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.
As I reported yesterday, the FBI conducted a threat assessment into Antiwar.com in April 2004 in conjunction (apparently) with a terrorist watch list posted on the site. I briefly reviewed what they found, but I wanted to look in more detail at what the report on them (see pages 62-71) shows. As I explain below, […]
As I noted yesterday, Bloomberg has made some really cool visual tools showing the lending the Fed did over the years. So I wanted to use it to show the other auto bailout: lending to Ford and Toyota at a time when the auto market was fragile and credit was scarce. Showing them side-by-side makes […]
Antiwar.com has a troubling story detailing how what appears to be either an FBI counterintelligence investigation of suspected Israeli spies or an attempt to track down everyone who had posted terrorist watch lists online led to the FBI to investigate the site and Justin Raimondo and Eric Garris. The story is troubling for several reasons: […]
Bloomberg has a good summary and even better visual database of the various forms of Fed lending that have been revealed over the years since the bailout. I encourage you to go play around in the database. For example, check out this summary of how the Fed lent Hypo Real Estate Holding AG, a German […]
Felix Salmon has a worthwhile (but, IMO, partly mistaken) post on what he deems “the global crisis of institutional legitimacy.” I think he’s right to see this as a significant challenge to our current political economy. While watching another Arab government get toppled on Sunday evening — this time that of Muammar Gaddafi, in Libya […]
The NYT has an article about efforts to strong-arm Attorney General Schneiderman to get him to put rule of law aside for yet another bank bailout. First, it quotes HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan as saying, The disagreement is around whether we should wait to settle and resolve the issues around the servicing practices for him […]
Karen DeYoung has an important article reporting that the Colombian intelligence agency implicated in political crimes, Department of Administrative Security, had support from the CIA. American cash, equipment and training, supplied to elite units of the Colombian intelligence service over the past decade to help smash cocaine-trafficking rings, were used to carry out spying operations […]
Ex-Bush flack Tony Fratto set me off on a rant this morning when he tweeted this: Over the past 10 yrs I might have visited a post office 10 times, total. (FWIW, Ed Henry also doesn’t frequent post offices, he mused from the luxury of Martha’s Vineyard.) Maybe I was misunderstanding what Fratto meant by […]
[youtube]Df_XSkDz418[/youtube] I wanted to return to Jeff Immelt’s Dartmouth talk to focus on what he means by regulatory reform. It’s newsworthy not just for the way Immelt creates straw men to try to claim the energy industry is overregulated. But given that he’s such a key Obama advisor, and given that Obama is also claiming […]
[youtube]Df_XSkDz418[/youtube] Jeff “China China China” Immelt spoke at Dartmouth yesterday, ostensibly about energy. But as it happens, he had the opportunity (in question period) to pressure SuperCongress to “reform” taxes rather than raise them on people like Immelt (while later saying he didn’t think SuperCongress should also look at job creation). He claimed GE would […]