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 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 […]
Given that the AP has filled in some details about the Ramzi bin al-Shibh tapes someone had hidden under a desk at CIA, I wanted to look back at the letter DOJ wrote to Leonie Brinkema in 2007, when the government first admitted it had been sitting on those tapes. AP says the tapes were […]
Remember how Judy Miller stored the notes showing that the Vice President’s lackey had leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to her under her desk in a shopping bag? Remember how we mocked that kind of record keeping? Well, the AP reports that the CIA uses the same archival system as Judy: The two videotapes and one […]
Jim White has an important observation about the increasing militarization of our aid operations in Afghanistan. When the medical teams come from the very same organization that disappears innocent people in the middle of the night, the US effort in Afghanistan has become completely detached from sanity. The medical team described above is affiliated with […]
When Hal Turner was led away to jail for writing that three judges who had upheld the Chicago gun ban (which has since been overturned at SCOTUS) “deserved to be killed”–and provided maps to help his readers find the judges–his son insisted Turner didn’t threaten anybody, he opined. But the third jury that ruled on […]
Folks are still arguing about whether Obama’s statement about the Cordoba House was sufficiently impassioned or whether his subsequent statements backtracked off the original statement. Now, that’s not to say that religion is without controversy. Recently, attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities -– particularly New York. Now, we must […]
I know. It almost never pays to read one of MoDo’s columns seriously. But enough good lefties are pointing to this one approvingly, I thought I’d do them the favor of pointing out how typically stupid it is. Let’s start with this lovely four-sentence passage: Not because of his outburst against the “professional left.” He […]
Barely expressed in the NYT’s long story about our use of paramilitary strikes in places we’re not officially at war is a conflict between three choices. The NYT piece describes the first two–a covert war run by CIA and briefed to Congress, or a covert war run by JSOC subject less oversight–as the choice the […]