitoring Falafels but Not Their Own Agencies
/in emptywheel/by emptywheelVia Noah Shachtman, I see that a woman with potential ties to Hezbollah got a job in both FBI and CIA.
How good are the FBI and CIA’s background checks? Each agency requiresits own separate investigation and polygraph before people are signedup to sensitive jobs. Each agency missed an absolute whopper…
A 37-year-old woman who previously worked as an FBI agent and a CIA analyst, pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges
4 Days on the Job and Already Mukasey Has Lapped Gonzales
/in emptywheel/by emptywheelI guess this offers at least a trickle of hope that those that made up reasons to torture and wiretap and ignore the Constitution might be held to account?
The Justice Department has reopened a long-dormant inquiry into thegovernment’s warrantless wiretapping program, a major policy shift onlydays into the tenure of new Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
The investigation by the department’s Office of ProfessionalResponsibility was shut down after the previous attorney general,Alberto Gonzales,
AGAG’s Clique Didn’t Even Know Tribal Crimes Were Part of the Job
/in emptywheel/by emptywheelToday’s installment in the Denver Post’s series on justice on tribal lands is absolutely devastating to the Bush DOJ, starting with the anecdote from Paul Charlton describing a “high-level DOJ official” who had no clue that tribal justice was part of the US government’s obligation.
Talking with superiors about a gruesomedouble murder on the Navajo reservation, Charlton was stoppedmidsentence and asked by a high-level Justice Department official whyhe was involved in a
The FISA Amendment Will Legalize Data Mining, Part One
/in emptywheel/by emptywheelI’ve been puzzling over something since the temporary FISA amendment passed in August. The Administration has claimed they needed on easy fix: to allow NSA to wiretap electronic communication that starts and finishes on foreign soil, whether or not that communication passes through the US between sender and recipient. Yet both times when Congress sets about providing that easy fix to FISA, the Administration demands much more.
Dick DeVos Is a Welfare Queen
/in emptywheel/by emptywheelI pointed out a few weeks ago that the ginormous King Ranch is a welfare queen recipient of cotton subsidies. Well, wouldn’t you know it, billionaire and GOP sugar daddy Dick DeVos is a welfare queen recipient of corn subsidies (perhaps we should call him the “High Fructose Corn Syrup Daddy”).
Consider Dick DeVos.
What Is It with GOPers and Their Email?
/in emptywheel/by emptywheelCREW and the National Security Archive won the first part of their fight with the White House–getting a court order requiring the White House to preserve their emails and the back-ups (h/t PJ Evans).
A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies ofall its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had arguedstrongly against.
U.S.
Margaret Chiara and the Ongoing Problem of Justice on Reservations
/in emptywheel/by emptywheelBuried in an excellent article on the difficulties Native Americans have getting someone in USA offices to prosecute serious crime is this Margaret Chiara quote:
“I’ve had (assistant U.S. attorneys)look right at me and say, ‘I did not sign up for this,”‘ said MargaretChiara, who until March was the U.S. attorney for western Michigan,with jurisdiction over several reservations.
CIA Contractor Fired for Stating Waterboarding Is Torture
/in emptywheel/by emptywheelMy post on Armitage forced me to wade through the archives, where I saw this post.
On July 13, Christine Axsmith posted this on her blog on the CIA’s confidential intranet, Intelink.
Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong.
Not to mention ineffective. Econo-Girl has serious doubts as to whether European lives were saved.
Armitage, a Review
/in emptywheel/by emptywheelAbout 6,204 people have emailed me news of Armitage’s mea kinda culpa on Blitzer. The admission of stupidity is really nothing new–Armitage said something similar when he came forward to speak with David Martin last fall.
Since a lot of people have asked what memo he learned of Plame’s identity from–here it is.