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.
Man, if Leon Panetta doesn’t get into trouble for revealing details of Anwar al-Awlaki’s targeting or confirming that Pakistani doctor Shikal Afridi was working for the CIA when he collected DNA from Osama bin Laden’s compound, I wonder if he’ll get in trouble for (apparently) telling David Ignatius when Israel will attack Iran? Panetta believes […]
The latest Goldman and Apuzzo report on the CIA-on-the-Hudson provides proof that Ray Kelly and Mike Bloomberg’s claims that religious institutions are not profiled are false. The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for […]
The Obama Administration insists that it wants to close Gitmo, but Congress is preventing them from doing so. They rarely talk about the other big detainee prison–the one with significantly less transparency and due process than exists at Gitmo: Parwan prison in Bagram. Perhaps that’s because we’ve just awarded a $35 million contract to expand […]
Remember this article? It describes the debate within the Administration over how readily and extensively to acknowledge the US killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. As it describes, the debate was at least preliminarily resolved at a Situation Room meeting in November. The issue came to a head at a Situation Room meeting in November. At lower-level […]
As I’ve suggested in my posts on US v Jones, the Justices seemed opposed to the kind of tracking we believe the government is doing under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Yet of the three opinions ruling the warrantless use of GPS tracking in the case improper, only Sonia Sotomayor spoke broadly enough to […]
I’ve long suspected the reason Republicans have pursued Fast and Furious so relentlessly–and more importantly, have tried to implicate Eric Holder in it personally–is to exact revenge on the Attorney General because he deigned to investigate torture. This disgusting bit of dick-wagging from Michael Hayden only reinforces that suspicion. Schadenfreude — joy at the misfortune […]
One of the most interesting exchanges in yesterday’s Threat Assessment hearing occurred between Ron Wyden and James Clapper–with David Petraeus, whom Wyden calls out, observing silently (the exchange starts at 1:01). Wyden: Let me wrap up with you Director Clapper on an issue that I’ve asked about before at this open hearing. General Petraeus knows […]
The takeaway the stenographers have gotten from yesterday’s intelligence threat assessment is that the Scary Iran Plot means Iran wants to target us in this country. They reported that even as Dianne Feinstein made it clear James Clapper was bullshitting us on another front. In her statement, she noted that James Clapper’s assessment of our […]
In her statement at the beginning of the Threat Intelligence Assessment hearing today, Dianne Feinstein complained that the Executive Branch continues to blab about things that are supposed to be secret (this starts around 11:00). I’d also like to say that once again this committee has been put in a difficult position of trying to […]
Remember when it was verboten to criticize David Petraeus, particularly in anticipation of his testimony to Congress? Apparently it’s okay to do so if you run a secret killer drones program. While couched in anonymous sources, this story provides a forum for members of CIA’s counterterrorism center and their congressional backers to insinuate that David […]