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.
Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson, just wrote a letter to Peter King asking him to include other terrorists, in addition to Islamic extremists, in his fear-mongering hearing this month. I write to request that you broaden the scope of your examination of ideological-based violence. Terrorists of all ideologies seek to […]
This column by Robert Grenier is stunning not because of its content–I agree with just about all of it–but because of who Grenier is. As the CIA’s Iraq Mission Manager in 2002-2004 and then head of CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center in 2004-2006, he had to have been intimately involved with many US efforts in the Middle […]
The Guardian has now posted its version of the US government’s efforts last November to learn what cables WikiLeaks would publish, so I’d like compare the three versions to show what we know. As I noted before, these negotiations started with the NYT giving the State Department a heads up. Following that heads up, offered […]
To be fair, it was not a highly lucrative football game CBS censored. Rather, it was an ad put out by the players’ union opposing the lockout the owners are threatening. I guess anything from a labor union — even a labor union representing a bunch of highly paid celebrities — may count as taboo […]
Last week, Russian Ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, told the organization that the computer worm Israel and the US devised to ruin Iran’s nuclear program could have led to a catastrophe with the Bushehr nuclear plant like Chernobyl. Russia said on Wednesday that NATO should investigate last year’s computer virus attack on a Russian-built nuclear […]
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 […]