Secrets of the CIA (Mary McCarthy Denies leaking!)

[WhiteTara]

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12466719/site/newsweek/

April 24, 2006 - A former CIA officer who was sacked last week after allegedly confessing to leaking secrets has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe, a friend of the operative told NEWSWEEK.

snip
The officials, who asked for anonymity because they were discussing sensitive information, said that McCarthy had been fired after allegedly confessing during the course of a leak investigation based heavily on polygraph examinations that she had engaged in unauthorized contacts with more than one journalist regarding more than one news story. The only journalist so far identified by government sources as one of the unauthorized persons with whom McCarthy admitted contact is Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who last week won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing details of a secret airline and prison network that the CIA operates to detain and interrogate high-level Al Qaeda suspects.

Priest’s most contentious story, published by the Post last November, alleged that the CIA had been “hiding and interrogating some of its most important Al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.” Even though the Post said it decided, in response to administration appeals, not to identify the Eastern European countries involved in secret CIA detention operations, intelligence officials said at the time that the story caused potentially serious damage to agency activities. The officials said the CIA would filing a “crime report” with the Justice Department regarding possible leaks of classified information. (Eric C. Grant, public affairs director of the Washington Post, says none of the paper’s reporters has been subpoenaed or talked to investigators in connection with this matter.)

snip

While acknowledging that information about the CIA operations was indeed available from unclassified sources, intelligence officials maintain that revelations like those made in the Post story about Eastern Europe could not have been put together without input from people who had access to classified information. These informants could confirm the stories and add detail to them. But the fact that McCarthy evidently is denying leaking the CIA prison story to the Post—and that other key information for stories revealing CIA detention and rendition operations originated with unclassified sources—does raise questions about how far the Bush administration will be able to press its crackdown on suspected leakers.

Two official sources familiar with the inquiry which led to McCarthy’s firing cautioned that news reports indicating that McCarthy was aggressively being pursued by the Justice Department for possible criminal violations were ahead of the facts.

snip

The McCarthy case troubles some former U.S. intelligence officials, who note that the CIA, while aggressively pursuing leaks to the news media, has failed to take disciplinary action against any of its officials for the widely acknowledged intelligence failures of recent years. “Nobody got fired for September 11 and nobody gets fired for but they fire someone for this?” said one former U.S. senior intelligence official. In the case of the September 11 attacks, a report by the same Inspector General’s office where McCarthy worked recommended the convening of CIA disciplinary boards for a number of current and former officials. But CIA director Porter Goss rejected the recommendation and has refused to allow even an unclassified version of the inspector general’s report to be publicly released. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, sent the CIA two letters seeking a public disclosure of the inspector general’s findings—one only a few weeks ago—but has yet to get a response.

Another twist. I can totally believe they would smear her, but why?

[emulatorloo]

1. Very Curious - they need a scapegoat, I guess - Kick and Nominated n/t

[ShortnFiery]

5. Yes Very, in an evil and coercive sort of way ...

:grr: Who can pull the USA out of this mess? What can be done when we have criminals throughout our national government.

Hell, we've got that immoral Bill Bennett on CNN now ... Everything has seemingly been "sold-out" to the BushBotBorg and their Neo-Con handlers. :grr: :nuke:

[TechBear_Seattle]

2. If they could have denied it, they would have

Being unable to deny it, their next option is to discredit the source. The viciousness and apparent desperation gives proof to McCarthy's claims.

[librechik]

3. everyone should read former CIA officer Larry Johnson's interesting take

on McCarthy's firing here--things are not as they seem.


http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/the_firing_of_m.html

also Ray McGovern on same

http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/mary_mccarthys_.html

[WhiteTara]

17. thanks for posting those articles

I think that says a lot when Larry Johnson says he hated working for her, but considers her very honorable. I'll bet KKKarl and * enjoyed putting that uppity woman in her place.

[htuttle]

4. One aspect of this that should be emphasized

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION DENIED THESE SECRET DETENTION CENTERS EXIST!!!

Yet, they turn around and persecute someone they think talked about them to the press.

What doesn't fit here?

[AuntiBush]

9. And, No One Calls Bush on LYING once again.

Lie after lie after lie.

There is something real fishy about this story. I ain't buying it.

[PublicWrath]

11. My fear:

Maybe the bush administration is trying to hide something even more inflammatory than the information that there are prison camps. Perhaps it's worth it to them to fire this agent in such a public manner, sending a message to any other potential leakers at the CIA here and abroad, even at the price of lending credibility to the story about the camps.
If this is the case, what they are trying to hide must be pretty bad.

[TankLV]

22. Exactly. She should be given a hero's ticker tape parade complete with

the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Medal of Freedom!

And the whore media should be clamoring for bunkerboy and the REPUKE Congress's heads for TRYING TO COVER UP WAR CRIMES & LYING ABOUT THEM!

This whole sordid mess reeks!

Our so-called "democratic leadership" should be hollering LOUDLY for bunkerboy and the REPUKES heads for this WAR CRIME & COVERUP!

They should be making plenty of statements and NOISE to ENC0URAGE OTHERS TO COME FORWARD WITH EXAMPLES OF BUSHCO & REPUKE CRIMES!

[Igel]

23. What doesn't fit here?

Quite possibly only our inferences.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

26. ???? I don't understand your response.

[Igel]

37. McCarthy says she didn't leak about torture bases.

CIA doesn't say she did. They just say that she had contact with Dana (Miller?), who wrote that story among others. McCarthy doesn't deny she had unauthorized contact with the reporter.

That McCarthy was the source for the torture-base story is the general inference that everybody's made, but it isn't required by the info available when I made my post. She just as well may have divulged confidential information for stories other than this one.

[babylonsister]

6. Oooh, the plot thickens! Nom! nt

[acmejack]

7. Happy to kick this to the Greatest Page!

What game are these people playing? She failed an inaccurate polygraph, inadmissible in a Court of Law for a reason! What gives at the Agency?

Porter should watch his back me thinks, he may be playing out of his depth...

[thefloyd]

8. Probably scapegoated because

she was somehow related to Clinton Admin.

[jazzjunkysue]

10. kick and nom. Hope this grows legs. Thanks.

[ShortnFiery]

13. Yes, they LIED to the media to spread this spin al la Rove-Co.

The talk shows (including one on NPR) have been going with the LIE that she had confessed. This should seriously piss off the few honest journalists.

Typical immoral and corrupt Republican Smear Machine tactic - get the lie out loud and first, perhaps everyone will continue to believe it even when confronted with the facts. :thumbsdown:

[Rose Siding]

12. Ah, but she can't deny her political affiliations

and that's all the cabal cares about.

[ShortnFiery]

15. Yes, despite 26 years of honorable service to date ...

You want to talk political operative, I was so disappointed when the Senate confirmed Porter Goss. He's in the process of trashing this organization. They only want spring-butt, yes-men TOADIES now.

This is so sick - consider that this 61 y.o. woman has dedicated herself to the CIA and, until now, her behavior has been beyond reproach. YET, Rove-Co. thanks to Goss gets to control "the message" out of the box, to include that she's "in with John Kerry" just because she had contributed to his Presidential Campaign.

I'm tired of the press's attempts to blur THESE HORRID CRIMES. How many more "good people" in the form of professional CIA agents, General Officers, and Diplomats have to resign or get their LIVES made a living hell just because they failed to "lock step with Dear Leader?"

We are going down so low if OUR LEADERS in the Congress don't find their backbones. Democrat or Republican - Is this how you wish your country to be run? :(

[Old and In the Way]

14. Was her #1 crime the level of donations to Kerry?

I'll bet Karl Rove has used that NSA asset to determine the names of all government employees who have donated to Democrats.

[HuffleClaw]

16. so it IS a crock o' shit. trumped up charges against a 'suspected' leaker

"While acknowledging that information about the CIA operations was indeed available from unclassified sources..."

what a disgrace.

[creeksneakers2]

18. NBC News just reported

McCarthy not only categorically denies the story, she denies that she ever even had access to the information.

[ShortnFiery]

19. Whoa! Then EXACTLY where did the original story (the lie) come from?

[C_U_L8R]

20. However... it still seems that the CIA

is implicitly admitting to running illegal
torture prisons throughout Eastern Europe !!!!

Where is the do-nothing republican congress ???????
Oh yeah.. right.. doing .... nothing. :-(

Isn't anyone (outside of DU) upset by the
fact that OUR government is torturing and
"ghosting" people through some kind of
Kafka-esque gulag system ???? Yikes !!!!!

[EVDebs]

21. CBS's 60 Minutes ran Wrongful Imprisonment story March 2005...

while Dana Priest (an alumnae of UC Santa Cruz- Go Banana Slugs !) didn't run her story until November 2005. What gives ?

BTW, it's really the CIA's hidden money supporting these 'secret prison' projects hidden within the DOD's appropriations that is an important thread in the end run around the Constitution that is going on here that needs investigating. The CIA's Inspector General (Helgerson) will need the DOD's acting OIG (Thomas Gimble) to look into how these black op wrongful imprisonments took place...

""Weiner, Tim. Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget. New York: Warner Books, 1991. 273 pages.
This book is based on Tim Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Philadelphia Inquirer. By following the money, Weiner finds appropriations of public dollars for highly-compartmentalized, secret research projects with no accountability to either Congress or the Secretary of Defense. The secret budget has never been published, a violation of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution.

Reagan doubled the Pentagon budget between 1981 and 1985, and by 1991 Bush had increased the "black" portion to 25 percent. Born from the Manhattan Project, described by Weiner as a "mutant chromosome in the American body politic," this secret operation is now a full-blown parallel government.

Weiner shows the secret government at work in diverting funds illegally, creating military units outside the chain of command, conducting covert wars, and transforming Star Wars into a system for the control of space. This book is a solidly-documented description of how the U.S. responded to atomic weapons and the Cold War by giving birth to, nurturing, and ultimately succumbing to a national security state. ""

http://www.namebase.org/sources/PR.html

""As one American official told The Washington Post's Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, who broke the "rendition" story in December 2002, "We don't kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them."

The policy seems to have begun in the 1990s. According to George Tenet, the CIA took part in over 70 renditions before September 11. No one knows how many have occurred since, as Congress is not notified about individual cases. But the practice has probably increased. According to the Post, the Clinton administration stopped sending suspected terrorists to Egypt after repeatedly complaining about Cairo's brutal interrogation methods. "You can be sure," said one Bush administration official of such human rights complaints, "that we are not spending a lot of time on that now."""

Hello, did you catch the source..."According to George Tenet..."

from
TRB FROM WASHINGTON
Outsourcing
by Peter Beinart
Post date 05.25.04 | Issue date 05.31.04
https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20040531&s=trb053104

Dec 26, 2002 story
U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations; 'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities
By Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, Washington Post 26 December 2002, p. A01

mentions US officials (plural) as sources for the story...

and

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html

the secret prisons story was already leaking from a 60 Minutes story about a German/Kuwaiti, Khaled el-Masri. Masri was already talking up a storm, and a British ambassador, Craig Murray, knew details of what was going on:

""Craig Murray is the former British ambassador there. He told 60 Minutes that Uzbek citizens, captured in Afghanistan, were flown back to Taskent on the American plane.

"I know of two instances for certain of prisoners who were brought back in a small jet, and I believe it was happening on a reasonably regular basis," says Murray.""

CIA Flying Suspects To Torture?
March 6, 2005
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/04/60minutes/main678155.shtml

The questions about how Ms. Priest found out about this project, after a wrongful imprisonment, begs the question 'how could a wrongful imprisonment be kept secret in the first place ?'.

""British freelance journalist Stephen Grey, who published the first detailed revelations of the CIA's secret airline system for transporting terrorist detainees in the London Sunday Times in late 2004, affirmed to NEWSWEEK over the weekend that "almost all" of the information that he assembled regarding the CIA operations came from "unclassified sources.""

Fired CIA Officer Denies Leak
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042406R.shtml

Investigations, not internal CIA inquisitions. How did things start going so wrong ? We're better than this. The policy was the problem. Did Congress approve this stuff and the funding ?

[Zorra]

24. Goss and Negroponte are systematically "cleansing" the Intell community

any patriot loyal to the American people.

Their loyalty lies only to the corrupt republican party, and they will purge anyone that is not a dedicated fascist.

Eventually they will use the Intell community to purge our country of "liberals" just like the centralized police organizations of Hitler and Stalin did in Germany and the former USSR respectively.

[Judi Lynn]

25. Another co-worker speaks up on Mary McCarthy's behalf:

Friend: CIA Officer Not Source on Prisons
Friend: Fired CIA Officer Mary McCarthy Was Not Source for Story About Secret Prisons
By KATHERINE SHRADER

WASHINGTON Apr 24, 2006 (AP)— The CIA officer fired last week for unauthorized contacts with the media denies allegations that she provided information leading to The Washington Post's award-winning story on secret CIA detention centers, according to a friend speaking on her behalf.

"She was not the source for that story," said Rand Beers, who has talked with his former colleague, Mary McCarthy, a veteran intelligence analyst.

Beers headed intelligence programs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. He said McCarthy authorized him to make the brief statement, but he declined to discuss the issue further.
(snip)

McCarthy was days away from retirement. Her statement, through Beers, was first reported by Newsweek magazine.
(snip/)

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1885831&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

[Judi Lynn]

27. McCarthy's lawyer says she didn't have access to that information:

Dismissed CIA Officer Denies Leak Role
Official Says Agency Is Not Asserting She Told of Secret Prisons

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 25, 2006; A01

A lawyer representing fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy said yesterday that his client did not leak any classified information and did not disclose to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest the existence of secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected terrorists.

The statement by Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the Washington office of Hogan & Hartson who said he was speaking for McCarthy, came on the same day that a senior intelligence official said the agency is not asserting that McCarthy was a key source of Priest's award-winning articles last year disclosing the agency's secret prisons.

McCarthy was fired because the CIA concluded that she had undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Priest, in violation of a security agreement. That does not mean she revealed the existence of the prisons to Priest, Cobb said.

Cobb said that McCarthy, who worked in the CIA inspector general's office, "did not have access to the information she is accused of leaking," namely the classified information about any secret detention centers in Europe. Having unreported media contacts is not unheard of at the CIA but is a violation of the agency's rules.
(snip/...)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/24/AR2006042401601_pf.html

[sabra]

28. WP: Dismissed CIA Officer Denies Leak Role

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/24/AR2006042401601.html

Dismissed CIA Officer Denies Leak Role
Official Says Agency Is Not Asserting She Told of Secret Prisons

A lawyer representing fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy said yesterday that his client did not leak any classified information and did not disclose to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest the existence of secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected terrorists.

The statement by Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the Washington office of Hogan & Hartson who said he was speaking for McCarthy, came on the same day that a senior intelligence official said the agency is not asserting that McCarthy was a key source of Priest's award-winning articles last year disclosing the agency's secret prisons.

McCarthy was fired because the CIA concluded that she had undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Priest, in violation of a security agreement. That does not mean she revealed the existence of the prisons to Priest, Cobb said.

Cobb said that McCarthy, who worked in the CIA inspector general's office, "did not have access to the information she is accused of leaking," namely the classified information about any secret detention centers in Europe. Having unreported media contacts is not unheard of at the CIA but is a violation of the agency's rules.

[NVMojo]

29. so who in the Bush administration leaked the false story ...they leak so

well!

[Peace Patriot]

30. This is getting to be the damndest, most puzzling story since, well,

since the Bush junta outed covert CIA agent Valeria Plame and the entire WMD counter-proliferation network she headed.

I know that CIA agents are under constrictions about what they can say--but I think it's time that the American people were told just what the hell is going on in our own government! And I hope Mary McCarthy does so.

[Peter Frank]

31. Is it just me, or is admin beginning to resemble the Keystone Cops?... n/t

[Justice]

32. unbelievable, the media is very shallow, never questioned the

the administration's statements yesterday that fired someone due to unauthorized contacts/failing lie detector. No one in the MSM thought to ask - oh, does that mean the person disclosed classified info? No, that would be too difficult, too, well, investigative.

finally, one reporter asks, and suddenly, people realize, oh yeah, that was an important question.

they fired her for having undisclosed contacts with journalists - even though she never disclosed classified information.

On edit: here is the thing. last night all the RW media went on and on about treasonm by Democrats. Come to find out today, there was no treason. Do you think Rush and all the other RW media will correct their stories today - to acknowledge there was no disclosure?

[rodeodance]

35. seems media parrotted the response without any investigation!--not

surprizing. Just maddening!

[rodeodance]

33. "Official Says Agency Is Not Asserting She Told of Secret Prisons" this

story better have wheels. Something fishy is going on.

[rodeodance]

34. saying no one can recall someone being fired cause of this:--just on KO

lberman Daytime edition (andrea mitchel reported on this).

McCarthy was fired because the CIA concluded that she had undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Priest, in violation of a security agreement. That does not mean she revealed the existence of the prisons to Priest, Cobb said.

[LifeDuringWartime]

36. Ty Cobb

who would have thought that baseball star Ty Cobb would return as a Washington attorney? :evilgrin: