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.
The government has finally charged Bradley Manning, the Wikileaks leaker. He is charged with two counts of violating the UCMJ, one related to loading onto his own unsecure computer a set of information and adding unauthorized software to a military network computer, and the other related to accessing and passing information onto someone not entitled […]
There’s not yet a lot of reporting about the terms of the British inquiry into its complicity with torture. But from the reports by the Beeb and the Independent, it seems the inquiry itself will not start until all pending civil and criminal complaints about torture are completed — and the government is helpfully offering […]
I have long maintained that we will eventually learn that Citibank took over where BCCI and then Riggs Bank left off: serving as a money laundering vehicle used by drug cartels and other organized crime, terrorists, and spooks. But this article (h/t scribe) on the role of big banks in laundering Mexican drug money reports […]
Happy Fourth of July. This week, the DC Circuit Court had to tell the government that using false passports does not make someone an al Qaeda member. At issue is the appeal of Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian who had been living in Bosnia alleged to have arranged travel for five others (the rest of the […]
When asked by NYT’s own media reporter about the NYT’s refusal to use the word torture, Bill Keller could barely exert himself to say more than the official press statement. Here’s what the spokesperson gave to Michael Calderone. A spokesman told Yahoo! News that the paper “has written so much about the waterboarding issue that […]
“Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” … The Government “thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint.” SCOTUS Pentagon Papers Decision A coalition of press outlets have written DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson, calling that […]
A number of people have taken the DNC to task for its Rovian attack on RNC Chair Michael Steele for comments suggesting we might fail in Afghanistan (Glenn Greenwald, Greg Sargent, Adam Serwer). The only thing I would add to their comments is to note that not only a majority of the Democratic caucus in […]
Call me crazy, but this is probably not exactly the kind of treatment Thomas Jefferson was thinking the Declaration of Independence would receive 234 years after he wrote it. Many nights an item prompts a call to wake the NCTC director, Michael Leiter, 41, the junior member of the nighthawks. He displays a copy of […]
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has voted to have its own commission investigate the BP disaster. The Committee finds that necessary, according to Mary Landrieu, because Obama hasn’t appointed a representative from the oil industry to his own commission. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted Wednesday to create a congressional bipartisan […]
In this post, I described the Harvard study that showed that US’ largest newspapers stopped calling waterboarding torture once it became clear the US was doing it.I wanted to look more closely at an odd time lapse in the NYT’s Orwellian treatment of waterboarding. In a seeming defense of their refusal to call torture torture […]