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.
It appears the White House may have gotten itself caught in the kabuki it played with the press on the Russian spies now swapped for some spies in Russian custody. But the timing of the kabuki suggests the target of the spy sting may not have been the illegals, but two Russian officials working under […]
The catfood commission (aka Obama’s deficit commission) is dead. Well, it must be, right? After all, that great figure of Beltway-corporatism-posing-as-moderation, Bob Corker, has decreed that we shall pass no legislation during a post election lame duck session. Corker called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), the Democratic […]
I seem to be one of the biggest skeptics about the torture inquiry David Cameron announced this week. Among other things, I worry that Cameron intends to pressure plaintiffs who allege they were tortured into a mediated settlement to prevent more details of their torture from coming out. So I wanted to look at Cameron’s […]
There are two pieces of good news in this McClatchy story reporting that Carol Rosenberg, one of four journalists banned from Gitmo because she published the previously reported name of Omar Khadr’s first interrogator, Joshua Claus, will be allowed to return next week rather than after August 5, as they had previously decided. The first […]
More than one percent of all Americans–3.3 million people–will have lost their unemployment benefits by month’s end if Congress doesn’t pass an extension of long-term benefits. The Labor Department estimates that about 1.7 million have lost benefits as of last week, after extended unemployment insurance expired in late May. Those numbers could reach 3.3 million […]
We’ve discussed the recent SCOTUS decision that ruled the government can charge people engaging in First Amendment activities with material support for terrorism. Even groups trying to teach terrorist organizations to engage peacefully might be judged to be materially supporting terrorists. And while I don’t think that’s precisely what is going on here, the logical […]
You know what happens when your elected representatives fight for your privacy? Counterterrorism investigators actually grant you some! At issue is SWIFT–the database that tracked most international money transfers which the Bush Administration mined in its counterterrorism fight. When SWIFT’s server moved to the EU, the US tried to demand the same access as it […]
One of the key takeaways of a study a number of people are buzzing about–showing that a majority of the country has generally opposed torture–is that six months after Obama became president, that changed. Using a new survey dataset on torture collected during the 2008 election, combined with a comprehensive archive of public opinion on […]
Steven Aftergood reports that DOD signed a directive last week allowing for Government Accountability Office audits of Special Access Programs. [A] Department of Defense Directive issued last week explicitly allows for GAO access to highly classified special access programs, including intelligence programs, under certain conditions.The newly revised DoD Directive 5205.07 (pdf) on special access programs […]
As I noted in my earlier post on Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning’s charging document, there’s an apparent discrepancy between the timing Wired gives for Manning’s arrest and what the charging document shows. Wired said that the FBI told Adrian Lamo on May 27 that Manning had been arrested the previous day–that is, May 26. At […]