Right Wing Nut House

One can usually expect the Washington Post to reflect a liberal point of view in their editorials. After all, Washington, D.C. is the most liberal city in the United States. There are so many moonbats flitting around the halls of Congress and the agencies that you can’t put out a cigarette without burning a hole in someone’s tin foil hat.

That said, there really is no excuse for this:

IF CIA OFFICIALS leaked information about the agency’s secret prisons to The Post’s Dana Priest, then the American public owes them a debt of gratitude. We don’t know who the sources were for Ms. Priest’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, though we assume there were many. (The news and editorial departments here operate separately, and they don’t share such information.) Last week a CIA officer on the verge of retirement, Mary O. McCarthy, was fired for speaking to Ms. Priest and other journalists, though she says she did not provide classified information about the secret prisons. Anyone who talked from inside the CIA violated the agency’s rules, if not the law. But they also upheld the public interest.

The “secret prisons are bad” theme has taken hold and there’s not much one can do at this point to debunk it. The fact is, two separate Commissions of the European Union have been unable to find any human rights violations as a result of the program which means that the only “evidence” we have at this point that the secret prisons carried out violations of human rights and torture is an anonymously sourced article by Dana Priest which was partly based on stories overseas from even more questionable sources (left wing journalist Stephen Grey did much of the original work on the flights of prisoners) but which never offer a shred of proof that any torture took place. (Priest mentions the death of one prisoner of exposure due to his being forced to lie on a cold, prison floor).

I am personally convinced that the prisons, in fact, existed. But as far as what went on there, no one has been able to prove a damn thing.

Are secret prisons in and of themselves, illegal? Well, if you believe captured terrorists have the same constitutional rights as you or I then yes indeed they are. If, however, you believe that we’re at war and that the idea of foreign terrorists being able to game a system they are trying to destroy is utter nonsense then they are not illegal and probably even a good idea.

But for Mary McCarthy (who according to her lawyer did not have access to information about the prisons) and others who had unauthorized contacts with the press on this story, they took it upon themselves to make a moral judgement on a program that foreign governments were desperate to keep secret - and for obvious reasons. If it got out that al Qaeda prisoners were being held in their country, they would present themselves as a terrorist target. But to McCarthy, the Washington Post, and those that agree with them, this vital foreign policy goal should take a back seat to their narrow concept of what is or is not moral.

A close call perhaps? But that’s why we elect Presidents. They are the ones authorized to make the close calls during wartime, not the Mary McCarthys of the world. I can understand if massive violations of human rights were occurring at those prisons then a troubled conscience could be used as a defense for leaking. But since no evidence exists that such horrific practices took place, what possible motivation could there be to make the prison story public?

If you guessed pure partisanship, you win a cookie:

We don’t question the need for intelligence agencies to gather or keep secrets, or to penalize employees who fail to do so. Leaks that compromise national security, such as the deliberate delivery of information to foreign governments, must be aggressively prosecuted. But the history of the past several decades shows that leaks of classified information to the U.S. media have generally benefited the country — whether it was the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam era or the more recent revelations of secret prisons and domestic spying during the war on terrorism. Those who leak to the press often do so for patriotic reasons, not because they wish to damage national security.

How “patriotic” was it to leak a classified analysis (one of dozens of similar analysis about an insurgency most of which contradicted the leak) about post war Iraq three days before the first Presidential debate in 2004?

If this be patriotism, I’d hate to see the Post’s definition of treason.

That’s only one example, of course. But what the hell is the difference between leaking classified information to a newspaper and handing the same information to a foreign government? Either way, our enemies see it. Such parsing is complete nonsense. To try and draw that distinction is idiotic, something the Post has gone overboard to prove themselves to be in this editorial. Anyone who thinks that revealing the existence of the NSA intercept program (erroneously referred to above as “domestic spying) didn’t do damage to our ability to track al Qaeda suspects both overseas and in this country is deluded.

I tried to draw a distinction between “good leaks” and “bad leaks” earlier and I’m afraid I didn’t do the subject justice. I agree that leaking the Pentagon Papers was probably a good thing. But I disagree that most leaks are done by patriots or that there exists some moral justification for leaking out of spite or partisanship as is clearly the case with what the CIA has been doing these last 3 or more years with regards to the Bush Administration’s War on Terror. And if Porter Goss has made getting the leakers a high priority it is only because of the enormous damage they are doing to the effort to defeat the fanatics who, if they get their way, will kill us all.

UPDATE

Jonah Goldberg on the WaPo editorial:

I think the Washington Post’s editorials are miles ahead of the Times’ in quality and seriousness — usually. But this self-justifying gas mass of an editorial is just ridiculous. It boils down to: Sure, leaks are bad. Just not the ones we put in our newspaper and get Pulitzers for. I just hope Andy McCarthy wasn’t drinking hot coffee when he read it this morning.

And make sure to read this piece in Opinion Journal.

Confederate Yankee gets it about right:

Today’s Washington Post editorial Bad Targeting was probably left unsigned with the primary goal of protecting the reputation of the wretch assigned to excrete it. You can hardly blame them. If a name were ever assigned to this dunghill of journalistic excuses, the author would forever lose what credibility he or she retains.

The Post sticks with septic certainty to its allegation that the United States has (or had) secret prisons in Europe, even after investigation have found no proof of illegal renditions, and no proof that such prisons ever existed. None.

Actually, the existence of the prisons may be in some dispute but I think that the totality of the evidence points to our ferrying prisoners to at least a safe house type arrangement in a couple of eastern European countries. Whether they could be considered “prisons” or whether torture has been carried out there is still unproven.

He said…she said…they said.

Many are asking this morning about how these two statements can be reconciled:

A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, said: “The officer was terminated for precisely the reasons we have given: unauthorized contacts with reporters and sharing classified information with reporters. There is no question whatsoever that the officer did both. The officer personally admitted doing both.”

“She did not leak any classified information, and she did not have access to the information apparently attributed to her by some government officials,” Washington lawyer Ty Cobb, who is representing veteran CIA analyst Mary McCarthy, said Monday.

Without putting too fine a point on things - and God, I hate people who use the English language as if it were the carcass of some dead cow, deliberately obscuring the meaning of what they’re trying to say by carving words out of sentences like a butcher carves a choice steak - and assuming both sides are choosing their words very, very carefully, one can immediately see where both statements may, in fact, be true.

Is there a difference between “leaking” classified information and “sharing” it? It would seem to be the case since according to some of her defenders, McCarthy had “permission” to brief reporters (probably on deep background) on some issues:

Associates, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of her sensitive legal situation, say the CIA authorized McCarthy on a number of occasions to talk with reporters. However, the details and timing remain unclear, including whether that was ever true after Goss took over in September 2004.

(HT: AJ)

Leaking would be a crime. But suppose you “shared” more classified information than you were authorized to? The CIA could hardly send you to jail for stepping over some line that’s incredibly vague to begin with. This, and her unauthorized contacts with reporters that, according to the CIA, represented “a pattern of behavior” is why she was able to box up her possessions and walk unescorted out the door at Langley.

Is that the end of it? Not hardly. Mr. Cobb raises the first of what is sure to be many defense strawmen; she didn’t have access to classified information on the prison story. Just because she didn’t have access to the information doesn’t mean that she wasn’t aware of the existence of the prisons and was thus able to confirm part of Priest’s story.

But even if that’s the case, where or where did that part of the original story come from? From someone involved in an investigation of criminal wrongdoing - leaking classified information - at the Department of Justice:

A Justice Department spokesman said “no comment” on the firing. The spokesman also would not say whether the agency was looking into any criminal action against the officer. One law enforcement official said there were dozens of leak investigations under way.

A second law enforcement official confirmed said the CIA officer had provided information that contributed to a Washington Post story last year saying there were secret U.S. prisons in Eastern Europe.

McCarthy was smart to get a lawyer. If there are “dozens of leak investigations under way,” and she had a “pattern of behavior” of making “unauthorized contact” with “several reporters” she very well may be the focus of a preliminary investigation that DOJ will neither confirm or deny at this point.

Look for your next important series of leaks on this case from the Department of Justice.

UPDATE

The Commissar has an interesting “Matrix” showing the McCarthy connections to various Democrats and far left groups.

Take the red pill, Mary….

If there really is a war going on between the White House and the CIA (and even the Washington Post said exactly that) then the very first salvo of the conflict was fired on March 17, 2003 by one of the most unusual groups ever formed in the history of US intelligence.

Calling themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), 25 ex-CIA officers threw down the gauntlet by calling on active duty intelligence professionals to damage the Bush Administration (and by extension, the government of the United States) by leaking the “truth” about the Iraq War:

Invoking the name of a Pentagon whistle-blower, a small group of retired, anti-war CIA officers are accusing the Bush administration of manipulating evidence against Iraq in order to push war while burying evidence that could show Iraq’s compliance with U.N demands for disarmament.

The 25-member group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, composed mostly of former CIA analysts along with a few operational agents, is urging employees inside the intelligence agency to break the law and leak any information they have that could show the Bush administration is engineering the release of evidence to match its penchant for war.

[...]

The group said officials who act as would-be whistle-blowers can use the same method as those now handing out information — giving it over to members of Congress who can both protect them and show the entire picture.

“They have to basically put conscience before career,” said Patrick Eddington, a VIPS member and former CIA agent who resigned in 1996 to protest what he describes as the agency’s refusal to investigate some of the possible causes of Gulf War veterans’ medical problems.

The question that has always nagged at me is that given the flood of leaks from the intelligence community both in the lead up and the aftermath of the Iraq war, what role (if any) did VIPS members play in facilitating those leaks?

Several VIPS members, including Larry Johnson, Mel Goodman, and Ray McGovern have emerged this past weekend, being quoted extensively in stories about the McCarthy leak case. The fact that they are never, ever identified as belonging to this far left group (their email address is in care of Counterpunch, the notorious left wing rag published by Alexander Cockburn) is almost surreal. Johnson can be safely dismissed as a publicity hound. But McGovern and Goodman have made it abundantly clear that they have it in for the Bush Administration.

Are there any strong connections between VIPS members and reporters? Certainly they appear together at forums like this CIP conference where Dana Priest shared the stage with Mel Goodman. So Goodman is out front defending McCarthy who is accused of leaking to Priest. And there’s proof that Goodman and Priest have at least a passing acquaintance.

Could such an association - casual and innocuous - have any meaning beyond coincidence?

VIPS is a group that has urged their colleagues to leak. Why is it so hard to believe that they would help in accomplishing that fact by acting as a go-between with the press? As a source for a journalist with the reputation of a Dana Priest, a VIPS member would enjoy a certain protection in that Priest would probably go to jail before exposing a source. And as an extra added bonus, the leaker could truthfully say that they never leaked that information to the press.

I want to be as cautious as possible in drawing any kind of conclusions. But here’s New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in promoting the group as pretty much of a non-partisan outfit:

But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney’s resignation.

Here’s what William Sjostrom writing in the Atlantic Monthly wrote about Kristoff’s lack of clarity:

Kristof cites mostly the alleged views of unnamed intelligence officials. So we just have his word for it. Among the only people cited by name are a newly formed outfit, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Kristof treats them as a disinterested group of non-partisan, non-ideological experts. These are not crazed anti-Bush fanatics, like Paul Krugman or ANSWER. Yeah, right.

And Sjostrom fills in some details about some of the ideology behind VIPS members:

VIPS does not seem to have a website, but its email is vips@counterpunch.org, and their open letter appears to have been published at CounterPunch (run by Alexander Cockburn, the Nation columnist), an outfit whose staple is stuff comparing Bush to Hitler. VIPS also published an open letter in opposition to the war at Common Dreams back in February. The spokesman for VIPS is Raymond McGovern, a retired CIA analyst. McGovern’s email is also at CounterPunch. He is giving a briefing today with Rep. Dennis Kucinich. McGovern has compared the Iraq war to Vietnam, even saying that it could lead to nuclear war. He has charged that if WMDs are found in Iraq, they may well have been planted. He believes Tenet’s job is safe because if Tenet were fired, he would reveal that the White House ignored intelligence warnings pre-9/11. McGovern has urged CIA analysts to illegally release classified documents to show what he believes to be true, specifically citing Daniel Ellsberg.

Another member of the VIPS steering committee is William Christison, who among other things believes that the Bush administration is attempting to colonize the Middle East, jointly with Israel. He believes that the war on terror is being used to turn the US into a military dictatorship. He is also a backer of the left-wing UrgentCall, along with people such as Noam Chomsky, Barbara Kingsolver, Julian Bond, and Jonathan Schell.

This “non-partisan” group also has several members involved with the National Security Whistelblowers, a group of professionals who have suffered persecution at various agencies, some of them for outing what they consider to be malfeasance by leaking to the press. Two names from that group - Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern - are of interest only because neither one of those worthy gentlemen blew the whistle on anybody or anything while they were on active duty. Only when President Bush came to power did they suddenly believe it necessary to support whistleblowers. A question that comes to my mind is what reason would those two gentlemen have in associating with leakers?

When Russ Tice, the self-proclaimed leaker of the NSA intercept program came in from the cold, none other than Ray McGovern was shepherding him around town from interview to interview. Tice may or may not be the ultimate source for the New York Times on the NSA intercept program but it is just a bit odd that he would attach himself to a man who urged people like him to leak secrets to the press.

I will repeat for those of you who may have missed this post: I am not a believer in conspiracy theories as a general rule and especially in this case where much more evidence is required to prove any collusion between VIPS and the media in leaking classified data. Having said that, some enterprising journalist may want to look into this web of innocuous but rather curious connections and see if there’s anything to the notion that members of VIPS may have acted as a conduit to the press in passing along classified information from active duty intelligence personnel.

The Mary McCarthy story just took a fascinating turn with the revelation that high powered criminal attorney Ty Cobb has taken on McCarthy as a client.

What is significant about Mr. Cobb is that he defended some of the highest profile criminals in the Clinton Administration including cabinet officers, a White House staffer, and a former Senator:

Represents the chief financial officer of major public company in an SEC investigation of significant restatement and alleged misconduct. (Jeff Skilling?)

Represented a former Commerce Department official and Democratic National Committee official, John Huang, in connection with Congressional and DOJ investigations (and related civil actions) involving campaign finance and the Clinton-Gore campaign of 1996.

If someone would fill in those blank names (too busy this AM) I would appreciate it.

The point is, why does little ole whistleblower Mary McCarthy rate such heavy Democratic party artillery? Especially if she’s not under indictment. Especially if the case hasn’t been referred to the Justice Department.

AJ Strata thinks McCarthy is making a mistake by relying on this particular attorney and I agree. It appears that Mr. Cobb was hired by others - not to defend McCarthy so much (defend her from what?) but to manage information coming out of leaks at the CIA on the case. He can deny, deny, and deny again that she leaked but as Mac points out, she signed a statement admitting wrongdoing.

My post last night on McCarthy pointed out that she may have been simply a facilitator for the press, confirming or denying specific information to keep reporters on track with their stories. But even if she leaked like a sieve and sang like a canary, the question you have to ask is: How has a woman who may not be in any danger at all from prosecution been able to procure the services of a $750 per hour attorney like Ty Cobb whose client list reads like the attendees at a Bill Clinton private Sybaris party?

Just wondering…

A story appearing in Newsweek contends that according to Mary McCarthy’s patron at the National Security Council during the Clinton years Rand Beers, McCarthy “categorically denies” leaking classified information on the secret prison story to Dana Priest of the Washington Post. In fact, McCarthy denies leaking classified information at any time to any reporter according to her lawyer:

McCarthy’s lawyer, Ty Cobb, told NEWSWEEK this afternoon that contrary to public statements by the CIA late last week, McCarthy never confessed to agency interrogators that she had divulged classified information and “didn’t even have access to the information” in The Washington Post story in question.

After being told by agency interrogators that she may have been deceptive on one question during a polygraph, McCarthy did acknowledge that she had failed to report contacts with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and at least one other reporter, said a source familiar with her account who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. McCarthy has known Priest for some time, the source said.

This is only slightly disingenuous. The way that a reporter like Priest gets a story like the one on secret prisons is by piecing together a hint here, a whisper there usually leaked as office gossip from low level staffers or by some intelligent guesswork using open sources. Then, when they think they have the outlines of a story, they sit down and have a drink with a Mary McCarthy and say something like “This is what the CIA is doing, right?” at which point our leaker will nod their head or shake it vigorously. She reveals no classified information, she simply confirms what the reporter thinks they already have. In short, by confirming or denying information, the leaker keeps the reporter on the right track without technically violating their oath of secrecy.

What McCarthy doesn’t say is whether or not she steered Priest to other sources who were willing to be more forthcoming in their treachery.

Could the Administration be firing McCarthy in order to make an example of her? This is always a possibility, especially since word has leaked out from the CIA (natch!) that the Administration is interested in the political affiliations of some of its top intel people:

The White House also has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials.

You’d think the White House could find that information out for themselves by using Google or going to Opensecrets.com. Laziness or stupidity? I report, you decide.

Does it matter if someone with access to agency secrets is a Democrat? Plame apologist Larry Johnson (who has been all over the pages of both the Times and the Post) doesn’t think so:

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who got into a dispute with McCarthy in the late l980s when she was his supervisor and remains critical of her management style, nonetheless says that he “never saw her allow her political [views] to cloud her analytical judgment.” Johnson maintains the Bush White House is “really damaging the intelligence community” by sending a message to career officials that “unless you are a partisan of the party in power, you cannot be trusted.” This message, Johnson says, is destroying the intelligence community’s “professional ethos.”

Excuse me, but ever since this doltish braggart left a comment on this site threatening me by saying that he knew the guys who had killed drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and that I better watch what I say about Plame, I haven’t had the friendliest of feelings toward him.

And with that quote, Johnson doesn’t disappoint as far as showing how breathtakingly stupid he is. No one is concerned that her “political views cloud[ed] her judgement.” That aspect of McCarthy’s partisanship has never been brought up by the White House, by any member of Congress, by any conservative columnist, or by any conservative blogger. It is a strawman pure and simple. It’s not her analytical skills that are being questioned, Larry. It’s her loyalty. Not to Republicans but to the agency she served. This, of course, makes your other statement that “unless you are a partisan of the party in power, you cannot be trusted,” equally ridiculous.

But Johnson’s ignorance aside, if the McCarthy firing has a chilling effect on agency personnel talking to reporters, I would put that down as a definite plus. So if the Administration is actually trying to dampen the enthusiasm of CIA employees for talking to the press, McCarthy would seem to have been the perfect sacrificial lamb:

McCarthy, 61, a career CIA analyst who was working in the inspector general’s office, was then told on Thursday that she was being fired. She was not escorted out of the CIA building, the source said. She also had been assured that the CIA would protect her privacy–just one day before her name became publicly known as the agency official who had been dismissed for leaking to the press, the source said. Ironically, McCarthy, who previously worked as chief intelligence official for the National Security Council during Bill Clinton’s second term, was planning on retiring from the CIA soon to pursue a new career as a lawyer working on adoption and family cases.

Headed for retirement anyway and someone with several contacts in the news media:

After being told by agency interrogators that she may have been deceptive on one question during a polygraph, McCarthy did acknowledge that she had failed to report contacts with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and at least one other reporter, said a source familiar with her account who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. McCarthy has known Priest for some time, the source said.

In other words, McCarthy may have been a kind of confirmation machine for the bevy of national security correspondents who prowl the halls of power in Washington. Need a story confirmed about some CIA secret program? Let’s call Mary and see if she’s free for dinner.

I’m being facetious, of course. But in sacking McCarthy, who even lefties have to admit was an easy target - Porter Goss and the Administration may finally be saying “You’ve been warned. The gloves are off.”

Welcome news, if true.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

Like a bad penny, we just can’t seem to rid ourselves of the irksome presence of John Kerry.

Ostensibly still a Senator, (although you’d be hard pressed to come up with anything noteworthy the former Presidential candidate has ever done in that august body and did I mention that he once served in Viet Nam?) Kerry pops up like a Jack-in-the-Box every time an issue arises that gives him the opportunity to prove himself to the group of rabid, unbalanced, deranged Bush bashers who now officially make up the base of the Democratic party.

In a speech on Saturday given at historic Faneuil Hall, the Massachusetts Senator helped prove to us all over again how much the Lord really does care about America when He denied this man’s overweening ambition and gargantuan hubris by repudiating his claim to the Presidency:

“I believed then, just as I believe now, that it is profoundly wrong to think that fighting for your country overseas and fighting for your country’s ideals at home are contradictory or even separate duties,” he said. “They are, in fact, two sides of the very same patriotic coin.”

“Once again, we are imprisoned in a failed policy,” he said. “And once again, we are being told that admitting mistakes, not the mistakes themselves, will provide our enemies with an intolerable propaganda victory.”

The idea that our soldiers working to bring democracy and order to Iraq have anything in common whatsoever with the dirty necked galoots and Birkenstock sandal wearers who are in favor of hanging George Bush from a sour apple tree while running away before the job is done in Iraq - a job already bought and paid for with the lives of thousands of Americans and Iraqis - is ludicrous. In fact, the dichotomy between soldier and protester in this case is so radical, it invites ridicule.

But the former celebrity traitor would need to develop some humility to realize the irony inherent in his remarks, an admittedly remote prospect. For as we all know, it is not “admitting mistakes” that the Massachusetts Senator is after but rather evidence for an impeachment trial that he and his fellow partisans will seek to bring about if they achieve majority status in November. And curiously, they will seek to use a Viet Nam template to impress their claims for impeachment on the people:

Among the similarities, according to Kerry: The justification for each war was “based on official deception”; the attempt to cast the struggles as part of a larger global conflict was a “misperception”; and, in Iraq as in Vietnam, “we have stayed and fought and died, even though it is time for us to go.”

It is eerie how those talking points all seem to have been buttressed in recent years by a series of selective leaks from our intelligence agencies. The “official deception” idea - the President ignoring “evidence” that there was no WMD in Iraq - has been bolstered by several cherry picked analyses going back to 2003 including the infamous imbroglio over Niger uranium being sought by Saddam portrayed as a canard. And the “misperception” in Iraq finds numerous examples of leaks designed to show that the Administration was warned of all the dire consequences (many of which like 500,000 war refugees and Iraqis starving by the millions never coming to pass) that we are experiencing today.

The firing of former National Security Council staffer and CIA employee Mary McCarthy for leaking a story to the Washington Post’s Dana Priest about secret “black prisons” in Europe where some of the most important al Qaeda suspects were being held may start unraveling a loose network of disgruntled, partisan tattletales who took it upon themselves to decide what American policies were “moral” and, even more despicably, sought to undermine a war they didn’t agree with and defeat a President they loathed.

Without benefit of having the broad view available to top policymakers and our elected leaders, they nevertheless allowed themselves to believe they had been granted special insight by virtue of their privileged positions in the intelligence community. They appointed themselves arbiters of American policy believing as they obviously do that their judgement was superior to that of the people they ostensibly are supposed to serve.

All this would be bad enough if it weren’t for the clear, partisanship demonstrated in the lead-up to the Presidential campaign by selectively leaking information that damaged the President at the worst possible times. The Wall Street Journal noticed this in an editorial 2 days before the first debate of the campaign in 2004 and immediately after an analysis regarding the possibility of a post-war insurgency was leaked to the New York Times:

Keep in mind that none of these CIA officials were ever elected to anything, and that they are employed to provide accurate information to officials who present their policy choices for voter judgment. Yet what the CIA insurgents are essentially doing here, with their leaks and insubordination, is engaging in a policy debate. Given the timing of the latest leaks so close to an election, they are now clearly trying to defeat President Bush and elect John Kerry. Yet somehow the White House stands accused of “politicizing” intelligence?

This has been the thrust of the CIA’s war against the White House that has been underway since it became clear that the Bush Administration was determined to effect regime change in Iraq. And now, one of those partisans has been caught red handed.

Mary McCarthy is not some selfless, conscience-ridden bureaucrat who was driven to leak a top secret CIA program out of patriotic devotion. She was, in effect, a mole for the Democratic party ensconced in one of the most sensitive jobs at the Agency. The fact that she and her husband gave nearly $10,000 to John Kerry’s campaign (including a revealing $5,000 donation to the Ohio Democratic party less than a month before the election) should lay to rest the silly notion that McCarthy was anything but Democratic party apparatchik.

This is not to say, of course, that she was part of any “grand conspiracy” of partisans at the agency and party leaders. But it does prove the existence of a group at the CIA who would rather violate their secrecy oaths than support the goals of the Administration in Iraq.

Working in the Inspector General’s office, McCarthy was privy to a wide variety of compartmentalized classified information. In short, she was in a perfect position to dole out leaks to reporters who were as eager as herself to damage the prospects of the President for re-election and, failing that, undermine support for the war among the American people. According to sources at the CIA, her leak to Dana Priest about the secret prisons (prisons that investigators for the EU have failed twice to prove existed) was the tip of the iceberg, that indications are McCarthy leaked several times, perhaps regarding several issues.

And this brings us back to John Kerry and his idea of “dissent.” If the group of leakers at the CIA were so hell bent on “dissenting” from the President’s policies in Iraq, they, like the group of retired generals who recently came out calling for Secretary Rumsfeld to resign, had other options open to them. Since it is difficult to believe that Mary McCarthy is unaware of the existence of others at the CIA whose views reflect her own, they could have and should have done the honorable thing and resign their positions. I daresay a bevy of resignations at the CIA coupled with a very public, very loud denunciation of the President’s policies would have had a far greater impact on the public than sneaking around in dark corners and furtively handing envelopes containing state secrets to liberal reporters.

The culture of leaking that McCarthy and others have developed at the CIA has little to do with honest dissent. The idea that dissent, even in peacetime, does not come without personal cost is wrong. The act of voicing opposition to majority policies carries with it a responsibility to accept the consequences of being ostracized or becoming unpopular. In wartime, more may be asked of the dissenter only because the stakes are much higher. And while the constitutional rights of the dissenter must be protected, that doesn’t mean that the dissenter can both violate an oath to protect that constitution by leaking secrets that damage national security or our foreign policy and still enjoy the fruits of their perfidy by remaining in a position where they can further harm America’s cause.

It is dishonorable to expect protection for dissenting in this way. And the fact that the press and liberals have leapt to McCarthy’s defense by saying that her leaking is nothing more than some kind of heroism is almost beyond belief. McCarthy took it upon herself to make public a policy for which some of our allies desperately needed to remain a secret lest they be targeted by our enemies for terrorist attacks. It may be hyperbole to posit the notion that anyone who dies in terrorist attacks in those eastern European countries where the secret prisons were supposed to be located and were named in the leaked information, that it would be McCarthy’s hands stained with the blood of those innocents. But it points up the serious consequences of deciding American policy based on one’s personal idea of morality.

Tough talk, that. But unless we begin to realize the real damage that these leaks are causing, it will be impossible to generate the kind of public outcry against the leakers that will bring their nefarious efforts to a close once and for all.

Responsible dissent is one thing. Certainly there are millions of Americans who, for a variety of reasons - some of which are based on a misinformation campaign carried out by Democrats and their allies in the press that is unprecedented in its ferocity - oppose the war in Iraq. And then there are those like Mary McCarthy and John Kerry who see dissent as a way to political gain.

One kind of dissent is worth defending. The other should be held in as much contempt as we should hold the people who practice it.

It is very tempting when looking at Mary McCarthy’s fascinating connections to heavy hitters in the Democratic party national security establishment to try and connect the dots to form what Varifrank has called “The Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory.” And while not entirely dismissing out of hand such a possibility, I believe such thinking neglects a much more mundane and common explanation.

Mary McCarthy is part of a very exclusive community of like minded Democrats numbering at most 200 experts in national security and foreign affairs who staffed the Clinton Administration’s Departments of Defense and State (and the much more exclusive National Security Council). These were the undersecretaries and assistant secretaries that flesh out any administration and get their jobs thanks to both their political connections and their experience in foreign and military policy.

This experience comes from a variety of places including our intelligence agencies, military staff jobs, foreign service postings, think tanks, and Capitol Hill staff positions. They provide an invaluable service to the party by constantly developing policy prescriptions and position papers that bubble and froth by being debated and shaped at conferences and forums until a consensus of sorts is reached.

In McCarthy’s case, she was running with an exclusive club indeed if Sandy Berger and Rand Beers were her patrons at the NSC. But that alone doesn’t prove that her actions in leaking were part of conspiracy nor does it make it probable that those worthies mentioned above even knew she would violate her oath of secrecy so brazenly. Her contacts with Berger and Beers were probably confined to seeing them at the numerous conferences and scholarly forums where the rest of the Democratic contribution to the military industrial complex meet.

The Republicans, of course, have a similar group albeit much larger but perhaps more disciplined. Where the Democrats have a half dozen major think tanks with another dozen or so small but influential policy groups, the Republicans have a remarkable network of scholars, ex-military, ex-intelligence and foreign service as well as former bureaucrats who work through long established think tanks like The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

I read a few years back where the turnover of scholars at Republican think tanks is much quicker than their Democratic counterparts which allows for more voices to take part in the policy debates that both of these institutional networks depend on to clarify and formulate the party’s positions. For McCarthy, her stint at The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) was the result of a common practice in the national security establishment of making sure that the agency’s “voice” was heard in the upper reaches of a political party’s councils. There are similar sabbaticals granted to Republican employees so that they can fulfill a similar purpose.

Whether she volunteered for the CSIS assignment or chosen is unknown. But the fact that the CSIS is generally thought of as a Democratic party organ made her return to the CIA in 2003 a problem given that a Republican Administration was running things. As has been pointed out, her being assigned to the Inspector General’s office could be considered a demotion from the position she had prior to leaving the CIA in 2001 (the NSC staff). An interesting question would be did she volunteer for the assignment knowing that she would have access to a wide variety of classified information?

Several former intelligence officials said they were particularly alarmed about McCarthy’s alleged involvement in any leaks because of where she worked at the CIA. L. Britt Snyder III, who was CIA inspector general from 1997 to 2000, said if McCarthy leaked information while working in the IG office, “we would have considered that a fairly egregious sin.” The IG, he said, “gets into everything, including personal things. That makes it a little different than other places.”

Consider this: Is it coincidence or conspiracy that Mary McCarthy, partisan Democrat, was placed in exactly the right position to scan a massive amount of intelligence about a wide variety of political hot button topics that, if selectively leaked, could cause the Bush Administration enormous embarrassment and damage?

Just thinking out loud…

Let us dispense once and for all with the notion that Mary McCarthy was some kind of non-partisan “whistleblower” whose conscience was so troubled by the Bush Administration’s rendition of terrorist thugs to prisons in Europe that she felt there was no other recourse than to blab the story to Dana Priest of the Washington Post.

Only dogs, little children, and liberal Democrats could possibly believe that bedtime story.

The tip-off here is Mrs. McCarthy’s $5,000 contribution to the Ohio State Democratic party just weeks before the 2004 election. Why is this proof positive of her rabid partisanship?

First of all, the amount is the maximum allowed to a state party under the law. Secondly, the idea for making this donation did not just occur to Mrs. McCarthy out of the clear blue sky; McCarthy could very well have been solicited by virtue of her being on an exclusive big donor’s list.

It’s possible but not likely that McCarthy’s $5,000 donation was in response to a mass appeal made by the Democratic party where they mail out tens of thousands of fundraising letters headed “Dear Democrat” or “Dear Friend.” Rather, it is much more likely that she is on a “Fat Cat” donor list that would be limited to a couple of thousand extremely loyal partisans that the party can count on in a financial crunch. This kind of network would be personally solicited with a letter and perhaps even a follow up telephone call. Since the date of her donation is registered with the FEC as October 5, 2005, the probability is that she gave that money sometime in September. Given the vagaries of 3rd class mail (which can sometimes take up to 2 weeks to be delivered), it would again be unlikely that McCarthy was responding to some kind of generic appeal for money.

It is significant that the donation went to Ohio. Everyone knew Ohio would be extremely close. But for the Kerry campaign to make a specific appeal to bolster the state party in their get out the vote activities, it’s clear that the campaign saw Ohio as the ballgame - winner take all - and a perfect spot to beg the Fat Cats to step up and give.

My understanding is that 138 donors gave the max to the the Ohio state Democratic party at approximately the same time as McCarthy. If true, then Mrs. McCarthy would have been on quite the exclusive donor list indeed.

Does this preclude her “my conscience bothered me” defense? No, but even the most rabid loony lefty would have to admit it makes that explanation much more problematic. At the very least, we are left with a reporter who knew McCarthy had a political ax to grind which means Ms. Priest either didn’t care or chose not to inform the reader and lessen the negative impact of the story.

And she won a Pulitzer for this?

I realize anonymous sources are the lifeblood of national security reporters like Priest. But to not disclose the clearly partisan leanings of a source does a huge disservice to her readers. An honest approach would have included something like this:

“A source in the intelligence community with ties to the Democratic party confirmed that the secret prisons…”

To believe that the political affiliation of a source has no bearing on how that source is viewed by readers is willful blindness. Or a demonstration of partisanship on the part of the reporter. I have found Priest’s articles to be generally well researched and incisively written. She is certainly one of the top national security reporters in the country.

My respect for her has gone down considerably in the lst 48 hours.

I am not a believer in conspiracies as a general rule.

First of all, they are extraordinarily difficult to prove. Secondly, I tend to follow Occam’s Razor which in essence states “”When you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better.” Ergo, is it easier to believe a conspiracy of massive proportions in the Kennedy Assassination or that a lone paranoid (not insane) with a gun shot the President of the United States in the back of the head to get attention? Or, is it easier to believe that the President of the United States went to war to enrich his friends in the oil industry and at Haliburton or for reasons having to do with the safety and security of the US?

Just because Haliburton or the oil companies benefited by the United States going to war does not mean that there was a conspiracy to enrich them. All things being equal (or in this case, incredibly unequal), the simplest explanation should rule.

The reason I bring this up is because “conspiracy fever” has begun to take hold on righty blogs and forums regarding the McCarthy story. Not taking anyone specifically to task over this kind of speculation, I feel it important that we not start to degenerate into what the lefties have done with anything and everything about the Bush Administration.

We’re all familiar with their cockamamie conspiracies regarding Plame, the War, WMD, and God knows what else that spouts and spews from their overactive and childish imaginations. And while there are solid investigations and intelligent speculation being done by bloggers like AJ Strata and Spook86 who is ex-military intelligence, the bulk of speculation that I’ve seen on most blogs has approached the surreal.

Most connections being made may, in fact, be entirely innocent or coincidental. Just because McCarthy was hired by Berger does not necessarily make her 1) a “crony” or 2) part of a network of leakers who worked for the Democrats. As AJ Strata points out, that connection certainly bears looking into but beyond that, all we have is the fact they worked together.

A similar argument could be made regarding the very interesting speculation surrounding a possible connection between McCarthy and Joe Wilson as well as another thread that may run to Valerie Plame. This one is very, very tantalizing but once again, a simpler explanation would point to no conspiracy but rather a simple acquaintanceship between Wilson and McCarthy. Much more evidence would have to be revealed including some proof that the two (or three) have had contact in the last few years.

The point? It is much easier to believe McCarthy was a disgruntled partisan stuck in a CIA backwater who leaked out of spite:

You’ll note that many media accounts describe the leaker as an “analyst,” suggesting that she was, at best, a mid-level staffer. That was hardly the case; few analysts make the jump from a regional desk at Langley to the White House. A “National Intelligence Officer” is the equivalent of a four-star general in the military, or a cardinal in the Catholic Church. There are only a handful of NIOs in the intelligence community; they are in charge of intelligence community efforts in a particular area. As a senior officer for Warning, Ms. McCarthy was tasked, essentially, with preventing future Pearl Harbors. Observers will note that McCarthy’s tenure in that role coincided with early strikes by Islamofacists against the United States, including the first World Trade Center bombing, and the Khobar Towers attack. It could be argued that Ms. McCarthy’s performance in the warning directorate was mediocre, at best–but it clearly didn’t affect her rise in a Democratic Administration.

[...]

Aside from her Democratic Party ties (she apparently wrote a check for $2000 to the Kerry campaign in 2004), I also detect the whiff of sour grapes in her motivation for leaking information to the Post. At the time she talked with reporter Dana Priest, Ms. McCarthy was apparently working in the CIA Inspector General’s Office. The agency, citing the Privacy Act, hasn’t divulged her pay grade or title at the time of her firing, but it seems certain that she was not at the NIO level. After the rarefied air of the Clinton White House, McCarthy had been banished to a relative backwater at Langley, and she was likely upset by the apparent demotion.

That last from Spook86 sounds reasonable and logical. Rather than jump to conclusions, best take a deep breath and examine the information as it trickles out. Then we can start putting pieces of the puzzle together (if indeed there is a puzzle at all) in a rational manner. Otherwise, we look like a bunch of cross-eyed, drooling lefties who see Haliburton behind every tree and Rove underneath every bed.

But then again…it is fun, isn’t it?

Yesterday, I played around with the notion that the McCarthy firing at CIA was the result of an internal agency sting operation using a false story about “secret CIA prisons” in Europe that, we found out yesterday, appear either to have been extremely well hidden or non-existent in the first place.

Circumstantial evidence that the prisons exist or existed at one time is compelling:

The European Parliament’s probe and a similar one by the continent’s leading human rights watchdog are looking into whether US intelligence agents interrogated Al Qaeda suspects at secret prisons in Eastern Europe and transported some on secret flights through Europe.

But so far investigators have not identified any human rights violations, despite more than 50 hours of testimony by human rights activists and individuals who said they were abducted by US intelligence agents, de Vries said.

”We’ve heard all kinds of allegations, impressions; we’ve heard also refutations. It’s up to your committee to weigh if they are true. It does not appear to be proven beyond reasonable doubt,” he said. ”There has not been, to my knowledge, evidence that these illegal renditions have taken place.”

Please note that Mr. de Vries, Chairman of the Commission, has chosen his words very, very carefully. “Illegal” renditions as well as an earlier reference to “no evidence of illegal CIA activities” could very well mean that the detention program existed but that no laws were broken:

Clandestine detention centers and secret flights via or from Europe to countries where suspects could face torture would breach the continent’s human rights conventions.

De Vries told the committee no EU-US agreement authorized secret renditions of terror suspects, that hundreds of CIA flights did not occur over Europe as reported by various media organizations, and that he has no news of European countries using intelligence obtained under torture.

So while there is still a possibility that the entire CIA secret prison story was part of a ruse to draw out a CIA leaker, it appears equally probable that the secret prisons may have existed but that EU investigators simply can’t find evidence beyond the eyewitness testimony of terrorist suspects, admittedly not the most reliable evidence.

I’m walking back a bit on connecting those dots - but I haven’t dismissed the idea entirely. The fact is, the Agency could have given McCarthy some incorrect information on a program that actually existed - such as which countries the prisons were in - in order to trap her.

From here on out, I’m going to take a wait and see attitude toward this aspect of the story.

UPDATE

Steve Sturm makes a good point as to why this is probably not a sting (see his comment below as well):

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.

My response would be that it is possible the sting would not be revealed due to additional damage that would be done to our relations with our allies in Europe plus the fallout I mentioned in my original post on the subject from the MSM who would be fit to be tied if it were revealed that they were the unwitting participants in a disinformation campaign to catch a leaker.

UPDATE II

From Dana Priest’s original story published 11/2/05:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents. HT: Doss at LGF)

You can see by the highlighted portions that Priest had more than one source for the information about the prisons. This would seem to indicate that the prisons actually exist but that the EU has been unable to verify any of the information from Priest’s article.

Either that, or Priest is lying through her teeth about “diplomats on three continents” and “foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.” Given that all the sources are anonymous, this is a possibility, one that her superiors at the Post are probably asking her about. However, Priest is a top notch reporter, one of the most insightful national security writers out there and I find it difficult to believe she would simply lie outright in fabricating a story that would have such enormous consequences.