So let me get this straight. Leaking is only bad if you're a Democratic party supporter? Or is leaking best left to the professionals (the White House)?
The latest news is that a CIA agent, identified by NBC as Mary McCarthy, was caught leaking information to the Washington Post and other news organizations, and she was promptly fired.
People who knew Ms. McCarthy are shocked at the allegations.
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.
It's possible that she could have let something slip though because it was known that she was very upset with Bush and his White House staff.
Of course, that could have been why she was given the pink slip, too, because the White House knew she was--ZOMG NO!!--a Kerry supporter.
Yeah, Drudge is doing his normal "THOSE HORRIBLE DEMOCRATS" attack again because she once donated some money ($2,000) to John Kerry's campaign. It's just $2,000, and even still, I thought Bush was all about bipartisanship, so what the hell is this? Why is it so terrible that she donated money to Kerry, and she's not happy with the current government?
Of course, you realize that's a reason to fire her. Donating to Democrats = disloyalty.
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 antiterrorism 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.
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 suspicion and was gradually eased out of her job as senior director for intelligence programs. She left several months into Mr. Bush's first term.
See, Ms. McCarthy, that was where you made a mistake. Leaking information about Clinton is OK, but dissenting against Bush and leaking sensitive information about him? Only Bush (and whomever his puppeteer of the day is) is allowed to leak information to the press because that's called "declassifying information to show the citizens that he has done no wrong," and thanks to some law passed not too long ago, it's legal for him to do so. But not you. Because you support Democrats.
Shame, Ms. McCarthy! To work in Washington, you must only donate to the RNC!
Tags: [Mary McCarthy], [CIA agent fired over leak], [CIA agents are not allowed to support the DNC?], [dissent against Bush is a no-no, apparently], [Bush motto: do as I say, don't do as I do], [it's only OK if the White House is doing the leaking]
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