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.
As has often been noted, the White Paper the Bush Administration released on January 19, 2006 largely repeats the analysis Jack Goldsmith did in his May 6, 2004 OLC opinion on the warrantless wiretap program. So I decided to compare the two documents. Not only did such a comparison help me see things in both […]
I’m really deep in the weeds on the Jack Goldsmith memo right now (I should have a weedy post up later). But in case you’re bored w/bmaz’s rant about the assault on Miranda rights, I thought I’d point to this TP post describing Richard Clarke suggesting that the Chamber of Commerce (funded by foreign sources, […]
The FBI has linked to a redacted executive summary of the report some shrink contractors did on Bruce Ivins. While it is just the executive summary and even that is partly redacted, the report basically paints Bruce Ivins was a stalker which therefore makes him a possible bioterrorist. Unfortunately for the shrinks who did the […]
Let me say at the outset that the GM bailout was far, far better handled than the bankster bailouts. And as a Michigan resident whose family still has ties to the auto business, I am tremendously grateful for that bailout. That said, this is why I have not declared mission accomplished, in spite of the […]
Here’s the last paragraph of a Politico article describing the considerable extent of AT&T’s paid influence in DC. AT&T said Monday that it is “confident” it can secure federal approval as it presents its case for T-Mobile, and both companies signaled Monday that they hoped to wrap everything up in about a year. AT&T declined […]
I don’t really know precisely what days in March 2003 the CIA’s contractors waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a total of 183 times. But I thought about the rough timing when Dafna Linzer tweeted about this Steven Aftergood post, noting the report in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review of what they did last Congress said they […]
Our country apparently has a new standard for justice: innocent until a secret study–headed by a guy who may have had some responsibility for screwing up an earlier investigation and conducted entirely after your death–finds you were psychologically capable of committing a crime. The LAT reports on a just such a report conducted on Bruce […]
Ha’aretz reports that Israel’s Military Intelligence set up a group several months ago dedicated to collecting intelligence on non-Israeli leftist organizations that criticize Israel. Military Intelligence is collecting information about left-wing organizations abroad that the army sees as aiming to delegitimize Israel, according to senior Israeli officials and Israel Defense Forces officers. The sources said […]
As we’ve known for years, the May 6, 2004 OLC opinion authorizing the warrantless wiretap program shifted the claimed basis for the program from inherent Article II power to a claim the Afghanistan AUMF trumped FISA. But one problem with that argument (hard to fathom now that Afghanistan has once again become our main forever […]
Congratulations to Barton Gellman, whose book on Cheney’s abuse of the Constitution, Angler, will serve as the basis for an HBO miniseries. HBO has optioned the book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Barton Gellman for a miniseries to be executive produced by Paula Weinstein. The mini, which will be based on the […]