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.
Faiz Shakir tweeted this: Our national discourse is becoming increasingly shrill. We are faced with complex economic, social, and foreign policy questions that need a safe atmosphere in which to explore solutions that will work for the long term. Partisan attacks have taken hold in Washington and throughout the country, and reasoned analysis is harder […]
Someone decided now was a good time to roll out Scooter Libby to complain about stolen elections and Iranian nukes. The whole thing was basically an unmitigated blowjob — thanks Monica Crowley! Crowley: I know that you had been working on the Iraq surge, before this ridiculous politically motivated case against you derailed your effort […]
Adam Goldman has another in his series of articles fleshing out the details of the torture that John Durham is investigating. Today’s story describes the former FBI-turned CIA guy, “Albert” threatened Rahim al-Nashiri with a drill–with the approval of Albert’s boss, “Mike.” (Though the AP story says this threat would be less than a felony […]
I wanted to add to what David Dayen had to say about these two stories. Last week, the WaPo quoted at least two military figures stating, as fact, that the Taliban was a bigger threat to the US mission in Afghanistan than corruption. Based on that judgment, the WaPo suggests “military officials” are now pursuing […]
I’m fairly amused by this story, presented by the NYT as “reporting.” It claims the Obama Administration has tried “just about every program it could think of to prop up the ailing housing market,” and faced with the failure of “just about every program,” economists and analysts are contemplating just letting the housing market crash. […]
Terry McDermott will have a 9/11-timed biography of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the New Yorker this week. But in the interim, he has posted a few of the letters he got in Pakistan as part of his research. In a letter sent December 15, 2006 to his brother–sent just months after KSM first became accessible […]
Apparently, Obama decided to use his Labor Day weekend radio address not to pay tribute to all that organized labor did to create the middle class in this country, but to try to persuade voters that he is doing enough to save it. On Monday, we celebrate Labor Day. It’s a chance to get together […]
Apparently, the Poodle’s memoir (the tour for which got a little messy in Dublin) confirms something that was blatantly obvious: Dick Cheney wanted to conquer the entire Middle East, country by country. Describing the former US vice president as an advocate of “hard, hard power”, Mr Blair said Damascus was next on Mr Cheney’s hit […]
This is a rather interesting pre-holiday document dump: The Pentagon’s war crimes appeals court announced without explanation Friday that the full U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, not a smaller panel, would review the conviction of Osama bin Laden’s driver, now free and living in Yemen. [snip] A three-judge panel heard both sides of the […]
Here’s how our crack 9th Circuit Judge Jay Bybee played word games so as to consider bottles of water left for migrants traversing the Arizona desert “litter” even if they weren’t “garbage.” (h/t Balkinization) 1The regulation suffers from several grammatical challenges. The regulation begins with three gerunds listed in series—“littering, disposing, or dumping”—followed by an […]