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.
It looks like the CIA may have gotten hit by another double agent in the attack on its Afghan station yesterday. “What is unique in the Obama administration is their decision that in spite of the disagreements on the political level, the military and intelligence relationship which benefits both sides will not be spoiled by […]
Peter Orszag opines from the politically sheltered comfort of his gig at Citigroup that we have too much democracy. I’ll say more about specific claims he makes below, but first, let me point out a fundamental problem with his argument. He suggests we need to establish institutions insulated from our so-called polarization to tackle the […]
[youtube]_zJp8hZTRiE[/youtube] One of the highlights of Netroots Nation this year was Van Jones’ way-too-early keynote. He offered a speech–and an organizing opportunity, Rebuild the Dream Movement–that addressed a lot of the angst of progressives. Since that time, there have been a series of Rebuild the Dream meetings, but it has yet to take off in […]
[youtube]moD2JnGTToA[/youtube] The NYPD made the news yesterday twice. First, for their over-reaction to the Occupy Wall Street protests. In the video above, street cops corral some women with orange mesh, so another cop–in the white shirt–could mace them. As the NYPD was bullying people for exercising their First Amendment rights, Commissioner Ray Kelly was on […]
Sheldon Whitehouse had a hearing on terrorist finance the other day. There was an interesting exchange that I think bears notice. The hearing focused, in part, on hawalas, not least because DOJ recently prosecuted Mohammad Younis, the guy whose hawala Faisal Shahzad used to fund his terrorist attempt. Richard Blumenthal suggested (around 75:50 and following) […]
The AP has another installment of their series on the NYPD intelligence department’s mapping of ethnic neighborhoods in New York. As always, you should read the whole thing, as well as the documents showing the spooks’ data collection on innocent Moroccans and Moroccan-Americans. One question I came away with, though, was how this program interacted […]
As Charlie Savage reports, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have written Eric Holder scolding him for mischaracterizations DOJ has made about how the government is using the Patriot Act, in part to collect information on people’s location. They cite two examples of such mischaracterizations: First, when a number of Justice Department officials claimed, that the […]
Between 2002 and 2008, USAID spent $408 million on schools in Afghanistan. A significant chunk of $857 went to Iraqi education in the first several years after invasion. Yet as American service men and women have been overseas protecting these school building projects, their own children’s schools have been neglected. The Pentagon has placed 39 […]
The claim that the Federal Reserve is insulated from politics has always been a farce. Greenspan did a number of ideologically inconsistent things that just happened to help Republicans. And given that the banks run the Fed, it would be impossible to say it is isolated from the politics of the MOTUs (which is increasingly […]
Some of the more amazing stories about China’s domination of manufacturing these days pertain to the cities in China that make most of just one of the world’s consumer goods, like socks. But a new study from the Economic Policy Institute makes it clear we haven’t just lost textile jobs to China, we’ve lost high […]