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.
We’ve long known that many of the techniques used to combat terrorism derived from the drug war. We’ve known that law enforcement agencies around the country are adopting counterterrorism techniques–and even PATRIOT Act tools–in regular law enforcement. Robert Mueller just explained that the FBI is taking lessons learned in its counterterrorism intelligence techniques to combat […]
Consider these two data points. First, Jo Becker reports that the money laundering scheme run by the Canadian Lebanese Bank involved brokering used cars purchased in America. In that inquiry, American Treasury officials said senior bank managers had assisted a handful of account holders in running a scheme to wash drug money by mixing it […]
I’ll have several things to say about Jo Becker’s story on the big Hezbollah money laundering ring. For the moment, I’m most interested in how Treasury Department authorities uncovered the ring: by first declaring Lebanese Canadian Bank a money launderer, providing reason to break it up. When an affiliate of Société Générale agreed to buy […]
I always like reading DOJ’s various expressions of their investigative and prosecutorial priorities–because they usually show a disinterest in prosecuting banksters, a thorough waste of resources on entrapping young Muslims, and an ongoing fondness for Anna Chapman. Lanny Breuer’s choice of DOJ lawyers to recognize yesterday was, in some ways, an improvement over the trend. […]
Funny how these drones keep experiencing failures in areas where they’re engaging in a covert war and not–say–where they’re being used to arrest American citizens in North Dakota. One of the Air Force’s premier drones crashed Tuesday morning in the Seychelles, the Indian Ocean archipelago that serves as a base for anti-piracy operations, as well […]
According to a press release from Senator Levin’s office, the conference on the Defense Authorization has made few changes to the detainee provisions institutionalizing military detention of alleged terrorists. With regards to Section 1031, which authorized the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists, the conference bill, Reaffirm[s] the military’s existing authority to detain individuals captured in […]
Sorry, this is absurd. “We have asked for [our Sentinel drone] back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said during a joint news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki after the two met at the White House. We violate Iran’s airspace, almost certainly conducting surveillance to support illegal assassinations, and we have the […]
I’ve been one of the first people to note that the Emergency Financial Manager laws have disproportionately affected MI’s African Americans. Note what I wasn’t arguing: that Governors Snyder and Granholm imposed EFMs because the cities in question were predominantly black. But it is, in fact, the case that the EFM law is affecting African […]
This story, billed as an account of the first Predator-drone assisted arrest in the US, has all the elements we’ve been expecting from this development. The drone in question belongs to the Border Patrol; presumably, it operates under the legal black hole built up around borders. The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, […]
I have already said I think Obama needs to veto the Defense Authorization because of the detainee provisions. And I have argued that the Administration needs to lay the groundwork for doing so right now, preferably by fear-mongering about how much less safe presumptive military detention would make us. Obama claims he’s still going to […]