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.
The first time I read Nicholas Schmidle’s breathtaking account of Osama bin Laden’s killing, I gave up when I got to this passage: John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President’s advisers began an “interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you’re going to disprove the theory that bin Laden […]
There’s something that bugged me about this article (indeed, bugs me about most economic analyses of our current crash). Amidst a discussion that fairly lays out some of the problems with the global economy (all the while ignoring that one critical issue in the US is a gutting of manufacture and unions and therefore increasing […]
As anticipated, the French have just opened an investigation into whether IMF Chief Christine Lagarde intervened in a settlement Bernard Tapie won with a state-owned bank during her tenure as Finance Minister. At the rate we’re going, the developing world might just get their demand for a President from one of their countries. The government […]
The Guardian has liberated the UK’s policy on cooperating with liaison services that torture. ((h/t Rosalind) As the Guardian explains the policy basically sets up a bureaucracy to weigh whether the value of the information outweighs the imperative not to torture. The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to […]
Charlie Savage tells the headline story from Leonie Brinkema’s opinion on whether or not James Risen must testify in Jeffrey Sterling’s leak trial. “A criminal trial subpoena is not a free pass for the government to rifle through a reporter’s notebook,” wrote the judge, Leonie Brinkema of the United State District Court in Alexandria, Va. […]
Susie linked to this clip. And while she’s right to point to all the evidence that L’il Luke Russert is an ignorant toad about how many jobs Obama’s trade deals will send overseas, I’m more amazed by his arrogant response to being asked about slave and dead labor. Here’s my take on the exchange, starting […]
Our Dying Economy The National Employment Law Project has a report showing how this Depression is hollowing out middle class jobs, with 8.4% of all middle wage jobs gone (and that’s on top of a process that had already started before the Depression). One profession that has shown growth among middle wage jobs, though, is […]
In one of my posts on drones, I noted that we have had more deaths this year in AL (238) and MO (159) because of extreme tornadoes the severity of which is probably at least due partly to climate change than we have from terrorism. But there’s something else that seems to have happened. Meteor […]
Okay, okay, I should have used a pun on “Echelon” for my title here, not “Carnivore.” After all, it was that earlier SigInt program that the US and its Anglophone partners used to steal industrial secrets in the 1990s. The point being that, while I am concerned by McAfee’s description of the extent of the […]
I suggested the other day that Mark Warner’s position on the Gang of Six might bode poorly for SuperCongress being anything but a pre-gamed attack on Social Security and Medicare. Well, it turns out he has already been running around to the press campaigning for the job, with a conference call and an appearance on […]