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.
Oiled up BP Judge Martin Feldman was required by both statutory and ethical considerations to recuse himself; at a absolute base minimum to disclose his appearances of conflict on the record; but he did neither. Any competent standard of lawyering would mandate the government to raise the issue if they are going to fight Feldman’s ruling; but they have not. The public ought to be asking what the hell is going on here.
As I’ve noted before (here and here), confirmation hearings for James Clapper have gotten bogged down in a dispute between the Administration and both houses of Congress over whether Congress should have the tools to exercise real oversight of intelligence functions. Right now, Nancy Pelosi is holding out for both extended notification to the Intelligence […]
Let me start by laying out a few details about Erik Prince that have been reported of late. Prince recently gave a speech I interpreted as a proposal for private contractors to serve as big oil’s enforcer–including in Nigeria and Iran Blackwater illegally tried (but allegedly failed) to negotiate a deal to train guards for […]
Jake Tapper’s interview with Leon Panetta has made a lot of news already and he deserves credit for getting the CIA Director on film in the first place. But one question he asked did more harm than good. Tapper asked Panetta to assure us that the US use of drones was legal. But he limited […]
Think Progress does the math on Panetta’s admission that there are just 100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and discovers we’ve got 1,000 American troops in Afghanistan for each al Qaeda member. The U.S. has committed nearly 100,000 troops to the mission in Afghanistan. ABC This Week host Jake Tapper asked CIA Director Leon Panetta […]
Oh boy, I’ve got a lot to say about this: After nine years of conflict, the U.S. military is still having trouble finding common ground with warzone locals. One way to fill that breach, Darpa figures, is through “interactive stories.” Counterinsurgency, in many ways, is a series of negotiations — over economic development, over security, […]
So on the same day that WaPo accepted Dave Weigel’s resignation for the unauthorized publication of emails that were off the record, it also published an article relying on anonymous sources–with no discussion of whether these sources have a motive for their comments–claiming Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings violated journalistic rules by publishing comments that […]
Before you read this post, go read this Glenn Greenwald one highlighting an Eli Lake interview with John Brennan. Lake reports John Brennan describing “dozens” of Americans against whom the US will bring the full brunt of its power. “There are, in my mind, dozens of U.S. persons who are in different parts of the […]
Charlie Savage reports that Acting OLC head David Barron is returning to spend more time with his law students at Harvard, to be replaced by Jonathan Cedarbaum. Unlike several of the legal jobs that have turned over under this Administration, this one doesn’t appear to be tied to a fight over counter-terrorism policy. David J. […]
And now we’re going to have to try to get them to give up Maguro sushi. Fearing that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will deal a severe blow to the bluefin tuna, an environmental group is demanding that the government declare the fish an endangered species, setting off extensive new protections under […]