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.
An unfortunate side effect of the NYT and NPR’s attempt to preempt WikiLeaks’ embargo on the Gitmo Files is that their coverage–rather than the coverage of those who had been working on the files for several weeks–got the most attention. Notably, McClatchy’s team of Tom Lasseter (who had done a series on Gitmo) and Carol […]
According to Josh Gerstein, DOJ decided not to charge anyone in the illegal wiretap leak probe. The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times – disclosures that Bush vehemently denounced as a […]
The defense attorneys representing detainees at Gitmo in habeas proceedings received this email today. Subject: Information in the public domain 2nd reminder All: As many of you have undoubtedly heard or read, government documents that may contain classified information have been released via the news media. As a reminder, information that is marked as classified, […]
Back in April 2009, I wrote a post outlining how purported al Qaeda training manuals formed the basis of Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell’s torture program. The SASC Report on Detainee Treatment reveals that some information collected from al Qaeda–and not DOD’s attempts to find methods to interrogate detainees–is one key to discovering how we […]
I’m working on weedy readings of the Gitmo Files released today. But I wanted to note the important revelation–and the source of the government’s concerns–regarding the release. These files assess how big a risk these prisoners are. And in a number of cases, the assessments label prisoners who have subsequently been released to other countries […]
As bmaz posted, WikiLeaks is (finally) releasing the Gitmo Files, review files on 758 of the detainees who have passed through Gitmo. For background, here’s the story Carol Rosenberg (with Tom Lasseter) wrote about the files. Among other things, they write about the “mission creep” at Gitmo, as people unrelated to al Qaeda were flown […]
There are two key takeaways I get from this comprehensive WaPo piece on why Gitmo will never close. First, after just one Congressman–VA’s Frank Wolf–bitched about the plan to bring innocent Uighurs to the US, the plan was shut down (apparently unilaterally, by Rahm). With chief of staff Rahm Emanuel at the helm of the […]
Yesterday, Michael Whitney pointed out how irresponsible it was for the ultimate commander of all the people who will decide Bradley Manning’s innocence or guilt to state publicly, before his trial, that “he broke the law.” But there was something else wrong with it. As transcribed by the UK Friends of Bradley Manning, Obama said, […]
At today’s presidential fundraiser in San Francisco, several attendees sang a song to Obama protesting Bradley Manning’s treatment. (From the White House pool report) Mr. Obama was in the middle of his remarks when a woman in a white suit stood up and said, Mr. President we wrote you a song. POTUS tried to get […]
Remember the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA)? Here’s how I described it back in 2007. CIFA is, along with the National Security Letters Congress is now cracking down on, probably the biggest abuse of civil rights and privacy BushCo has hatched up. It was designed to gather intelligence on threats to defense installments in the United […]