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.
A number of bloggers are pointing, with concern, to an Oregon case in which a blogger got hit with a $2.5 million defamation judgement. Oregon law provides special legal protections against defamation lawsuits to journalists associated with traditional media outlets. Such publications are immune from defamation suits unless the defamed individual first requests a retraction. […]
The government has responded to ACLU’s FOIA for a bunch of WikiLeaks cables by releasing redacted versions of just 11 of the 23 cables they FOIAed (I’ve copied, ACLU’s inventory of what they got below the fold). Some of their redactions are unsurprising–details that show officials from other governments sucking up to the US. But […]
A few comments from Mary got me thinking about how damning today’s AP story on our Romanian black site is for the torture apologists’ tale that torture–and CIA interrogations more generally–helped find Osama bin Laden. The AP’s story reminds readers that Abu Faraj al-Libi, who was first captured on May 2, 2005, provided information about […]
Barack Obama, who was educated in the country’s most esteemed universities, has implied that having daughters has convinced him the government should ignore science. His anti-science justification came in response to questions about HHS’ decision to override the FDA’s recommendation that Plan B be made available over-the-counter. He justified his support for the decision on […]
[YouTube]vzcWPKAv2Ow[/YouTube] Before you read this David Sanger/Scott Shane piece reporting that the RQ-170 Sentinel drone that just went down in Iran was, “among other missions, [] looking for tunnels, underground facilities or other places where Iran could be building centrifuge parts or enrichment facilities,” I invite you to review what David Sanger has been writing […]
Goldman and Apuzzo are back on the dark sites beat, this time with a description of the dark site in Bucharest, Romania where the CIA stashed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others after shutting down the site in Poland. This prison was built into the basement of a classified archive now used by NATO and the […]
The other day, John Bellinger and Matthew Waxman joined the long list of people voicing opposition to the detention provisions of the Defense Authorization. Yet there’s a part of their column that has received little focus, in spite of the fact it’s one of the things Bellinger emphasized when he linked to their column at […]
As I noted in an update to this post, the US has now admitted that the drone Iran claimed to down is, in fact, one of its new-fangled RQ-170 Sentinels. Sources have admitted anonymously that CIA was using the drone for reconnaissance, implicitly of Iran. Which leaves a number of questions. First, how did the […]
In the entire two week debate over the detainee provisions of the Defense Authorization, the champions of military detention offered almost no rationale for it (a pity, then, that the opponents barely explained why it’s such a bad idea), aside from Lindsey Graham repeating endlessly that detainees shouldn’t get lawyers (he never explained how this […]
The most shocking phrase in the Senate’s Defense Authorization detainee provisions to me was not the language affirming indefinite detention. That language simply affirms and possibly narrows the status quo. Rather, it was this language purporting to strike a “balance” between military and civilian detention for alleged terrorists by offering the Secretary of Defense the […]