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.
Corey Robin has an important post on America’s privatized repression. He starts by describing how, after watching a panel on Occupy Wall Street in which she appeared, the freelancer who got arrested while she was covering the Brooklyn Bridge arrests lost her relationship with the NYT. Two Fridays ago, I attended an excellent panel discussion […]
I suggested yesterday that the West will be playing dumb about the extent to which Qaddafi looted the Libyan people becomes known. But what about how Qaddafi looted us–or, at least, the Fed? As this article laid out, one of the means by which Qaddafi was looting was the Central Bank of Libya. Moammar Kadafi […]
[youtube]-Gf8NK1WAOc[/youtube] Now that they’re dancing on Moammar Qaddafi’s grave (or would be, if the rebels would end the trophy show of his body so he can be buried), they’re no doubt faced with a dilemma. How to get all the money they bribed Qaddafi with over the years back into circulation, paying for consultants on […]
Having MoDo vouch for the “sangfroid” of Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir (who, she notes, once saved her from being punished by Saudi religious police for dressing inappropriately) is about as amusing as having David Ignatius announce the Scary Iran Plot must be true because the CIA is involved. Jubeir stayed cool even when American officials […]
This post from Cannonfire reminded me how convenient for our country it is that Moammar Qaddafi was executed rather than captured alive and tried: he will not be able to tell anyone, now that he’s dead, how Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who under torture provided one of the casus belli for the Iraq war, came to […]
As part of a new ACLU project to FOIA and map all the racial profiling the FBI has been doing, it liberated a Detroit FBI document describing its efforts to set up a “Domain Management” assessment (which seems to be a nice euphemism for racial profiling). It describes what it claims is the distinct counterterrorism […]
Okay, I don’t know for a fact that the Senior Administration Official Jake Tapper rather irresponsibly gave anonymity to is John Brennan. After all, Ben Rhodes loves to boast anonymously too. But given the Administration’s past caution about describing Obama’s role in the Awlaki assassination, I find it interesting that John Brennan this SAO is […]
So imagine this scenario. A DEA informant calls up his handler out of the blue and says, Omigod! Some crazy Iranian just approached me to arrange some kind of hit on behalf of this Iranian terror organization. He asked about explosives (I bragged about my C4 expertise.) He found me through my aunt in Corpus […]
Bush is in British Columbia today, giving a $100,000 speech. Three men first captured when they were teenagers–Hassan bin Attash (Walid’s brother, who was captured when was 16 and remains in Gitmo), Muhammed Khan Tumani (who was captured when he was 17), and German-born Murat Kurnaz (who was 19 when he was captured)–and the Al […]