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.
The NYT has one of the most stunning headlines of the day. Losses at Afghan Bank Could Be $900 Million The story tells a story of Afghanistan’s own “Too Big to Fail” problem that offers opaque descriptions of precisely what caused the problem, but waits until the 17th and 18th paragraph to explain the real […]
Spencer has a useful catalog of all the war toys Egypt buys with our military aid. Whatever Egypt’s military does next, chances are they’ll do it with American weapons.Al-Jazeera showed M1A1 Abrams tanks carrying Egyptian soldiers through Cairo in what its correspondents called “a show of force.” Those iconic American tanks have been co-produced in […]
In a press briefing on Friday, Robert Gibbs said several times the Administration would be reviewing its aid to Egypt in the upcoming days. Q You say these legitimate grievances have to be addressed. I’m wondering: Or what? What can the President do if these matters are not –MR. GIBBS: Well, look, first and foremost, […]
Well, perhaps not quite. When Mona Eltahawy explicitly described what many of us learned from Jane Mayer–Hosni Mubarak’s appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman, has a long history of cooperating with us in accepting and torturing people rendered to Egypt–and when Wolf asks whether this went on in the Bush Administration (it dates back to the […]
There are now four versions of the cooperation between WikiLeaks and its journalistic “partners:” Vanity Fair, NYT, Guardian, and Spiegel. A comparison of them is more instructive than reading any in isolation. For example, compare how the NYT and Spiegel describe the three things the State Department asked journalistic partners not to publish during the […]
In a press briefing on the situation in Egypt (and probably his last briefing ever), Robert Gibbs made a stunning, but important statement. We believe in the basket of individual freedoms includes the freedom to access the Internet and the freedom to use social networking sites. Gibbs did not say (and none of the reporters […]
As Siun noted yesterday, Mohamed el Baradei issued a statement critical of US support for Hosni Mubarak in advance of returning to Egypt (and, as of now, being put under house arrest). Of course, you in the West have been sold the idea that the only options in the Arab world are between authoritarian regimes […]
Since Ron Bloom–IMO, the most effective member of the Auto bailout team–got named the special advisor for manufacturing in September 2009, those of us insisting the country has to reinvest in manufacturing have argued Bloom should get more power to make that happen. At least in theory, his imminent promotion to Assistant to the President […]
I keep trying to immerse myself in the FCIC Report, but keep getting distracted–I guess I’ll have to read it this weekend. But it’s high time I put up a working thread for the rest of you. The report itself is here. Lambert Strether has made 1147 of the backup documents released by the FCIC […]
The NYT has a sanitized version of the story of a “US Consular employee” who has been charged with shooting two Pakistanis. An American official, Raymond A. Davis, 36, appeared in court here on Friday on charges of murdering two Pakistanis after police officials alleged Mr. Davis shot the men during a possible roadside robbery […]