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.
In his book, McMafia, Misha Glenny describes how mobsters filled the vacuum left by communism in Eastern Europe and Russia. The new circumstances bewildered old international institutions. All had to improvise and no party quite understood the implications of its actions or their unintended consequences. One group of people, however, saw real opportunity in this […]
Matt Yglesias has responded to my post on the destruction wrought by some capitalism with a fairly narrow complaint about my sarcastic comment about what I still maintain his original post entailed: an apology for the kind of destruction that Bain Capital engages in because (he argued) all successful capitalism creates such destruction. I don’t […]
On a near daily basis in the last week or so, Jason Leopold has tweeted some quote from the daily White House press briefing in which a journalist asks Jay Carney a question about detention, to which Carney responds by insisting the Administration still intends to close Gitmo. Q One other topic. Wednesday is apparently […]
I’m utterly delighted with this paragraph: But as is so often the case, the reality is more complicated. Almost every successful business career is built on the ashes of doomed factories, pink-slipped workers, and towns laid to waste. Not because it’s true–it’s not! But because I’m so amused that someone (in this case, Matt Yglesias, […]
The Gray Lady is dedicating space this week to reflections on Gitmo. In addition to a debate on it (more on that tomorrow), it offered Lakhdar Boumediene and Murat Kurnaz space to tell their stories, albeit in the opinion section. Both men told of their terrible treatment. But both also discussed what they learned about […]
Every time I read Treasury’s updates of sanctions designations, I’m reminded that two of our three new trade partners–Colombia and Panama–are really centers for corruption, money laundering, and crime. One of three new kingpins added to the list is from Colombia (the other two from Mexico), something like 23 of 50-some people and companies being […]
The FT links to this Oxford Policy Management study showing that 15 low and medium income countries have become newly dependent primarily on some commodity–fuel or minerals–for export income in the last 14 years. The number of low- and middle-income countries1 that depend on minerals for more than 25% of their tangible exports – defined […]
Former JP Morgan Chase Exec Bill Daley has finally quit the job he sucked at, White House Chief of Staff. He will be replaced by former Citi Exec and current OMB Director Jack Lew. Chicagoan Bill Daley is stepping down as White House chief of staff and budget director Jack Lew is taking over the […]
For the record, Carol Rosenberg has been covering Gitmo for more than the decade that has elapsed since she arrived there on January 9, 2002 to cover the impending arrival of the first war on terror detainees. She filed this story on March 22, 1999 and another a month later for the Charlotte Observer, when […]
As Josh Gerstein reported, the government has submitted a filing in its appeal of some rulings in the Jeffrey Sterling case that reveals a little more about their reason for appealing. The key detail is that the government considers two people, about whom the government withheld impeachment information, so critical to their case that without […]