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.
I owe ROTL a hubcap, apparently, because while I’ve been distracted with the joy of moving in a historically bad housing market, the US won its long extradition battle over Viktor Bout. Coincidentally, I actually found Douglas Farah’s book on Bout, Merchant of Death, half-read a few weeks ago, as I was packing up the […]
Dexter Filkins confirms today something that had been suggested in earlier reporting: Pakistan cooperated in our capture of Abdul Ghani Baradar in January to disrupt peace talks in Afghanistan. Now, seven months later, Pakistani officials are telling a very different story. They say they set out to capture Mr. Baradar, and used the C.I.A. to […]
You’ve probably already read DDay’s and Atrios’s pieces on what some Treasury officials admitted about HAMP the other day. But partly because I want to link to this really comprehensive account of the entire meeting and partly because I want to elaborate on a point made in it, I thought I’d join in. Basically, at […]
Here’s what the military judge in the Omar Khadr trial, Colonel Patrick Parrish, said to justify admitting Khadr’s own confessions as evidence. (h/t Carol Rosenberg, whose story on this ruling is here) There is no credible evidence the accused was ever tortured as that term is defined under M.C.R.E.304(b)(3), even using a liberal interpretation considering […]
When James Clapper testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he rejected one of the central criticisms in the WaPo’s Top Secret America series–that the redundancy in the Intelligence Community contributed to waste and intelligence failures. Clapper disputed criticism of redundancy in intelligence programs, saying that duplication is sometimes a conscious decision. “One man’s duplication is […]
Remember that Jeremy Scahill report that listed Colombia among the 75 places where JSOC has deployed? The Nation has learned from well-placed special operations sources that among the countries where elite special forces teams working for the Joint Special Operations Command have been deployed under the Obama administration are: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, […]
This is a rather interesting public statement from the guy who–at least before Elena Kagan and her obscure views on executive power got sworn in–was the swing vote on SCOTUS. (h/t fatster) “Article III courts are quite capable of trying these terrorist cases,” [Justice Anthony] Kennedy said, agreeing with [an earlier panel that endorsed civilian, […]
I wanted to point out two details of timing on the Ramzi bin al-Shibh tapes: The tapes were made after CIA started getting worried about making interrogation tapes The tapes were disclosed after the CIA started trying to figure out what happened to the Abu Zubaydah tapes The tapes were made after CIA already started […]
July 27: Chris Dodd says of Elizabeth Warren, “She’s qualified, no question about that” August 9: Katrina vanden Heuvel tweets that several sources have told her Elizabeth Warren would be nominated “next week” August 12: Warren meets with Financial Services Roundtable President Steve Bartlett and then meets with David Axelrod at the White House to […]
All you Californians ought to be getting awfully nervous about Senate-Select Carly Fiorina about now. Because the lesson I take from the Rod Blagojevich verdict–he was found guilty of just one charge of lying to the FBI, while the jury remained deadlocked on 23 other charges–is that it’s okay to sell a Senate seat, so […]