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.
I have long argued that the way to address the big problems our government is currently all-but-ignoring, not least jobs and climate change, is to talk about how our current policies put us at significant national security risk. If nothing else, by demonstrating how these are national security issues, it’ll provide a way to reverse […]
The NYT liberated the specific answer to a question that Russ Feingold asked in March 2009, but which DOJ didn’t respond to until November 2010, when Feingold was a lame duck Senator. At issue were new investigative guidelines Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued in late 2008, on his way out the door, which allowed the […]
As you read Bill Keller’s latest exercise in public masturbation, keep in mind how the NYT long refused to correct its credulous and ultimately, factually false, reporting on James O’Keefe III’s ACORN videos (Update: here’s BradBlog’s coverage of their belated admission they were wrong). Now consider how Keller equates O’Keefe’s serial fabrications with Julian Assange’s […]
The Third Way thinks it learned something worthwhile by offering a bunch of apparently straight people who have full civil rights a chance to judge the motivations of those who don’t. At Third Way, for example, we went beyond traditional polling and conducted a series of innovative and intensive one-on-one interviews — akin to the […]
As I have noted before, there are a number of paragraphs in the May 6, 2004 Goldsmith memo authorizing warrantless wiretapping that appear to be badly overclassified. Not only were many of the same paragraphs printed, almost verbatim, in unclassified fashion, in the White Paper released in January 2006. But many of those paragraphs contain […]
Here are the claims the Bybee Two memo premised its authorization to torture Abu Zubaydah on: As we understand it, Zubaydah is one of the highest ranking members of the al Qaeda terrorist organization, [snip] Our advice is based upon the following facts, which you have provided to us. We also understand that you do […]
All the discussion about the wisdom or legality of Eric Holder’s unilateral change to Miranda procedure for “operational terrorists” (Evan Perez story, Charlie Savage story, bmaz post) seems to be missing a stunning detail. The memo laying out the change in procedures apparently doesn’t distinguish between foreign terrorists (that is, members of al Qaeda) and […]
Back in 2009, I noted that a report that USAMRID had lost track of its vials of anthrax sort of undermined the entire FBI case against Bruce Ivins. One key to the FBI case against Ivins, after all, is that he had complete control over the sole flask that contained the strain of anthrax used […]
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, […]