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.
I was going to write about this story–about a confrontation between Henry Waxman and Barack Obama over the latter’s ineffective negotiating strategy–yesterday. The president has heard the complaint before. Democrats have accused Obama repeatedly of ceding too much ground to the GOP, especially on health care and the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for […]
This document, Judge Richard Bennett’s rulings on the admissibility of a number of documents presented in CIPA hearings, is interesting for several reasons, some of which I may return to. But I wanted to highlight that the government is trying to introduce evidence under a silent witness rule, something I hadn’t seen mentioned before. [Update: […]
WSJ has an article reporting on the purportedly Chinese-launched GMail hacks that targeted top White House officials. The article is interesting not because it claims the Chinese want to hack top officials. Who do you think they’d be most interested in hacking? Rather, the article is interesting for some of the implications bandied about in […]
Even though he admits yet again that torture didn’t get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Furaj al-Libi to reveal the name of Osama bin Laden’s courier, Michael Hayden has launched yet another round of sophism to defend the case that torture led to Osama bin Laden–and if it didn’t it produced a whole lot of […]
Jared Bernstein (whose blog I still recommend) has responded to his 2-day PEPCO power outage by posting the crummy infrastructure report card the US got in 2009: Check out the 2009 Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers:Aviation D Bridges C Dams D Drinking Water D- Energy D+ Hazardous Waste D Inland Waterways D- […]
CNN has a report today on some of the many lawsuits victims of right and left wing violence have taken against Chiquita. Family members of thousands of Colombians who were killed or who disappeared are suing Chiquita Brands International, alleging the produce company is liable because of its payments to paramilitaries.”We’re holding them accountable,” said […]
For some time, it has become increasingly clear that our politicians can pursue policies that benefit just their rich donors–austerity, killing Medicare, bailing out banksters at the expense of homeowners–while ignoring their purported constituents. So I guess it comes as no surprise that advertisers are beginning to adopt the same approach. The top 10 percent […]
Ellen Nakashima has a piece following up on the WSJ story previewing DOD’s cyberwar (which I posted on here). Before you read it, though, I wanted to suggest another reason we may be seeing this policy early (in addition to the hacking of all the defense contractors, now including L-3; and note, Nakashima references this […]
Earlier today, we learned that (thanks to Antonin Scalia) the word “suspicion” no longer means what it used to mean. Now we learn that “protected” doesn’t mean what it used to mean. As Josh Gerstein reports, the judge in the Thomas Drake case has agreed to let the government protect unclassified information using the Classified […]
DOD has announced that prosecutors have recommended charges against KSM and the other alleged 9/11 plotters. The Department of Defense announced today the office of military commissions prosecutors have sworn charges against five individuals detained at Guantanamo Bay: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed […]