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.
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The folks at the Fed who run our economy apparently believe in the Easter Bunny. And Casper the Friendly Ghost. And Santa Claus. I mean, I can only conclude the folks over there are completely unhinged from reality given their claim that no people–not a single homeowner–was wrongly foreclosed. A months-long investigation into abusive mortgage […]
Back in 2002, Gitmo’s Standard Operating Procedures advocated stripping detainees of clothing as a way of demonstrating the omnipotence of the captors. In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee. With Abu Zubaydah–as Jane Mayer has written–they explicitly tied this […]
As I predicted in my liveblog, the most emotional moment of Peter King’s MUAC Hearing came when Keith Ellison saluted the sacrifice of Mohammed Salman Hamdani. Every American, including Muslim Americans, suffered on 9/11. 29 Muslims died at the World Trade Center; 3 Muslims died in the hijacked planes (United Flight 175 and American Flight […]
You can watch here or here. Bennie Thompson gets permission for Andre Carson and two other Reps to sit on the hearing. People often forget that Carson, like Keith Ellison, is Muslim. King accuses those who oppose the form of this hearing of hysteria. “To back down would be craven abdication to political correctness.” King: […]
The FBI has made an arrest in the MLK Day Spokane bombing. And the alleged culprit is–not surprisingly–a white supremacist. An FBI source in Washington, D.C., said one man was arrested east of Spokane. Agents, including a bomb expert from Quantico, Va., were preparing to search a house where others associated with the suspect were […]
A few weeks ago, I wondered whether Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, a Saudi citizen arrested in Texas for purchasing the ingredients to build picric acid, would be our first Lone Wolf. Here was a non-US person, seemingly unconnected to any known terrorist organizations; the FBI obviously used his emails to indict him. So would he be […]
Back in January, I suggested that Peter King ought not be hailed for his role in the Irish peace process, but rather called out for his hypocrisy on terrorism. Peter King would still be in prison if the US had treated his material support for terrorism as it now does, with sentences that can amount […]
You know how I have argued that our country does have an industrial plan, one that is commonly called the Military-Industrial Complex? The government dumps seemingly unlimited amount of money into selected projects. Defense companies make sure to spread the jobs created by defense contracts around, so members of Congress support those contracts in bipartisan […]
There’s something hysterical about the promise a Quantico spokesperson made that DOD would take any threats to its IT networks–in this case, threats made by Anonymous–seriously. A Quantico spokesman, Lieutenant Agustin Solivan, said officials had referred the matter to law enforcement and counter-intelligence agencies. “We are aware of the threat and any threats to defence […]