http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12423825/
The officer flunked a polygraph exam before being fired on Thursday and is now under investigation by the Justice Department, NBC has learned.
Intelligence sources tell NBC News the accused officer, Mary McCarthy, worked in the CIA's inspector general's office and had worked for the National Security Council under the Clinton and and George W. Bush administrations.
They are working on the charges to follow. The termination was just to stop the leaking. If you want to work as a Spy for America you should be able to support whatever the commander & chief orders. As a matter of fact they are sworn in under oath to do just that.
This is just another example of the disgusting attempts by the left and it's drive by media to help us loose the war.
We can win the war without secret prisons in eastern Europe.
We can? How do you know that?
We can torture people anywhere.
How do you know we do torture people? I have seen no proof of torture
of any people. You are talking out the top of your head.
Why else would you need a secret prison?
I don't know, you are the expert, you tell me. Do you mean we have
to have them just to torture people? How bout maybe we don't want
others to know who we have in custody, because, well maybe someone
in the CIA might want to tell a newspaper. Nah, that couldn't be it.
Well, there you go.I don't knowWhy else?Do you mean we have
to have them just to torture people?Nah, we didn't get the names of the Gitmo detainees until they wanted to tell us. Try again.How bout maybe we don't want others to know who we have in custody, because, well maybe someone
in the CIA might want to tell a newspaper.
The man is a HERO, and probably didn't want to make the transition from CIA officer to KGB, which is where the agency/country seems to be heading.
This might be, yet again, a long, complicated, cloudy story, but it smells like the Repug political operative running the CIA is out for political revenge and scapegoatig, not increased security, or illegal activies.
Repug "intelligence", Repug "science". Whatever fits the Repug ideology, just like Communist Russia.
===========================
April 23, 2006
Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by Rules
By DAVID S. CLOUD
WASHINGTON, April 22 — In 1998, when President Bill Clinton ordered military strikes against a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan, Mary O. McCarthy, a senior intelligence officer assigned to the White House, warned the president that the plan relied on inconclusive intelligence, two former government officials said.
Ms. McCarthy's reservations did not stop the attack on the factory, which was carried out in retaliation for Al Qaeda's bombing of two American embassies in East Africa. But they illustrated her willingness to challenge intelligence data and methods endorsed by her bosses at the Central Intelligence Agency.
On Thursday, the C.I.A. fired Ms. McCarthy, 61, accusing her of leaking information to reporters about overseas prisons operated by the agency in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. But despite Ms. McCarthy's independent streak, some colleagues who worked with her at the White House and other offices during her intelligence career say they cannot imagine Ms. McCarthy as a leaker of classified information.
As a senior National Security Council aide for intelligence from 1996 to 2001, she was responsible for guarding some of the nations most sensitive secrets.
"We're talking about a person with great integrity who played by the book and, as far as I know, never deviated from the rules," said Steven Simon, a National Security Council aide in the Clinton administration who worked closely with Ms. McCarthy.
Others said it was possible that Ms. McCarthy, who began attending law school at night several years ago, made a campaign contribution to Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 and had announced her intention to retire from C.I.A., had grown increasingly disenchanted with the often harsh and extra-legal methods adopted by the Bush administration for handling Al Qaeda prisoners and felt she had no alternative except to go to the press.
If in fact Ms. McCarthy was the leaker, Richard J. Kerr, a former C.I.A. deputy director, said, "I have no idea what her motive was, but there is a lot of dissension within the agency and it seems to be a rather unhappy place." Mr. Kerr called Ms. McCarthy "quite a good, substantive person on the issues I dealt with her on."
She was known as a low-key during her time at the white house as professional who paid special attention to preventing leaks of classified information and covert operations, several current and former government officials said. When she disagreed with decisions on intelligence operations, they say, she registered her complaints through internal government channels.
Some former intelligence officials who worked with Ms. McCarthy saw her as a persistent obstacle to aggressive an errorism efforts.
"She was always of the view that she would rather not get her hands dirty with covert action," said Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. official, who said he was in meetings with Ms. McCarthy where she voiced doubts about reports that the factory had ties to Al Qaeda and was secretly producing substances for chemical weapons.
In the case of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, her concerns may have been well-founded. Sudanese officials and the plant's owner denied any connections to Al Qaeda.
In the aftermath of the attack, the internal White House debate about whether the intelligence reports about the plant were accurate spilled into the press. Eventually, Clinton administration officials conceded that the hardest evidence used to justify striking the plant was a single soil sample that seemed to indicate the presence of a chemical used in making VX gas.
There is no evidence Ms. McCarthy was involved in any disclosure to the press about the incident, but she was concerned enough that she wrote a formal letter dissenting to President Clinton, two former officials say.
Over the last decade, Ms. McCarthy gradually came to have one foot in the secret world of intelligence and another in the public world of policy.
She went from lower-level analyst working in obscurity at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va,. to someone at home "downtown," as Washington is called by agency veterans, where policy is more openly fought over and leaks are far more common.
Though she was a C.I.A. employee for more than 20 years, associates said, her early professional experience was not in the world of spying and covert operations.
After a previous career that one former colleague said included time as a flight attendant, she earned a doctorate in history from the University of Minnesota. She worked for a Swiss company "conducting risk assessments for international businesses and banks," Ms. McCarthy wrote in a brief biography she provided to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also called the 9/11 Commission. She testified before the commission in 2003. The biography notes that she once wrote "a book on the social history of Ghana."
Even after joining the C.I.A. in 1984, Ms. McCarthy, who was hired as intelligence analyst for Africa, was far from a covert operative. In the late 1980's, she was promoted to management, taking over as chief of the Central America and Caribbean section, though she had no previous experience in the region, said a former officer who worked with her.
By 1991, she was working as deputy to one of the agency's most senior analysts, Charles E. Allen, whose job as "National Intelligence Officer for Warning" was to anticipate major national security threats. Ms. McCarthy took over the job from Mr. Allen in 1994 and moved to the Clinton White House two years later.
Rand Beers, who at the time was Mr. Clinton's senior intelligence aide on the National Security Council, said he hired Ms. McCarthy to be his deputy. "Anybody who works for Charlie Allen and then replaces him has got to be good," said Mr. Beers, who went on to serve as an adviser to Mr. Kerry's campaign in 2004. She took over from Mr. Beers as the senior director for intelligence programs in 1998.
Though she was not among the C.I.A. officials who briefed Mr. Clinton every morning on the latest intelligence, she "worked on some of the most sensitive programs," a former White House aide said, and was responsible for notifying Congress when covert action was being undertaken.
The aide and some others who spoke about Ms. McCarthy were granted anonymity because they did not want to be identified as discussing her official duties because she may be under criminal investigation.
When the Bush administration took office in 2001, Ms. McCarthy's career seemed to stall. A former Bush administration official who worked with her said that, although she was a career C.I.A. employee, as a holdover from the Clinton administration she was regarded with su ion and was gradually eased out of her job as senior director for intelligence programs. She left several months into Mr. Bush's first term.
But she did not return immediately to a new assignment at C.I.A. headquarters. She took an extended sabbatical at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research organization. In late 2003, she testified publicly before the 9/11 Commission about ways to reorganize the intelligence agencies to prevent another major terror attack.
She served on the Markle Foundation's "Task Force on National Security in the Information Age," a group of academics as well as current and former government officials working on recommendations for sharing classified information more widely within the government, according to a report issued by the group. The report identifies Ms. McCarthy as a "nongovernment" expert.
H. Andrew Schwartz, a spokesman for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Ms. McCarthy's relationship with the organization lasted from 2001 to 2003. Several associates of Ms. McCarthy say she returned to the C.I.A. in 2004, taking a job in the inspector general's office. That year, public records show, she contributed $2,000 to Mr. Kerry's presidential campaign, identifying herself as a "government analyst."
Married with one child, she also began attending law school at night, two former co-workers said, and talked about switching to a career in public interest law.
After an article last November in The Washington Post reported that the C.I.A. was sending terror suspects to clandestine detention centers in several countries, including some in Eastern Europe, Porter J. Goss, the agency's director, ordered polygraphs for intelligence officers who knew about certain "compartmented" programs, including the secret detention centers for terror suspects.
Polygraphs are given routinely to agency employees at least every five years, but special ones can be ordered when a security breach is suspected.
Government officials said that after Ms. McCarthy's polygraph examination showed the possibility of deception, the examiner confronted her and she disclosed having conversations with reporters.
But some former C.I.A. employees who know Ms. McCarthy remain unconvinced, arguing that the pressure from Mr. Goss and others in the Bush administration to plug leaks may have led the agency to focus on an employee on the verge of retirement, whose work at the White House during the Clinton administration had long raised su ions within the current administration.
"It looks to me like Mary is being used as a sacrificial lamb," said Larry Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who worked for Ms. McCarthy in the agency's Latin America section.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
============================
If it smells like extremely dirty, slimy politics, it's Repug.
Well, seeings someone in an article can't imagine her a leaker, I guess that settles itBut despite Ms. McCarthy's independent streak, some colleagues who worked with her at the White House and other offices during her intelligence career say they cannot imagine Ms. McCarthy as a leaker of classified information.
No one could imagine at the time that Aldridge Aimes was a spy, either...
Secret prisons brought to you by the land of liberty, the Bill of Rights, and justice for all. Can't the GOP find somebody who is a real Republican rather than a free-spending tyrant?
Can we win a war with a leaky CIA?
What I want to know is this: Was Mary McCarthy, who gave $7,500.00 to the Kerry Campaign (not being reported by MSM), personal friends with, an acquaintance of, or known to the Plame-Wilsons?
I think the leftist plot to undermine the Presidency and the war in Iraq is unraveling. Granted, the culture and expertise of entrenched CIA liberals is making it difficult -- but, it is indeed coming apart on them.
Here's your hero, ex.
Flopping Aces has a very large backgrounder on Mary McCarthy, the CIA operative who is being accused of passing classified information to the Washington Post. Nearly all of it is cir stantial, but startling nevertheless. Here are some snippets.
There's much more.
Since McCarthy had reached a fairly senior level it was only natural that she should interact with these individuals. Still, it looks like the start of a pretty interesting week.
In From the Cold has some opinions on Mary McCarthy's career. The key paragraph:
OK. It's an opinion. Then In From the Cold makes a prediction:
Which has already come true. The New York Times has a special on Mary McCarthy called Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by Rules. (Requires registration)
In the view of the Times, McCarthy was not somebody who 'rose meteorically' -- as In From the Cold believes -- but rather a hard working gal who rose by merit to the loftiest positions in intelligence.
But "By 1991, she was working as deputy to one of the agency's most senior analysts, Charles E. Allen, whose job as 'National Intelligence Officer for Warning' was to anticipate major national security threats. Ms. McCarthy took over the job from Mr. Allen in 1994 and moved to the Clinton White House two years later." Yet her competence is established in the next paragraph by a glowing comment from Rand Beers:
And Rand Beers turns out to be, according to this cached news article, John Kerry's foreign policy advisor while on campaign.
He was also, according to this Washington Post article, adamantly opposed to OIF; believed that Afghanistan "was a job begun, then abandoned", and a believer in the primacy of multilateral and diplomatic effort in the War on Terror. The Post article closes in this way:
Now, for a laugh from the National Review:
It was there when I checked. But then, maybe the stories are related in some way.
This is from the ABC: Will CIA Firing Cloud Public Window on Government? Some See Media's Watchdog Function at Risk.
Here comes the "higher loyalty" argument. Except in this case the higher loyalty may be to a political party.
Larry Johnson at TPM Cafe has an interesting article on Mary McCarthy, the gist of which is that Ms. McCarthy was not in a position to know anything operational about the intelligence, but may have stumbled across it while at the Inspector General's. Johnson then goes on to distinguish McCarthy's "service to her country" leak to the de able leaks engineered by the President of an undercover operator, presumably one Valerie Plame.
Thomas Jocelyn compares Mary McCarthy's position on the attack on the so-called Al-Shifa chemical weapons factory in the Sudan with that of Richard Clarke. Jocelyn brings up this bit of history from page 128 of the 9-11 Commission Notes:
Mary McCarthy did not at first support the decision to strike the chemical factory at al-Shifa, but she soon came on board.
Jocelyn concludes by saying:
So was there an Iraq-Bin Laden connection? Did Iraq have a chemical weapons program? It's like the Whack-a-Mole. Now you see it, now you don't.
Here's the problem as I see it. The leaky and politicized intelligence system has made it difficult to judge the truth value of any proposition. Did the Plame affair damage national security? Did Ms. McCarthy's actions damage national security? Is there someone lying dead in a gutter because somebody talked? The answer to those questions about the intelligence agencies is going to be answered by the intelligence agencies themselves. And so we come full circle to the modern version of the Cretan Paradox: which asserts that when a Cretan says 'all Cretans are liars' all logical roads lead to a contradiction. How then to know the truth about the lies? When intelligence agencies -- and I use that word broadly to encompass the press, which is the civilian intelligence system -- are politicized, then even our knowledge about our knowledge becomes uncertain. We are in a Wilderness of Mirrors indeed. ... in Washington politics, like the gravitational field of a massive Black Hole, distorts everything. In regions sufficiently close to the political event horizon truth and facts simply cease to exist.
Last edited by Yonivore; 04-23-2006 at 09:30 AM.
...with the revelations coming out about Dana Priest, the Washington Post reporter who published the "secret prisons" story, and Mary McCarthy, the Democratic Party activist and now-fired CIA bureaucrat who leaked the story to Priest.
Sweetness & Light points out that Dana Priest is married to William Goodfellow, the Executive Director of the the Center for International Policy (CIP). At the top of its web site is CIP's mission statement: "Promoting a foreign policy based on cooperation, demilitarization and human rights." It appears that CIP's idea of "demilitarization and human rights" is best exemplified by Cuba.
Sweetness & Light goes on to hightlight connections among CIP, which operates The Iraq Policy Information Program, Joe Wilson, and Dana Priest. This is not just guilt by association: Priest herself participated in an anti-Iraq war program put on by her husband's group, CIP, along with Joe Wilson and other even more unsavory characters. (Via The Corner).
Then we have Ms. McCarthy, the CIA leaker, who turns out to be a substantial contributor to the Democratic Party. Andy McCarthy notes that the Washington Post has published a sympatetic portrait of McCarthy--who leaked, remember, to the Post, resulting in a story for which the Post won a Pulitzer Prize--which touts McCarthy as unbiased without ever mentioning that she was a Kerry supporter who has given up to $7,700 a year to Democratic candidates!
So we have a Democratic Party activist violating federal law by leaking classified information to an antiwar activist on the payroll of the Washington Post, which publishes the criminal leak and is awarded a prize by the left-wing Pulitzer committee.
Finally, several bloggers are speculating about the possibility that the whole "secret prisons" story might have been a sting operation by the CIA designed to catch a leaker. I don't think this can be true, based mosly on public statements that have been made by intelligence officials, but wouldn't that be sweet? it is a curious fact that there doesn't seem to be any evidence for the existence of the secret prisons other than Dana Priest's story. Can it be that this is one secret the CIA has actually been able to keep, but for the leak?
Spoken like the true expert you aren't.
Does she have a legal defense fund? Do they take PayPal? They hypocrisy of the "leaks are only bad when they're bad for us" crowd knows no bounds....
we aren't teaching our intellegance people very good if they can fail a polygraph, unless you think we have so trained our people to detect peopel trying to fake them. then again maybe she didn't fail and they just said she did.
Can we win a war when we diverted all our forces to someone who wasn't the enemy we should have been fighting?Can we win a war with a leaky CIA?
I'm glad all those WMDs you knew Iraq had are safely under our control now.
Uh, she was an analyst and not clandestine.
If McCarthy was a Repug contributor and leaked to a Faux News black-suits info the helped dubya, would McCarthy be scapegoated?
It depends on whose ox is being gored.
Okay, I know your head is in the sand and that nothing I say will dissuade you but, obviously, many other people are following developments and are coming to the realization that 1) al Qaeda and Ba'athist Iraq had a relationship, 2) Ba'athist Iraq was still very much in the business of developing weapons of mass destruction and probably had more than have already been found (and yes, they've been found), and 3) Ba'athist Iraq was supporting terrorist organizations to the extent it is reasonable to believe they would be more than happy to assist one in attacking the U.S. or it's interests.
I guess you've also missed the latest tranlated do ents that show he admitted Arab Fedeyeen (code for al Qaeda) into the country, supported their training, and shortly before the invasion, ordered that they be paid just as were Iraq regulars.
And, this is after you ignored 12 years of UNSC violations, hostile acts against coalition forces enforcing the UN no-fly zones, the oil for food scandal, and the massacring of Shi'ites and Kurds.
Also, if we've diverted all forces, how do you explain recent operations in Afghanistan?
I'm not certain how you can make the claim that Iraq wasn't the enemy.
Yeah, how many tons of gas?yes, they've been found
How many nukes?
How much yella cake?
You'd think the administration might actually say something about that. Maybe a little mention by the President? I guess his head is in the sand too.
All you came up with was some halfbaked theory that the WMDs are now in Syria.
Wow that's safe!
We've been over and over that. You can't use that as a reason if you are going to ignore the bigger massacres in Darfur, etc. I'm so glad we stopped all that killing, right? That's what we do.the massacring of Shi'ites and Kurds.
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