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 seems we’re going to be discussing anthrax in detail again. And in anticipation of those discussions, I wanted to challenge the notion that the circumstantial evidence against Ivins remains strong. The whole case depends on the FBI’s contention that a flask Ivins had–RMR-1029–was “the murder weapon.” But in fact, the FBI only has proof […]
That’s a very good question, Congressman Nadler: On September 16, 2008, the House Committee on the Judiciary, on which I sit, conducted an oversight hearing of the FBI at which you testified. At that hearing, I asked you the following: “[W]hat was the percentage of weight of the silicon in the powders that your experts […]
Congratulations to Kathy Hochul, who rode a disciplined campaign against Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare to victory in a Republican Congressional district tonight. There’s a lesson here. Republicans voted on Ryan’s shitty plan. Which allowed Democrats to highlight how shitty it, and Republicans, are. And … Victory!!! Obama, however, seems to be missing that […]
Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have an amendment to the PATRIOT Act that makes it clear the Obama Administration briefed the Intelligence Committees in February on an intelligence collection program, conducted under PATRIOT authority, that interprets the language of the law so broadly as to mean something it really doesn’t say. The amendment reads, in […]
I sort of get the feeling that the entire legislative effort on cyberwar is going on in a classified annex. Nevertheless, even from what we can see, we’ve got a dispute. As I noted a few weeks back, The House Armed Services Committee included a provision that explicitly granted DOD the power to conduct clandestine […]
The Administration just issued its official position on the House Armed Services Committee Defense Authorization bill. In it, Obama issues veto threats on several issues, including an extra engine for the Joint Strike Fighter and limits on START nuclear reductions (but not, it must be said, on any delay of DADT repeal, though he did […]
We’re on our second near-record tornado this year and summer hasn’t even started. Joplin, MO and Birmingham, AL have been especially hard hit, but much of flyover country is set to spend the summer hunkering down to hide from truly horrifying weather. Yet Eric Cantor wants to hold disaster relief hostage to debt hysteria. (h/t […]
The DNC and Midwestern state Democratic Parties are rolling out an extravaganza today, using the occasion of Chrysler paying back some of its federal loans to mock GOP presidential candidates for opposing the auto bailout. The DNC had a press conference with Jennifer Granholm, Ted Strickland, and Bob King to mock people like Mitt, T-Paw, […]
The government appears to hope three time’s a charm. The last two times they subpoenaed James Risen in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, Judge Leonie Brinkema quashed the subpoena. But they’re trying again, this time to get him to testify at Sterling’s trial. It appears likely they planned to do this all along and crafted […]
I’ve been reading the National Academy of Sciences Anthrax Report and noted something odd in follow-up to the McClatchy report of the other day describing unexplained tin and silicon in one of the anthrax samples. (Here’s Jim White’s post on the report.) As McClatchy reported, there’s some weird data about silicon and tin in some […]