Posted 8:21 PM by steve

It's nice that the CIA fired Mary McCarthy, the traitor (yes, traitor, in my not-so humble opinion) who leaked the story about CIA overseas detention facilities, instead of letting her retire as she had been planning to do. I just hope the firing costs her her pension, shopping privileges at the CIA store and whatever other shame can be dumped on her oh-so-self-righteous head...

... and I wonder if Dana Priest, the Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer for her complicity in revealing national security secrets during wartime, considers what happened to McCarthy to be just some unfortunate collateral damage, a necessary sacrifice in the pursuit of personal glory... and, no doubt, a pay raise.

And I wonder how many Mary McCarthy's there are/were working at the CIA. The news stories all pretty much report her status as a "career" or "veteran" CIA officer, which I usually take as someone who has been on the job pretty much constantly. Yet googling her name shows a Mary O. McCarthy who has worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies*. Is this the same Mary McCarthy who just got her butt fired from the CIA? If so, had she left the CIA and then come back?

And, while I note the CSIS claims to be bi-partisan, it is run by John Hamre, a Clinton appointee, who seems to take a dim view towards the US using its military (at least while a Republican is in the White House)... so, if the two Mary McCarthys are one and the same, and if one can infer that the CSIS would lean towards hiring similarily-minded individuals, one could speculate that McCarthy was no fan of what the Bush Administration was doing and figured, as she was nearing retirement age, that she would do what she could to derail a vital component of the Bush Administration campaign against terror...

* it appears that the CSIS took down the references to Mary McCarthy, which thanks to some smart Freepers, can be found here. I guess this establishes the two Marys are one and the same... which makes me wonder/question just how stupid the CIA is for hiring and putting such a partisan in such a sensitive position and why Bush didn't move more quickly to establish control over the CIA?

Thanks, Lorie...

UPDATE: Totally without surprise, the Washington Post continues to defend both their story reporting on the so-called secret prisons and the 'source' that provided the classified information on those prisons to Dana Priest, with Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. saying "people who provide citizens the information they need to hold their government accountable should not "come to harm for that."... sidestepping, of course, any discussion of McCarthy having broken the law.

From the good Captain, I see reports that the whole thing might have been a sting operation designed to catch leakers, based in no small part by the disclosure yesterday that despite having spent a fair amount of effort looking for these prisons, European investigators can not find ANY evidence that these prisons ever existed. If so, this has to go down as a phyrric victory, as the Bush Administration took such a PR hit from the disclosure about these prisons that any benefit of catching a leaker in the act is small potatoes indeed.

Of course, if, as Ace is wondering, McCarthy is somehow tied up with the likes of Joe Wilson and a few other Clintonista-saboteurs, then the Bush Administration could leverage this into quite a PR coup of their own. It sure would be nice if more firings and some indictments and a hearty PR offensive by Bush's new Press Secretary finally start to roll back some of the successes Bush's enemies on the left have had in portraying him as being more dangerous than the terrorists who are actually trying to kill us.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: After going out and getting breakfast (drivethrough at McD's), I thought that were I running such a sting, I would have immediately released information that the allegations were bogus as soon as the story appeared in the Post. Once Dana Priest ran her article, the leak had taken place, the investigation could have gotten underway, and I don't see the benefit of letting McCarthy and Priest continue to think that the story was legitimate... especially in light of the PR hit the Bush Administration and its allies in Eastern Europe were taking over these allegations. So, just as the dog not barking was a tip off to one fine detective, so too is the lack of a public rebuttal of these allegations a tip off to me that this was no sting operatiion, but the illegal revelation of a real CIA program.

Looks like Rick Moran is backing off the thought as well... maybe there is something to it, maybe not.

And the AP headline still reads "CIA Fires Employee for Alleged Press Leak" (bold mine)... even though the first paragraph acknowledges that McCarthy admitted leaking the information. Some "alleged", huh? And for some reason (I know, my tongue is in my cheek), the AP thinks designated attack dog Democrat Representative Menendez's call for the White House to "hold accountable those in his administration who leaked information about the Iraq intelligence in the run-up to the war and outed undercover CIA operative
Valerie Plame" is worthy of 4th paragraph position, ahead of such McCarthy related details such as where at the CIA McCarthy worked, her involvement with Dana Priest, or, more importantly, the damage McCarthy's leaking did to national security.

Another follow up, this on the NYT story that claimed Mary the Traitor was somebody who 'played by the rules'... at least while she was working in the Clinton Administration.

And yet one more, this one wondering just how many sources Dana Priest had for her article.