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.
Remember when Egypt raided the offices of a bunch of US NGOs? Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces raided 17 civil society and human rights groups yesterday, in some cases holding staffers at the NGO offices as the raid proceeded. The raid has the odd effect of pitting the Generals we’ve mentored and funded–to […]
As you’ve probably heard, the 4th Circuit rejected Jose Padilla’s suit against Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday. Both Lyle Denniston and Steve Vladeck have good summaries of the decision, which basically says the courts can’t grant damages for constitutional abuses not otherwise covered by law until such time as Congress sees fit to cover them in […]
Let me start by saying that Jessica Buchanan, the American aid worker rescued with her Danish colleague from pirates last night by SEAL Team 6 in Somalia, sounds like a selfless woman; I’m happy for her and her family she is now safe. But the rescue got me thinking about our country’s efforts to combat […]
Remember how Dick Cheny outed Valerie Plame and in the process hurt our efforts to prevent Iran from getting nukes? And since then, Iran has just been working away, allegedly, to get nukes? Well, at a time when much of the national security establishment is drumming up war against Iran, they’ve done it again. A […]
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. (Revelation 22:13) Barack Obama’s State of the Union, first 100 words: Last month, I went to Andrews Air Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq. Together, we offered a final, proud salute to […]
While it is good news that the Administration is finally going to do something about the non-Afghan detainees at Bagram, the WaPo sure lets its anonymous Administration sources put the best spin on the move. It is not, apparently, a response to our closest ally finding us in potential violation of the Geneva Convention. It […]
As I laid out in this post, the complaint in the Jon Kiriakou case shows that the Patrick Fitzgerald-led investigative team could have found Kiriakou as the ultimate source for some Gitmo detainee lawyers’ information on two people associated with the torture program without accessing journalists’ communications directly (though the FBI has the contents two […]
As I’ve noted, former CIA officer Jon Kiriakou was charged yesterday with leaking classified material–including one covert officer’s identity; the alleged leaks involve three different journalists. Since the complaint focuses on Kiriakou it’s easy to forget that the investigation didn’t start there: rather–it started with a filing submitted in a detainee defense case (almost certainly […]
In his interview with Jason Leopold in May 2010, Jon Kiriakou explained how his book got approved by the CIA Publication Review Board. He describes someone who–given the mention of the transition team and the seniority at CIA–must be John Brennan, advising him to wait to resubmit his book until after the Obama Administration cleaned […]
As I noted, DOJ charged former CIA officer Jon Kiriakou for allegedly leaking information relating to the CIA’s torture program (as well as purportedly secret information about GPS tracking that is not secret). But remember how this investigation started: as an effort to implicate Gitmo detainees’ lawyers. 1) DOJ has been investigating the John Adams […]