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.
Glenn Fine–DOJ’s Inspector General–is usually one of the most credible agents of oversight in the federal government. But his last report–examining whether the FBI investigated the First Amendment activities of lefty groups as terrorism–is a masterpiece of obfuscation. It manages to look at three different investigative efforts of the Thomas Merton Center’s anti-war activism, all […]
I’m still working on a big post on the DOJ IG Report on domestic spying. But for the moment I wanted to call attention to a footnote that seems to suggest the emails from FBI employees in Pittsburgh who had conducted surveillance of the Thomas Merton Center and/or invented an excuse for doing so after […]
This is just pathetic: Vice President Joe Biden travels to Boston Wednesday, where he’s scheduled to team up with Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. A Democratic source tells CNN that the event is a fundraiser for the two-term Democratic senator, who faces a very difficult re-election bid this year. Blanche Lincoln just joined Republicans to […]
There’s an interesting detail in the IG Report on FBI’s investigations of peace groups that suggests FBI was asking OLC for an interpretation of the approval required before conducting a riot-related investigation. The Attorney General’s Guidelines on “Reporting on Civil Disorders and Demonstrations” were in effect from 1976 until they were repealed and partially incorporated […]
Sorry for the delay in blogging today–I got distracted with something.I should be back at this blogging thing shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to link to this post Spencer did at Danger Room: The Pentagon quietly announced yesterday that Rear Admiral Kathleen Dussault is out as commander of Task Force 2010, a unit co-established […]
I realize the odds of Democrats keeping the House are not all that great. But I also know that the DCCC is far more competent than the RNCC; DCCC has managed to win just about every challenging election of late. So let’s just say Democrats keep the House and with it John Conyers his gavel. […]
Tim Noah’s great series on the causes of income inequality got a lot less attention during its second week than its first week. So I thought it worthwhile to focus on what he concluded was causing the dangerous new income inequality in America. Here’s how he described the relative importance of each of the causes […]
Josh Gerstein provides Lindsey Graham a soap box to complain that his efforts to craft a grand compromise with the Administration on Gitmo stalled in May. “I thought we were close to getting a deal,” Graham told POLITICO last week. “I had some meetings where I walked out of the White House and said, ‘This […]
The most depressing part of this McClatchy article on the corrupt USAID contracting in Afghanistan by the construction company, Louis Berger, are six-year old quotes calling for an alternative to Berger. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials repeatedly have voiced frustration about the company’s work. In May 2004 — three months after then-President George W. Bush […]
I’ve started reading through J. Edgar Hoover’s files the reports a contractor developed for PA’s Department of Homeland Security that describe political activism as a terrorist threat; Governor Rendell has made them publicly available here. I’ll have more to say about them later (though feel free to add comments on them below). But for the […]