The new McCarthyism

Fired CIA leaker Mary McCarthy is back on the front page of the WaPo in a three page expose about her life and times. Reporter Jeffrey Smith got together with a few of her friends and colleagues (over sweet mint tea, perhaps?) to talk about Mary, all of whom preferred to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the situation or their secrecy agreements.

She's described as a charming, feisty and independent analyst, one not afraid to lay it on the line and think out of the box, real truth to power stuff. For example, we learn (again) about the time she stood up to Sandy Berger over the decision to bomb the aspirin factory in Khartoum. In contrast to that, she argued against James Pavitt in favor of deploying drones over Afghanistan to target Osama (or Usama in CIA parlance).

Not surprisingly her friends have a theory on her firing:

They allege that her firing was another chapter in a long-standing feud between the CIA and the Bush White House, stoked by friction over the merits of the war in Iraq, over whether links existed between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaeda, and over the CIA-instigated criminal inquiry of White House officials suspected of leaking the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Links between Saddam and al-Qaeda? Valerie Plame? Well, there's a couple of new and exciting tidbits. I guess it was too easy to think it was just violating the secrecy agreement and failing a poly.

I'm still interested in the come and go, or rather go and come. The article wasn't specific about her after-Bush period and resulting mindset, leaving such stuff open to armchair speculators such as myself. So let's spin back to 2001. Her CIA career didn't look promising with the new administration. For some reason she was transferred to the Directorate of Science and Technology where she felt "underutilized" (code word for hurt pride). We're left to believe she just punched out and dropped into a local think tank.

What was her mood during that time? The run-up to the Iraq war was ongoing followed by the Plame affair. Then,

McCarthy was drawn into the CIA's wrenching internal debate over treatment of foreign detainees when she was recruited by Inspector General John L. Helgerson in the summer of 2004 to oversee the agency's criminal probe of alleged wrongdoing in the war on Iraq.

Let's think about this a minute. She held prestigious positions in both the Clinton admin and CIA prior to Bush. Then she gets dumped down into the science department and falls out fo the Agency. Then, presto--a former co-worker, IG Helgerson, brings her back off sabatical for a special project, one looking into the detainee abuse and allegations of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, ironically concurrent to the 2004 presidential campaign season. It must have been a dream job!

Somewhere along that road she

"was seeing things in some of the investigations that troubled her," said one of her friends, and she worried that neither Helgerson nor the agency's congressional overseers would fully examine what happened or why. "She had the impression that this stuff has been pretty well buried," another friend said. In McCarthy's view and that of many colleagues, two friends say, torture was not only wrong but also misguided, because it rarely produced useful results.

So allegedly it was time to pull a Colbert and speak some truth to power. Was that before or after the 2000 donation to Kerry? Was there anything else donated to Kerry?

Looking at the complete picture there are more than a few foul odors here, ones that need to be aired out before we can entirely understand things. It's unclear exactly what she told Dana Priest, since they swear up and down it wasn't about the secret prisons. But CIA officials have indicated it was something sensitive.

Simultaneous to this story we have Newsmax and others running one about the European Commission looking into the secret prisons and rendition flights, which is linked down below. The EU official mentioned they were in contact with an American journalist who was feeding them information from CIA and other sources. Wonder who that could be?