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.
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 […]
Back when Tony Fratto was arguing that we should shut down post offices because he uses the InterToobz and therefore only ventures into an actual post office once a year, I noted that we would effectively be kicking huge portions of our rural areas out of our country if we presumed everyone could replace the […]
The environmental community is beginning to worry that the Obama Administration is preparing to cave on greenhouse gas emissions, just like it did on ozone emissions. Hard on the heels of the Obama administration’s decision earlier this month to scrap a new rule for ozone emissions, U.S. EPA appears poised to miss another major regulatory […]
Spencer has a must read story on the FBI’s recent training program for counter-terrorism agents on Islam. I’m going to have a few points to make about it. But for the moment I wanted to (in addition to recommending you go read the whole thing) draw attention to this slide on Islamic law, explaining some […]