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 I noted last night, the US has been violating the spirit of its agreement with the EU on access to the SWIFT database–the database tracking international financial transfers. Rather than giving Europol specific, written requests for data, it has been giving it generic requests backed by oral requests the Europol staffers are not supposed […]
I have tracked the American negotiations with the post-Lisbon EU to get continued access to the SWIFT database, the database that tracks international money payments. Basically, after the Lisbon Treaty went into effect last year, the EU Parliament balked at giving Americans free run of the SWIFT database. The EU and US put an interim […]
As Jim White reported this morning, Raymond Davis has been released after the families of his victims were paid blood money per Sharia law. We’ve really gotten to bizarro-land when a possible Blackwater contractor has been saved by Sharia law. But wait! Hillary says we didn’t pay the blood money ourselves. QUESTION: Okay, we’ll jump […]
Thought I’d share some pics from the rally today in Lansing. It’s a decent sized crown–6,000 around noon; they expect to get a whole bunch of teachers out for the last set of speakers at 4:30. Here’s the crowd just outside of the Capitol in Lansing. Lots of signs about the Constitution protesting the Emergency […]
On Friday, Dylan Ratigan and I had a podcast chat about the treatment of Bradley Manning. Among other things, we talked about the “Constitutional Law Professor” President’s rather bizarre response when DOD told him it was standard procedure to strip an Army man of his clothes because of a trumped up claim that his underwear […]
I’m headed out to Lansing shortly–hopefully I’ll be posting updates from the biggest protest MI’s capital has seen in a long time. But I wanted to point out something funny (as in, “oh jeebus we’re all going to die” funny) about the American Nuclear Society’s talking points to try to convince Americans that nukes are […]
As I mentioned in my earlier post on the new Gitmo protective order, DOD is reportedly preparing to charge Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri for his role in the Cole bombing for trial in a military commission. That’s worth keeping in mind because the Gitmo order is largely based on the protective order the DC District […]
DOD just issued a new protective order that will cover the military commissions they’re about to roll out. (h/t Carol Rosenberg) I’m still reading the document. But I wanted to highlight this requirement. Statements of the detainee that detainee’s counsel acquires from classified documents cannot be shared with the detainee absent authorization from the appropriate […]
With all the attention focused on Bradley Manning’s treatment yesterday because of PJ Crowley’s ouster, DOD has done a lot of pushback on the notion that taking away Manning’s underwear is “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid.” The pushback has been so effective that a number of journalists have reported that Quantico no longer takes Manning’s underwear […]
A WikiLeaks cable dated March 5, 2007 has raised new interest in the BAE bribery scandal (AP, WSJ, Telegraph). While no one seems to have noted this, the cable shows that the British lied to their counterparts at the OECD about details of the bribery investigation into BAE. As the Guardian (which led the reporting […]