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.
When he gets defensive, Carl Levin can be tremendously cantankerous (sometimes that’s a good thing, but not when he’s pushing terrible law like the detainee provisions in the Defense Authorization). That cantankerous Carl Levin of late started repeatedly invoking Hamdi in response to claims the Levin-McCain language newly subjects American citizens to indefinite detention. Now, […]
Given the defeat of the Udall Amendment, it looks likely the Defense Authorization will include provisions mandating military detention for most accused terrorists (though the Administration has already doubled down on their veto threat). So I’d like to look at an aspect of the existing detainee provision language that has gotten little notice: the way […]
“Who will be the last senator to not want to end a mistake? Me.” – John Kerry That’s the way MightyOCD interpreted John Kerry’s vote–along with 66 of his colleagues–not to repeal the Iraq war that is ending whether they like it or not next month. The vote was on a Rand Paul amendment to […]
In the battle of two wrong sides, the Democrats lost, with the Udall Amendment failing 37-61. The vote is interesting, first of all, as a read of Obama’s ability to sustain a veto. Right now, the militarists do not have a two-thirds majority to override. Also of interest are some of the Democrats voting against […]
As I have puzzled over the civil liberties and human rights communities’ stance on the NDAA Detainee Provisions, I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that Michelle Bachmann was not far off when she claimed, “Barack Obama … has essentially handed over our interrogation of terrorists to the ACLU. He has outsourced it to them.” After […]
As I have repeatedly described, I have very mixed feelings about the debate over Detainee Provisions set to pass the Senate tonight or tomorrow. I view it as a fight between advocates of martial law and advocates of relatively unchecked Presidential power. And as I’ve pointed out, the SASC compromise language actually limits Presidential power […]
Judge Jed Rakoff has rejected the SEC’s proposed wrist slap of Citibank for selling mortgage-backed securities it knew to be of poor qualify. Effectively, what he did was join this complaint with SEC’s complaint–filed at the same time as they filed the proposed Citi settlement–against a Citi employee, Brian Stoker, in which the SEC explicitly […]
Bloomberg’s blockbuster story–showing that the Fed was dumping $7.77 trillion into the same banks that Treasury was claiming were solvent to qualify them for TARP–shows a number of different things. It focuses on the $13 billion in profits the banks made off of massive secret loans from the Fed. The 190 firms for which data […]
In “honor” of the 25th Anniversary of the press conference admitting to Iran-Contra on Friday, National Security Archive liberated memos an aide to Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, Christian Mixter, wrote assessing the criminal liability of Reagan and Poppy Bush. The report found that a loophole Ed Meese suggested–basically using National Security Act to trump the […]
As I wrote on Wednesday, earlier this month, the government released Manssor Arbabsiar’s original complaint in the Scary Iran Plot. As I showed, comparing the original with the amended complaint reveals that the government tried to hide the roles of Arbabsiar’s brother and several western banks (possibly including Chase) in transferring the money for the […]