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.
Well, this is rather inauspicious timing. The conservatives on SCOTUS have sharply limited the teeth of the Privacy Act–limiting damages to out-of-pocket damages. The Supreme Court has dealt privacy advocates a huge setback. By a 5-3 majority, the court ruled that people who sue the government for invading their privacy can only recover out-of-pocket damages. […]
The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing today to review the results of the Schuelke report on the prosecutorial misconduct in the Ted Stevens case and to entertain the Lisa Murkowski bill requiring disclosure. In response, DOJ submitted a statement for the record, opposing any legislation enforcing its discovery obligations. When concerns were first […]
Yesterday, I tried to puzzle through seeming discrepancies between the victims described by Afghans and those named in Robert Bales’ charge sheet. In addition to the difference in total number (16 or 17 victims), there appears to be a difference in the sex of the described victims (Afghans described 8 victims of both sexes, whereas […]
Last year, after Spencer Ackerman exposed some of the Islamophobic materials the FBI was using to train its counterterrorism agents, the FBI conducted a review of its training materials to weed out such counterproductive materials. Unsurprisingly, as Spencer reports today, they found additional offensive and just downright stupid materials. A sample of that possibly harmful […]
As Bane of Our Existence and Dirty Masquerade have been noting in comments, the case against the Hutaree Militia has been crumbling in court. Today, Judge Victoria Roberts threw out most of the charges against most of the defendants, based on her judgment that the government had based its conspiracy charges on speculation. Among those […]
As I noted in this post, there is a discrepancy between the people Sergeant Robert Bales is accused of murdering and the people Afghans report to be victims. While DOD has redacted the names of Bales’ alleged victims, at least two women and one man are on that list but not among those named by […]
Update: See this post, which gives DOD’s latest update on the lack of military operations during the attack. According to Amy Davidson, the explanation that Robert Bales’ 17th victim was an unborn child, which I noted here, has been debunked. That explanation was based on the presence of an unnamed Afghan male–listed as murder charge […]
I was struck by this passage in the WSJ’s description of the three green on blue killings yesterday. Since the year began, more coalition service members have been gunned down by Afghan troops than by insurgents. A total of 16 members of the U.S.-led coalition were killed this year in nine such “green on blue” […]
Jill Abramson repeats the word “impartial” several times in this interview on the NYT’s Israel-Iran coverage, almost explicitly invoking what Jay Rosen calls the View from Nowhere. Q: Do you think there have been articles the Times has published that could be considered pro-attack or anti-attack, or has all of the coverage been impartial? ABRAMSON: […]
Greg Miller got a lot of buzz this weekend for his profile of the head of CTC, whom he calls “Roger.” The article is in no way unbalanced–Miller makes it clear that Roger is an asshole and suggests he might bear some responsibility for the Khost bombing. But I couldn’t help but wonder whether the […]