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.
Here in the Midwest, we’ve got lions and tigers and bears running around today, and even other animals, like monkeys, that aren’t members of the NFC North. In the Middle East, it seems everyone’s rolling out the usual suspects to impugn in the Scary Iran Plot. The most humorous is Bahrain’s use of David Ignatius […]
Back when the foreclosure fraud settlement was purportedly only going to cover robo-signing abuses, the price tag was going to be $17 billion. Now that the Obama Administration is desperately trying to craft a settlement deal to include origination problems, the price tag has grown to $25 billion. Under the proposed terms of the settlement […]
[youtube]KuC4iYpNzT4[/youtube] At around 9:30 last night, I tweeted something I tweet everytime I watch an episode of the GOP Presidential Candidate Survivor show: Once again, we’ve gotten to that point of the GOP Debate I hate where Ron Paul starts to sound sane. Then, about 10 minutes later, Paul said this: Are you all willing […]
The stories exposing how Franco’s government and the Catholic Church sold babies has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention. The scale of the baby trafficking was unknown until this year, when two men – Antonio Barroso and Juan Luis Moreno, childhood friends from a seaside town near Barcelona – discovered that they had been bought […]
As I noted on Friday, Manssor Arbabsiar’s cousin, Abdul Reza Shahlai, who purportedly directed him to arrange a plot with Los Zetas, was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2008, in part for involvement in an attack in Karbala. Iran-based Abdul Reza Shahlai–a deputy commander in the IRGC–Qods Force–threatens the peace and stability of Iraq […]
As I’ve mused on twitter and in comment threads, I’ve started wondering who paid more for Scary Iran Plot, the US Government or (allegedly) Quds Force? After all, it’s clear that Narc offered up the idea to attack Adel al-Jubeir at a restaurant with explosives rather than, say, shooting him or poisoning him. Narc invented […]
Several days ago, I finished listening to Joby Warrick’s The Triple Agent. It’s quite good, both in terms of readability and news value. But since I have the Audible, not the dead tree, version I wasn’t able to transcribe what I found to be one of the most interesting passages in it. Luckily, that incident […]
A number of people–from MadDog to the Administration–have claimed that the money trail in the Scary Iran Plot is what makes it credible. I’d like to lay out what the Administration showed in the complaint–as opposed to in its predictable trail of anonymous leaks that the Administration apparently believes can replace actual evidence–regarding the money […]
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; I want to return to something […]