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.
The outage of the day is the report that Hamid Karzai’s chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, receives a steady stream of bags of Euros from Iran. One evening last August, as President Hamid Karzai wrapped up an official visit to Iran, his personal plane sat on the airport tarmac, waiting for a late-running passenger: Iran’s […]
I admit I’m no big fan of Elena Kagan. But tell me whether I’m justified in worrying about this? Data point 1: On at least one occasion, Antonin Scalia participated in the Koch brothers’ secret sessions plotting to advance the Koch agenda. Data point 2: Antonin Scalia is hunting buddies with Dick Cheney. Data point […]
The NYT has a worthwhile editorial lambasting the Obama DOJ’s pursuit of SCOTUS review in Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, which will probably result in expanded immunity for government officials that abuse the law so as to abuse the rights of Americans. The editorial focuses closely on the way in which DOJ’s defense of absolute immunity amounts […]
The biggest headline from Friday’s Wikileaks dump (everywhere but the NYT, anyway) is that the “US ignored torture.” But the way in which an official policy ignoring torture was followed by collaboration with one of Iraq’s torture squads raises the question whether the US involvement in Iraqi torture was more direct. Did the US “ignore” […]
As you may have heard on Twitter, Omar Khadr has plead guilty to all charges against him. Omar Khadr, the only Canadian, only child soldier and only Guantanamo Bay detainee charged with battlefield homicide in the killing a U.S. soldier, pleaded guilty to all terrorism and murder charges on Monday. “Yes” said Mr. Khadr, when […]
It says something about our country that the person who wrote this op-ed could, in a few short years, go on to serve as the primary economic advisor to the President. (h/t scribe) And this study shows that measured this way, the mortgage market has become more perfect, not more irresponsible. People tend to make […]
As I noted in my last post on the move, led by Fidelity National, to require banks to warrant against “incompetent or erroneous affidavit testimony or documentation,” the move was largely about getting Fannie and Freddie on board and with them making this a standard practice in the industry. So I’m not surprised by the […]
Before the Wikileaks document dump this afternoon, DOD and Murdoch were out with claims that the impending dump would put 300 Iraqis at significant risk of reprisal. As Wikileaks noted via Twitter, the article falsely claimed that Wikileaks would reveal actual names. Besides, if DOD has a problem with leaks, they likely have a problem […]
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism says there are 14 incidences recorded in today’s Wikileaks dump alleging that Blackwater fired on Iraqi citizens (their site appears to be overloaded, so be persistent). Two years before Nisour Square, on May 14 2005, the logs allege that Blackwater shot at a civilian car. The shooting reportedly killed the driver, […]
Le Monde did this graphic of the what kind of deaths the Wikileaks document dump records happening when (blue are American soldiers killed–darker–or injured; green are civilians killed or injured). In an article on another revelation in the Wikieaks document–tracing several more incidents of civilian deaths caused by a helicopter using the same call sign […]