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’m working on some deep weeds for a post later on Monday (hopefully). But as a preliminary to them, I wanted to point out a minor–but very critical–bit of timing. As I pointed out in the comments to this thread, someone (I’ll show in my new weedy post why it might be then-Counterterrorism Center Legal […]
Clark Hoyt has a really curious final column summarizing his three years as the NYT’s public editor. A lot of it is self-congratulation to the NYT for even having a public editor. But I’m most fascinated by Hoyt’s rebuttal of reader claims that NYT is a “liberal rag.” For all of my three years, I […]
David Kris gave a speech at the Brookings Institute last week, largely intended to make the case for civilian trials. Here’s the main framework of the speech: Today, however, the consensus that developed in the aftermath of 9/11 shows some signs of unraveling. In particular, there are some who say that law enforcement can’t – […]
Scott Shane and Eric Lichtblau tell a sort of weird story of how a House Intelligence Committee staffer, Diane Roark, tried to reach out to William Rehnquist to get him to review Dick Cheney’s illegal wiretapping program. Within months of the beginning of the eavesdropping program in October 2001, a staff member of the House […]
Threat Level posted a quarter of the chat logs between alleged Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning and hacker Adrian Lamo (it didn’t post those with particularly personal or potentially dangerous national security information). While the logs don’t provide many details about what was in the 260,000 State Department cables that has the government so spooked, they […]
Apparently, the Brits are calling Americans–including President Obama–xenophobic for referring to the company shitting up our Gulf as “British Petroleum.” So for this installment of my now-regular reflection on how, fifty-some years ago, we overthrew a democratically-elected government for that company shitting up our Gulf, I’m going to call it the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. You […]
I had a bit of fun with Michael O’Hanlon on Tuesday. At the America’s Future Now conference, he was pitted against Juan Cole in a debate over the future of our Afghan war. I took the first question to note that we weren’t just facing a choice between escalating in Afghanistan (O’Hanlon’s position) or maintaining […]
Dawn Johnsen has a must-read op-ed today describing how the Bybee memo damaged the Office of Legal Counsel. In 2004, the leak of a controversial memo on the use of torture catapulted the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel into the spotlight. Fallout and debate continue, including in the context of my nomination — withdrawn […]
As McClatchy reported yesterday, Judge Henry Kennedy granted a the habeas petition of a Yemeni man, Mohamed Hassan Odaini, several weeks ago. That brings the total number of men held at Gitmo who have won habeas petitions to 36. Kennedy’s ruling reveals not just his exasperation with the government’s arguments, but also the absurd lengths […]