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.
When the WikiLeaks Gitmo Files were first released last week, the Telegraph’s top headline warned of a “nuclear hellstorm” if Osama bin Laden were captured or killed. One of the terrorist group’s most senior figures warned that al-Qaeda had obtained and hidden a nuclear bomb in Europe that would be detonated if Osama bin Laden […]
As I noted several weeks ago (and as Carol Rosenberg has reported in depth), the government pissed off the Seminole tribe earlier this year by claiming that Seminoles defending themselves in territory held by the Spanish during the early 19th century fought like al Qaeda (and not, for example, American rebels using guerrilla tactics). Further, […]
According to reports, we first started tracking the couriers who would ultimately lead us to Osama bin Laden over four years ago. The stream of information that led to Sunday’s raid began over four years ago, when U.S. intelligence personnel were alerted about two couriers who were working with al Qaeda and had deep connections […]
It’s probably just a coincidence that the US finally got Osama bin Laden at a time when its relationship with Pakistan is at a post-9/11 low. President Obama said the discovery of OBL came from a lead first generated last August. Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was […]
This Time article is designed to be a swan song to Robert Mueller’s career; it builds over almost 6,500 words to the conclusion that, “Most people inside the bureau believe that the blown opportunities to head off 9/11 would not recur today.” Mueller, the article suggests, has fixed the problems that led the FBI to […]
To a degree, this reminds me of the Joshua Claus moment, when DOD banned reporters like Carol Rosenberg and Michelle Shephard because they uttered the name “Joshua Claus” in their coverage of his testimony in Omar Khadr’s trial. (Shephard had interviewed him previously, so they were basically asking her to forget information she had gathered […]
Politico has a festival of stupidity on yesterday’s release by Obama of his long form birth certificate. The varieties of stupid in the article include: Ignoring the real precedent of the blowjob that shall not be named Blaming birtherism on the InterToobz, and not cable TV Conflating correct doubts about Bush ignoring warnings about al […]
I’m going to be in transit for another half day yet, but I wanted to comment on this motion David Remes, Gitmo detainee Saifullah Paracha’s attorney, filed to request emergency access to the Detainee Assessment Brief on his client released by WikiLeaks on Monday. (h/t Benjamin Wittes) Remes describes the implications of the protection order […]
Check out this sentence, which appears at the end of the Executive Summary of a document purporting to debunk the “cover stories” of detainees who claimed to have traveled to Afghanistan to teach the Koran. Mujahideen that traveled to Afghanistan following the attacks of 11 September 2001 did so with the knowledge that Usama Bin […]
Last week, Spencer reported on an Air Force contract for software to move towards self-piloted drones. The Air Force recently gave Stottler Henke Associates $100,000 to deliver a software package that can keep drones from colliding into human-piloted planes as they take off and land. Stottler’s proposal, called the Intelligent Pilot Intent Analysis System, models […]