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.
The headline and lead of the story everyone’s buzzing about reads, Pentagon Finds Perils for U.S. if Israel Were to Strike Iran A classified war simulation exercise held this month to assess the American military’s capabilities to respond to an Israeli attack on Iran forecast that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, […]
For the record, I don’t trust the investigation the Afghan legislators did into last week’s shooting of 16 civilians in Panjwai any more than I trust DOD’s own investigation. But it’s their country, and they’re proceeding with their results–which allege that over a dozen Americans were involved in the attack. ‘After our investigations, we came […]
In an article describing how our use of drones in Pakistan continues to mobilize public opinion against US involvement, the NYT includes this description of how militants claim to be limiting the efficacy of some drone strikes. During an interview last month in Shawal, a thickly-forested district of plunging valleys that became a haven for […]
One more point about the David Ignatius wankfest today. In his story pitching OBL as a still-ambitious terrorist rather than an out-of-touch idiot, David Ignatius claimed the documents he based his article on had already been declassified. The scheme is described in one of the documents taken from bin Laden’s compound by U.S. forces on […]
Presumably to buck up their campaign theme–“Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive“–the Administration pre-leaked some documents to David Ignatius taken from OBL’s compound revealing that OBL hoped to attack President Obama. Ignatius described the aspirational plot as a “bold” command Before his death, Osama bin Laden boldly commanded his network to […]
At a moment when the Obama Administration is still aggresively pursuing James Risen’s testimony on sources for an Iran story he wrote 7 years ago, on Saturday he published a new story summarizing the uncertainty surround intelligence on Iran right now. In the story, Risen reveals that both the 2007 and the 2010 NIEs on […]
As I wrote in this post, I got interested in the provenance of a set of leaked Bashar al-Assad emails largely because of the way in which two of them were used to suggest, dubiously, Nir Rosen was an Assad agent. The Guardian and Al Arabiya have both offered posts describing, in part, how they […]
Something curious has happened in the last few days while I’ve been traveling. The Guardian and Al Arabiya have been publishing leaked emails from Bashar al-Assad and his wife, showing both to be callous assholes but not otherwise producing a smoking gun (though I do hope to return to what they show about how they […]
To cap off Sunshine week, there was a slew of FOIA news today. For now, I’m just going to look at the response the ACLU got on its request for “OLC legal opinions and memoranda concerning or interpreting Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.” Josh Gerstein noted one interesting aspect of this response: the […]
In his post on our clearance for payments to Egypt, Jim noted that the key graph came 13 paragraphs into an 18 paragraph story. Likewise, the key graph from the NYT story letting a senior American official lay out a narrative blaming the staff sergeant’s massacre of Afghan civilians on marital problems comes at the […]