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.
Today’s news will be dominated with Bush’s admission that Cheney was mad at him for not pardoning Libby. Bush, in an interview aired Monday on TODAY, said Cheney was angry that Bush only commuted the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted of lying during the leak investigation. [snip] ‘I can’t believe you’re going to […]
DOJ’s Inspector General just released a report on whether or not US Attorneys were living it up on the government dime. It finds that five of the US Attorneys studied were the worst offenders for staying at luxury hotels and billing the government. And though it doesn’t refer to those US Attorneys by name, we […]
On Friday, Russia joined the growing list of country telling us to investigate our torture chambers. It may be more noteworthy coming from Russia given the turnabout: back in the day, of course, dissidents and the US pressured the Soviet Union to abide by the human rights treaties it had signed. Then there’s this: Russia […]
The narrative the banksters and their enablers have used to fight a foreclosure moratorium focuses on property values. If we put off foreclosures, they argue, it’ll have detrimental effects on the local community, not least by (continuing to) drive down local property values. Now, the entire premise ignores the fact that the banksters have been […]
From the Department of reading the wrong message in an election is this news, of Timmeh Geithner meeting with the Chamber of Commerce’s odious Thomas Donohue to talk about international issues (read: “let’s talk about other countries we can ship American jobs to”). But this week, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, met with the […]
A number of people have linked to the part of this Joseph Stiglitz interview where he says we won’t fix the economy without some good old fashioned prosecutions. But I wanted to highlight where he describes the way our system of debt imposes a kind of indentured servitude on the debtors. Can we draw a […]
In Steven Rattner’s book, he describes newly elected Barack Obama asking his advisors “Why can’t [the US automakers] make a Corolla?” Implicitly, of course, he was asking “why can’t they make a Corolla in the United States.” His economic advisors, according to Rattner, admitted they didn’t know: “We wish we knew.” The correct answer to […]
The WaPo reports that Bush, in his book, admits to approving waterboarding. In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him. In […]
Mary, who apparently is not a twit, noticed that those of us who are have been brainstorming all the great hearings the GOP will hold now that they control the House. And, in her infinite wisdom, she asked for a thread here so everyone can all join in the fun. Here were my twitter suggestions: […]
Remember WhereIsTheNote? In the face of mounting evidence that the banks foreclosing on homes did not comply with legal requirements during securitization of mortgages and therefore don’t have legal standing to foreclose, the SEIU and some community organizations teamed together last month to create an online tool that anyone can use to ask their mortgage […]