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.
In Nicholas Shaxson’s book, Treasure Islands, he traces out a network of offshore locations, like Cayman Islands, where corporations and crooks hide their cash. But he also noted that the incorporation laws in various US states allows those same corporations and crooks to hide money right inside the United States. Reuters has a superb article […]
As Josh Gerstein reports, Leonie Brinkema has unsealed her November 2010 ruling quashing the government’s subpoena of James Risen to testify before the grand jury. Gerstain describes several interesting details revealed in the ruling–including that the government withheld information, including details surrounding the 2005 testimony of, apparently, a Senate staffer. Go check out those details. […]
Usually, when Max Baucus tries to craft a grand bargain, oversized legislation starts by getting progressively worse, at which point the legislation finally dies. But he has finally succeeded in getting a grand bargain, with a deal to extend Trade Adjustment Assistance in exchange for votes on the Korea, Colombia, and Panama trade deals. Baucus […]
Update: As Dday corrects me, both these lessons in negotiation describe the same confrontation that took place on June 2. DDay linked to this story describing Henry Waxman confronting President Obama because he had given the Republicans the impression he would cave on debt negotiations. One Democrat who was there said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) […]
Boy has Charlie Savage caused a headache for Barack Obama and Harold Koh. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had a hearing to grill Koh today, in part, because of Savage’s report that Obama overrode OLC, DOJ, and DOD lawyers in deciding that we are not engaged in “hostilities” with Libya and therefore he can blow […]
I’m watching the Senate Foreign Relation Committee’s grilling of Harold Koh–either bmaz or I will post on that later. But Jim Webb just made a really important point. He noted that we have suspended, but not severed, our relations with Libya. After cornering Koh on that issue (and finally getting Koh to acknowledge that point), […]
The Pentagon Papers were declassified earlier this month. In advance of its formal declassification, the National Archives had announced that 11 words would remain classified. But ultimately, the entire document was released. Kudos to Steven Aftergood for FOIAing the documents that explained what happened. Staffers at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library discovered on June […]
The website for the US Trade Representative still has a link to the inadequate–but nevertheless improved–labor protections that the US had demanded from Colombia to support a trade deal with the country. But according to Sander Levin–who just announced his opposition to the deal–Obama has agreed to a Republican demand to drop such protections from […]
Remember that GCHQ/MI6 agent, Gareth Williams, who was found dead in a duffel bag last year? At first, the narrative around his death centered on rumors he had been killed in a weird gay sex game. Amid such sensational reporting, other articles revealed Williams worked closely with the NSA on wiretapping Rashid Rauf, one of […]
As bmaz reported while I was looking at flowers in Northern MI, POGO liberated via FOIA the Inspector General report central to the Thomas Drake case. While much of the report is redacted (except for, perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of comments about limitations to ThinThread that have been decontextualized by redactions), a few interesting details […]