1115.org

(1)
This whole Mary McCarthy firing is a little surreal, isn’t it? Dana Priest gets the Pulitzer Prize for the stories she wrote based on the information she received from McCarthy, and McCarthy gets fired for passing on the information.

At one level, there’s no denying that the CIA is justified by its service rules, which McCarthy clearly violated. At the same time, no CIA officer has been fired in living memory for leaking classified information. And leaks are a standard event in the CIA, as they are up and down Washington. Heck, even Presidents cheerfully engage in the leak game. With impunity. And when senior White House staff members leaked classified information about Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent, the President refused to even question those under suspicion, or to launch a White House investigation into the leak. So firing McCarthy now certainly comes across as an act of hypocritical bullying.

And while we are on the subject of Presidents taking a leak, no one in the administration has disputed that Bush authorized the leak of selected misinformation from the October 2002 NIE. What has been put forward in defense of Bush is the extremely convenient and totally unverifiable claim that Bush had first declassified that information by some mysterious, informal, unrecorded process. People who live in such flimsy glass houses really should not throw stones, I think.

And shifting the focus from the Bush administration for just a minute, isn’t it relevant for America – as opposed to the CIA – to ask: if publishing the stories about the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe is regarded as being a) in the public interest, and b) very laudable, then whose role is more applause-worthy, Mary McCarthy’s or Dana Priest’s? It may be right, in a narrow, legal sense for McCarthy to be fired. But now that she has been fired, and is no longer an anonymous source, at what point does the journalism industry and a grateful nation start to honor her, and in what way?

To not honor her would violate the most basic rule of free-market capitalism: greater risk brings greater rewards. Dana Priest got the Pulitzer Prize, and it was surely well-deserved. Mary McCarthy took the greater risk, so those who conferred the Pulitzer on Priest now owe some suitable reward to McCarthy. Let’s see the journalism industry honor her. Or would they rather become accomplices after the fact in the Bush administration’s mean-spirited act of hypocritical bullying?

Alternatively, of course, the administration could take the wind out of everyone’s sails by – having followed the rules that they were compelled to follow – now giving her the same damn medal they gave George Tenet. Isn’t getting the truth out to the American people a darn sight more honorable than the slam-dunk falsehood Tenet fed to Bush?

(2)
When the CIA secret prisons story broke, CIA Director Porter Goss offered the following perspective:

“I’m sorry to tell you that the damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission. I use the words ‘very severe’ intentionally. That is my belief. And I think that the evidence will show that,” Goss said.

Ah yes, the story severely compromised our ability to conspire with foreign governments to break their laws, our laws and every international norm on the treatment of enemy personnel. We will never again be able to kidnap suspected enemies with quite the same impunity, and move them hither and thither across the globe at will.

But don’t fret so, Porter. You do still retain some mission-critical capabilities. Including the ability to send operatives into places like Abu Ghraib, to preside over torture-in-fact-but-not-in-name. And even if a few unfortunates happen to die in the process, there are no consequences beyond investigations that determine that no charges need to be brought against anyone. That’s a nice set of U.S. and international laws we can still violate with total impunity, even with the attention of the world focused on our treatment of detainees. That must surely be a source of great pride and personal satisfaction to you?

Then there’s Pat Roberts:

Sen. Pat Roberts …of Kansas, Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, called for prosecution in the case and said vigorous leak investigations should continue across the international community.

“Clearly, those guilty of improperly disclosing classified information should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” he said in a statement.

He probably needs to step up the dosage on his memory pills. He does seem to have managed to totally forget that the administration for which he is chief assistant water carrier, second class, when faced with a different leak of classified information, refused to even conduct a White House investigation to identify the leakers, let alone fire them, let alone prosecute them.

(3)
It’s a plague, I tell you, a plague! Barely has the dust started to settle on McCarthy’s firing, when what do we have but yet another leak of classified information, this time about the military’s campaign plan for fighting the global war on terrorism. We would so this, among other things, by clandestinely positioning Special Operations troops in U.S. embassies around the world, to the potential future embarrassment of both the U.S. and the foreign countries in question. Any resemblance to the story that brought McCarthy down is purely coincidental.

**UPDATE** 7 am April 25th:

WaPo reports that McCarthy was not fired for leaking information about the CIA prisons:

A lawyer representing fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy said yesterday that his client did not leak any classified information and did not disclose to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest the existence of secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected terrorists.

…a senior intelligence official said the agency is not asserting that McCarthy was a key source of Priest’s award-winning articles last year disclosing the agency’s secret prisons.

McCarthy was fired because the CIA concluded that she had undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Priest, in violation of a security agreement.

This may sound like it gives a whole new meaning to what I called hypocritical bullying above. Hypocritical bullying, that is, by the administration which wrote the book on undisclosed contacts with journalists.

However, McCarthy was fired ten days before she was due to retire. She gets to retain her government pension, so her firing is more like a slap on the wrist.

“Firing someone who was days away from retirement is the least serious action they could have taken,” said a former intelligence official who is friendly with McCarthy but spoke on the condition of anonymity because of speculation on the administration’s motive. “That’s certainly enough to frighten those who remain in the agency.”

Boy, they really made an example of McCarthy, didn’t they? Nothing shows you’re serious about enforcing the security agreement part of the CIA’s service rules like a really light slap on the wrist.