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 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 […]
I hate to be pedantic, but a number of people are misreading Obama’s Executive Order on indefinite detention, with the result that they present the order as much less troublesome than it actually is. Here’s one example, from Ken Gude: There is now a clearly articulated standard for continued detention; gone is the so-called intelligence […]
I made my two most critical points about Obama’s Executive Order on indefinite detention in my snarky post yesterday. First, even assuming the idea of institutionalizing indefinite detention weren’t bad on its face, Obama’s EO doesn’t provide any standards of review for the kind of people who should be indefinitely detained. The EO’s standard is, […]
Obama has declared that he has the authority under the 2001 AUMF to indefinitely hold anyone “if it is necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the United States.” He doesn’t say that person has to be a terrorist, much less part of al Qaeda. He doesn’t say that person has […]
I think I’ll do a series of posts over the next few days all starting with the phrase, “with David Kris gone,” showing how Obama has finally gone off the deep end (the “Dark Side”) in his War on Terror and the Constitution. This edition has to do with Obama’s announcement that he’s in the […]
There’s an interesting tidbit in the government’s mediation questionnaire in anticipation of their appeal of Vaughn Walker’s decision that al-Haramain had been illegally wiretapped and was entitled to damages. The government is willing to negotiate. In response to the direction, “Provide any other information that might affect the suitability of this case for mediation,” the […]