CIA Senior Officer Fired Over Leaks

Poster: Micah Wright Propaganda Remix Project

Why would the government do such a thing to a woman just on the verge of retirement? Well, we're really not supposed to know her identity (the CIA wishes to respect her privacy), but according to the New York Times, she's probably Mary O. McCarthy, "a veteran intelligence analyst who until 2001 was senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, where she served under President Bill Clinton and into the Bush administration."

We suspect that it's because she has demonstrated her possession of a conscience, despite a long record of service to the spooks. Ms. McCarthy had previously served at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an organization in Washington that examines global security issues, which suggests in my estimation, the probability that her motivating concern was the destabilizing existence of the Bush Disinformation Campaign's overseas "secret torture chambers" as well as the public's right to know how their fearless leader is conducting business in their names. She can't be a stupid woman, but was willing nonetheless to risk her life's work to get the information out there.

Demon Princess just has to believe that when someone who's signed on & served so long in that honorable institution has second thoughts about its nefarious doings (look the other way, good Americans), you just know the reason they're doing it is that something so really, awfully, dastardly & heinous is going on that even they can't bear it. Which tells ya something, doesn't it?

The Thoughtcrime (essentially) against the State of Oceania with which she has been charged? Leaking classified info about the United States' policy of secretly outsourcing its torture operations to reporters. The point of those operations, being, of course, to do dastardly things to secret prisoners in secret locations in secret countries where there is no namby-pamby regard for human rights. And did I mention that this is all supposed to be secret?

Well, this news gives Demon Princess cause to pause in light of the fact that when George & the dastardly Veep surprise everyone by selectively & autocratically declassifying classified info in the service of outing undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame (potentially endangering her life & certainly wrecking her career), just to serve their petty vindictive aims & discredit her husband's investigation into their manipulation of intelligence in order to make the case for a really stupid stunt of a war...well, THAT's different.

Says the New York Times, "The dismissal of Ms. McCarthy provided fresh evidence of the Bush administration's determined efforts to stanch leaks of classified information. The Justice Department has separately opened preliminary investigations into the disclosure of information to The Post, for its articles about secret prisons, as well as to The New York Times, for articles last fall that disclosed the existence of a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants supervised by the National Security Agency. Those articles were also recognized this week with a Pulitzer Prize."
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"[Someone at the CIA with "extensive overseas experience", speaking on condition of anonymity, said:] 'It's a terrible situation when the president approves the leak of a highly classified N.I.E., and people at the agency see management as so disastrous that they feel compelled to talk to the press'."

Demon Princess's thoughts are in accord. It's pretty damned tragic when the professionals who are paid to know have so little faith left in our government, and the administration's determination to silence them, and put reporters in jail for disseminating information to we, the people who put them in office, and have the power to take them out...well, this is a long run-on sentence of a diatribe, even by Demon Princess's standards, so she'll just leave it here with a simple thought:

Pretty damned Orwellian. These "leakers" & the reporters who report the leaks are sure to be recognized by future generations as Freedom Fighters one day...if we ever get our rapidly diminishing freedoms back, that is. I add, it tells ya something when reporters have to go to efforts so extreme to get the truth about what's going on from our "free country" that they win Pulitzer Prizes for the trouble.