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.
In addition to green-lighting debt collection calls to cell phones, another of the deficit plans Obama rolled out today is basically claiming credit for military withdrawals. The plan also realizes more than $1 trillion in savings over the next 10 years from our drawdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq. As DDay notes, these “cuts” are scheduled […]
A number of people are talking about the spectacle of Representative John Fleming complaining about tax cuts on the wealthy him, suggesting that it will lead him to cut jobs. [my transcription] Chris Jansing: With all due respect, Congressman, the WSJ estimated that your businesses, which I believe are a [sic] Subway sandwich shops and […]
As part of the President’s deficit reduction plan, he proposes changing the rules to allow debt collectors to call people on their cell phones. Allow agencies to contact delinquent debtors via their cellular phones. The Administration also proposes to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to facilitate collection of debts owed to or guaranteed by […]
Over the weekend, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s GA politics section published an article claiming that Saxby Chambliss’ Gang of Six has become a Gang of 38. Saxby Chambliss’ Gang of Six has grown to 38 U.S. senators from both parties, who on Thursday urged the debt reduction “supercommittee” to aim high and secure $4 trillion in […]
[youtube]ywIqvCojtsQ[/youtube] According to Dick Cheney, our objective in Afghanistan was, from the very beginning, not about defeating al Qaeda, but rather, defeating the Taliban, while denying al Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan. At least that’s what he says in a passage explaining why he was talking about Iraq in the days after 9/11. He […]
As I’ve noted a couple of times, there’s the suggestion that the CIA likes the NYPD’s CIA-on-the-Hudson because the NYPD, unlike the CIA, is diverse enough to have people with the linguistic and cultural background to infiltrate Muslim communities. So how stupid is this? Three weeks ago, The Arab American News published a story written […]
I’m still slogging through Dick Cheney’s awful book–I will write some more comprehensive things when I finish. But I found this passage particularly curious given recent claims by Ali Soufan and Richard Clarke that we might have been able to prevent 9/11: They had struck us before, blowing a crater five stories deep in the […]
There are a number of details from Ron Suskind’s new book revealed by an AP and a NYT preview of it, the most alarming (but not surprising) that TurboTax Timmeh Geithner managed to save Citibank by basically ignoring Obama’s order to break it up. The book, by Ron Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, […]
A retired Navy guy decided to treat Spencer’s reporting on the dangerously bad training the FBI is giving its agents by offering a justification for that training with his own theological argument for why Muslims are dangerous. For my own part, I would like to draw a necessarily blurry line between what Mr. Ackerman and […]
Matt Apuzzo has a story describing three different responses to growing concerns about the CIA-on-the-Hudson. There’s Rush Holt, who unfortunately is no longer on the House Intelligence Committee and therefore has limited ability to look into this: “I believe that these serious and significant allegations warrant an immediate investigation,” Holt wrote. [snip] Holt, who previously […]