CIA officer fired over leak about secret prisons

Doesn't this make you wonder just how many TORTURE PRISONS we really have and fund.

Doesn't this make you wonder just how many illegally detained PRISONERS that are totally innocent that we have in our TORTURE PRISONS??

At what point do we get smart and stop being sold the SCARE campaign being peddled by this venal Administration?

When, if ever, are we going to stand up and find our moral code and our courage, or are we going to be conternt to be a dumbed down, frightened society that is being led to disaster because of our fears????

Anon


CIA officer fired over leak about secret prisons
David Johnston, Scott Shane, New York Times

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Washington -- The CIA has dismissed a senior career officer for disclosing classified information to reporters, including material for the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in the Washington Post about the agency's secret overseas prisons for terror suspects, intelligence officials said Friday.

The CIA would not identity the officer, but several government officials said it was 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 Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush.

At the time of her dismissal, McCarthy was working in the agency's inspector general's office after a four-year stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an organization in Washington that examines global security issues.

The dismissal of McCarthy provides fresh evidence of the Bush administration's determined efforts to staunch 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 warrantless domestic eavesdropping program supervised by the National Security Agency. Those articles were recognized this week with a Pulitzer Prize, awarded to two New York Times reporters.

Several former veteran CIA officials said the dismissal of an agency employee is rare and perhaps unprecedented. One official recalled the firing of a small number of agency contractors, including retirees, for leaking several years ago. McCarthy's dismissal was announced at the CIA on Thursday in an e-mail message sent by Porter Goss, the agency's director, who has made the effort to stop unauthorized disclosure of secrets a top priority.

McCarthy's departure followed an internal investigation by the CIA's Security Center, part of an intensified effort that began in January to scrutinize employees who had access to particularly sensitive information. She was given a polygraph examination, confronted about answers given to the polygraph examiner and confessed, the government officials said. On Thursday she was stripped of her security clearance and escorted out of CIA headquarters.

"A CIA officer has been fired for unauthorized contact with the media and for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information," said a CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano. "This is a violation of the secrecy agreement that is the condition of employment with CIA. The officer has acknowledged the contact and the disclosures."

Gimigliano said the Privacy Act prohibited him from identifying the employee.

McCarthy did not reply Friday evening to messages left by e-mail and telephone.

Intelligence officials speaking on condition of anonymity said the dismissal resulted from "a pattern of conduct" and not from a single leak but that the case involved in part information about secret CIA detention centers that was given to the Post.

McCarthy's departure was another unsettling jolt for the CIA, battered in recent years over faulty prewar reporting in Iraq, waves of senior-echelon departures after the appointment of Goss as director and the diminished standing of the agency under reorganization of the country's intelligence agency.

The CIA's inquiry focused in part on identifying McCarthy's role in supplying information for a Nov. 2, 2005, article by Dana Priest, a national security reporter for the Post. The article reported that the intelligence agency was sending terror suspects to clandestine detention centers in several countries, including some in Eastern Europe.

The article provoked an outcry among European allies and set off protests among Democrats in Congress. The article prompted the CIA to send a criminal referral to the Justice Department. Lawyers at the Justice Department were notified of McCarthy's dismissal, but no new referral was issued, according to law enforcement officials. They said they will review the case but that her termination could mean she will be spared criminal prosecution.

In January, current and former government officials said, Goss ordered polygraphs for intelligence officers who knew about certain "compartmented" programs, including the secret detention centers for suspected terrorists. Polygraphs are given routinely to agency employees at least every five years, but special polygraphs can be ordered when a security breach is suspected.

The results of such exams are regarded as important indicators of deception among some intelligence officials. But they are not admissible as evidence in court -- and the CIA's reliance on the polygraph in McCarthy's case could make it more difficult for the government to prosecute her.

"This was a very aggressive internal investigation," said one former CIA officer with more than 20 years of experience. "Goss was determined to find the source of the secret jails story."

McCarthy has been a well-known figure in the intelligence circles. She began her career at the agency as an analyst and then a manager in the intelligence directorate, working at the African and Latin America desks, according to a biography by the strategic studies center. With an advanced degree from the University of Minnesota, she has taught, has written a book on the Gold Coast and was director of the Social Science data archive at Yale University.

Public records show that McCarthy contributed $2,000 in 2004 to the presidential campaign of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate.

Leonard Downie Jr., the Post's executive editor, said on the newspaper's Web site that he could not comment on the firing, because he did not know the details surrounding it. "As a general principle, obviously I am opposed to criminalizing the dissemination of government information to the press."

Republican lawmakers praised the CIA effort. Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "I am pleased that the Central Intelligence Agency has identified the source of certain unauthorized disclosures, and I hope that the agency, and the community as a whole, will continue to vigorously investigate other outstanding leak cases."

Several former intelligence officials -- who were granted anonymity after requesting it for what they said were obvious reasons under the circumstances -- were divided over the likely effect of the dismissal on morale. One veteran said the firing would not be well-received coming so soon after the disclosure of grand jury testimony by Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff that Bush in 2003 approved the leak of portions of a secret national intelligence estimate on Iraqi weapons.

"It's a terrible situation when the president approves the leak of a highly classified NIE, and people at the agency see management as so disastrous that they feel compelled to talk to the press," said one former CIA officer with extensive overseas experience.

But another official, whose experience was at headquarters, said most employees would approve the action by Goss. "I think for the vast majority of people this will be good for morale," the official said. "People didn't like some of their colleagues deciding for themselves what secrets should be in the Washington Post or the New York Times."