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.
Oh is Mary going to love this. As she has tirelessly reminded us over the years, Larry Thompson, the former Deputy Attorney General who signed off on Maher Arar’s rendition to Syria to be tortured, has spent the last 7 years at PepsiCo serving as their General Counsel. But he’s got a new job: as […]
Does it help to explain DOJ’s failure to crack down on mortgage fraud that one of the agents assigned to investigate it was instead sleeping with–and helping defend–one of those being investigated for fraud? The FBI just indicted Special Agent Adrian Busby for allegedly lying about how he helped an informant fight indictment. According to […]
Become a Member of Firedoglake GOAL: 1,000 New Members by June 1st Support our one-stop shop for in-depth news coverage and hard-hitting activism. Just over two years ago, right around the time I reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a month, many of you chipped into the “Marcy Wheeler fund” […]
I’ve been looking at one of the Siobhan Gorman articles that accused whistleblower Thomas Drake served as a source for. I’ll have more later, but I wanted to point out one main thrust of the story: the NSA had no way of measuring efficacy and controlling costs. At the NSA, and throughout the government, the […]
I’ve been having difficulty finding the time to get through the entire AEI torture extravaganza that took place yesterday (“Moderated” by John Yoo). But by the time I read this Greg Sargent piece, I had gotten through the point at about 3 minutes in where Michael Mukasey said, Was there a memo in the file […]
It’s bad enough that Obama didn’t clear out the Cheney folks burrowed into the permanent bureaucracy. Now the Obama Administration will appoint former Cheney aide Victoria Nuland to replace PJ Crowley as State Department spokesperson. Victoria “Toria” Nuland, the current U.S. special envoy for conventional forces in Europe and a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, […]
When I first read tweets pointing to this article, reporting that the Administration won’t let independent scientists evaluate the radiation exposure from RapeAScan machines, I joked that it was because we can’t let terrorists know how dangerous these machines are. Unfortunately, that is precisely the reason the Administration gave a scientist who wrote an article […]
The AP has an astoundingly detailed description of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. It describes the kinds of aircraft used, the minutes spent completing each part of the task, and even explained that the Geronimo name just served to indicate that the SEALs had reached stage “G” of the mission. It also includes […]
Just days after asking Congress not to give the intelligence community a hard deadline to put a basic cybersecurity measure into place, the Obama Administration rolled out a cybersecurity strategy yesterday with great fanfare. The event itself seemed designed to bring as many Cabinet Secretaries into one place at one time–Hillary Clinton, Gary Locke, Janet […]
You’ve no doubt read the multiple posts in which I responded with growing incredulity at the response of DOD and the Intelligence Community to the gaping holes in their network security. Basically, a review of DOD networks after Bradley Manning’s alleged leaking (which came two years after they reviewed DOD networks after a bad malware […]