Author Archive for: emptywheel
About emptywheel
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.
Entries by emptywheel
Obama Administration Tries to Get Out of Its Khadr Problem
/in Gitmo Show Trials/by emptywheelAdd this to the list of things I might laugh about if it weren’t so damned sad and awful. The Administration has now realized trying a Canadian accused of murder for killing someone in an active battlefield as a teenager exposes the Gitmo show trials as a kangaroo court. But they don’t know whether they […]
Trash Is Back!
/in Trash Talk/by emptywheelI’ll admit it. I’ve got ulterior motives for posting trash two weeks before the regular season begins. First, I will once again be mostly away from the Toobz this weekend as I continue to experience the joys of moving. So I wanted to leave you with something more fun than CIA corruption, our failing economy, […]
CIA: Money Is Fungible, Except When It Is Our Money
/in Intelligence, Terrorism/by emptywheelKeep in mind as you read these four paragraphs from WaPo’s follow-up on NYT’s story on Mohammed Zia Salehi that the person quoted is almost certainly from the same CIA that profiles terrorist organizations that, regardless of the charitable work they do, may not legally receive money. U.S. officials did not dispute that Salehi was […]
Extend and Pretend about to Bite the Banksters in the Butt
/in Economics/by emptywheelI would be laughing my ass off at this if I weren’t about to put my home on the market for what the house next door sold as a foreclosure several years ago. (h/t CR) By postponing the date at which they lock in losses, banks and other investors positioned themselves to benefit from the […]
Military Commissions Good Enough for Teen Acting in Self-Defense, But Not Alleged Cole Bomber
/in Gitmo Show Trials/by emptywheelThe WaPo reports that the Administration has shelved plans to try Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in military commissions. The decision at least temporarily scuttles what was supposed to be the signature trial of a major al-Qaeda figure under a reformed system of military commissions. And it comes practically on the eve of the 10th anniversary of […]
Chris Dodd’s Newfound Concern about Management Experience
/in Economics/by emptywheelFederal bureaucracies which, according to the confirmation hearing questions he asked of prospective directors, Chris Dodd believes require no management experience to run: Securities and Exchange Commission Housing and Urban Development Federal Housing Administration Export-Import Bank National Credit Union Administration Federal Reserve Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Thrift Supervision (which oversaw AIG and GE, […]
Dexter Filkins’ Busy Week
/in Intelligence, Terrorism, War/by emptywheelDexter Filkins’ story reporting that a top, corrupt, Hamid Karzai aide is on the CIA payroll is not, by itself, all that interesting. Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear […]
New Wikileak: CIA Admits US Exports Terror
/in Intelligence/by emptywheelWikileaks has posted a single new document–a CIA Red Cell report contemplating what would (will?) happen if other countries begin to see the US as an exporter of terrorism. The document admits several cases where the US has exported terror–such as the widely known but downplayed fact that David Headley had a role in the […]
What Irrational Exuberance Looks Like
/in Economics/by emptywheelGo read this Kevin Drum post. The important takeaway is this picture, showing that home prices had been, except for the last decade, utterly flat since World War II. Kevin spends his post providing a bunch of reasons why people are so silly as to believe they’re going to get rich off of their house–things […]