A few comments:
"McCarthy held various jobs in more than two decades at the agency, and at one point was its most senior analyst for "warning," assigned to anticipate security threats. According to a government commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she expressed concern about the quality of intelligence linking Osama bin Laden to a chemical factory in Sudan that U.S. warplanes later attacked. But her last job at the CIA was in the office of Inspector General John L. Helgerson, who has a unique status at the agency.
After revelations in the 1980s about questionable CIA activities, the inspector general's appointment was subjected to Senate approval for the first time, to confer a measure of independence. Moreover, as the person singularly responsible for sensitive internal investigations of alleged wrongdoing at the agency, the inspector general is routinely granted extraordinary access to secrets ordinarily not shared with others inside the CIA.
The inspector general's combination of independence and access may have been combustible in McCarthy's case, if allegations about her involvement in leaks prove true. Since the revelation in 2004 of prisoner abuses by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the CIA inspector general's office was charged with examining allegations of torture and other ill treatment of detainees by CIA officers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The allegations arose, according to sources, from complaints made by others within the agency about wrongdoing.
The resulting reports have never been made public, although the agency has confirmed that it submitted several requests for prosecution of CIA-related employees to the Justice Department. Only one trial has resulted, in North Carolina, involving a CIA contractor.
Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism expert who worked briefly for McCarthy at the CIA in 1988, said yesterday that if McCarthy was really involved in leaks, she may have concluded that the investigation was "a whitewash, and why not tell the press? . . . I am struck by the irony that Mary McCarthy may have been fired for blowing the whistle and ensuring the truth about an abuse was told to the American people."
Johnson is the proof that for too long some in the IC have played politics with the safety of the American people. This same group of malcontents made 9/11 a breeze for Atta and his buds - a cake walk. I will remember that and so should we all.
It's not the prerogative of ops to form policy, comment on it, nor manipulate it. It is definitely not their position or place to blab top secret or classified intel to the media. Yet that is exactly what these pukes (yeah pukes) have done since the time of JFK. If Mary loose lips had a problem with policy she had a chain of command to follow. Cripes, all she had to do was swing the chair around and talk to her boss.
I don't think she had any problem per-se, except with the fact that George Bush is president. She, Johnson, the VIPS, Valerie Plame, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Senator Dick Durbin, and a handful of other Democrats have been working a plan to oust GWB since he won the 2000 election, and specifically since the war in Iraq began. That plan is coming apart at the seams now and their excuses and blame gaming are proving that they are hearing the clanking of medal and the gavels of magistrates.
A sound that the WAPO editors and associated writers might be hearing the coming weeks.
iraq Politics News bush war on terror spying patriot act nsa CIA mary O. mcCarthy
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