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.
There’s an interesting detail in the IG Report on FBI’s investigations of peace groups that suggests FBI was asking OLC for an interpretation of the approval required before conducting a riot-related investigation. The Attorney General’s Guidelines on “Reporting on Civil Disorders and Demonstrations” were in effect from 1976 until they were repealed and partially incorporated […]
Sorry for the delay in blogging today–I got distracted with something.I should be back at this blogging thing shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to link to this post Spencer did at Danger Room: The Pentagon quietly announced yesterday that Rear Admiral Kathleen Dussault is out as commander of Task Force 2010, a unit co-established […]
I realize the odds of Democrats keeping the House are not all that great. But I also know that the DCCC is far more competent than the RNCC; DCCC has managed to win just about every challenging election of late. So let’s just say Democrats keep the House and with it John Conyers his gavel. […]
Tim Noah’s great series on the causes of income inequality got a lot less attention during its second week than its first week. So I thought it worthwhile to focus on what he concluded was causing the dangerous new income inequality in America. Here’s how he described the relative importance of each of the causes […]
Josh Gerstein provides Lindsey Graham a soap box to complain that his efforts to craft a grand compromise with the Administration on Gitmo stalled in May. “I thought we were close to getting a deal,” Graham told POLITICO last week. “I had some meetings where I walked out of the White House and said, ‘This […]
The most depressing part of this McClatchy article on the corrupt USAID contracting in Afghanistan by the construction company, Louis Berger, are six-year old quotes calling for an alternative to Berger. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials repeatedly have voiced frustration about the company’s work. In May 2004 — three months after then-President George W. Bush […]
I’ve started reading through J. Edgar Hoover’s files the reports a contractor developed for PA’s Department of Homeland Security that describe political activism as a terrorist threat; Governor Rendell has made them publicly available here. I’ll have more to say about them later (though feel free to add comments on them below). But for the […]
Two weeks ago, I suggested Obama would do well to hire the woman who wrote the book on the struggles of the middle class. Today, he did that. This afternoon, I suggested that the White House needed to get their newest employee out on teevee, talking to the middle class. For the White House, not […]
The government appealed its loss in the habeas petition of Mohamedou Ould Salahi Friday. It’s worth reviewing what this appeal is about. At the District level, Judge James Robertson ruled that while Salahi had clearly been an al Qaeda sympathizer and, before al Qaeda declared war on the US had been a sworn member of […]
I’m cautiously optimistic with the dual appointment of Elizabeth Warren to be Assistant to the President to work at Treasury to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Board. Frankly, no one knows what this appointment will mean in practice except perhaps Obama, Warren, and Timmeh Geithner. And no one knows how well Warren will negotiate […]