CIA secret prisons leaker fired

varwoche said:
Next you're going to be saying that Kevin Bacon did it.
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Probably not.
(Surely you jest. Right?)
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Nope. We have a clearly disgruntled employee trying to sabotage foreign policy. She got fired (and BTW, it sounds like the opinion of senior intelligence officers is largely that she deserved to be fired), and may well face criminal charges. Shouldn't the MSM be looking into whether this is an isolated incident or a systemic problem in the intelligence community? And it certainly seems fair to ask what her relationship with Joe Wilson was; if she was willing to risk her career and prison time to thwart foreign policy, did she send Wilson to Africa in the knowledge that he'd come back and say, "Nope, no Iraqis trying to buy uranium there," also to thwart foreign policy?

Lest I start sounding like a woowoo conspiracy theorist, I'll be the first to admit there may nothing at all to this, that she's an isolated case. But there are questions that need to be answered - and the MSM has so far shown little inclination to ask those questions, as far as I can see. The big story the Washington Post is carrying today is, predictably, about the politics of it (that's what WaPo does best), with the Dems naturally reciting Mephisto's line as if he'd scripted it for them.
 
BPSCG said:
. . . - you have to ask if it's possible that the same person who sent Joe Wilson to Africa was the same person who leaked national security information to the Washington Post.
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Or, you could just as easily ask if the person who OK'd the release of the fact that Joe Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA agent was the same person who authorized secret prisons we're NOT supposed to have.
 
Mephisto said:
Or, you could just as easily ask if the person who OK'd the release of the fact that Joe Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA agent was the same person who authorized secret prisons we're NOT supposed to have.
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And the MSM is hard at work on that one. Why are they ignoring the McCarthy-Wilson connection?
 
BPSCG said:
And the MSM is hard at work on that one. Why are they ignoring the McCarthy-Wilson connection?
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Who knows? Maybe (as I'm often reminded of) they know something none of us know, I can't tell, but I have suspicions too.

I think we can both agree that a horrible and dangerous security violation has occurred, and involving foreign journalists (and who knows who else). Just so we're straight on this; are you more concerned about the security violation or the fact that we're apparently running secret (I remember some here scoffing at the speculations) prisons where we can torture political prisoners behind the eyes of the world?
 
BPSCG said:
Lest I start sounding like a woowoo conspiracy theorist...
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Too late.

Let me see if I have this right...

Wilson and McCarthy are former colleagues and are both "virulently opposed to U.S. Iraq policy".

Thay hatch a plot to discredit the administration, the cornerstone of which is to out Wilson's wife Plame and destroy her career. (No problem though. They probably figured they'd make it back many times over in book royalties and speaking engagements.)

Here's where the Machiavellian twists are too complex for my puny brain to wrap around... The W&M plot depends on somehow duping Miller, Cooper, Libby, and federal prosecutors to play along.

Maybe you can fill in some dots here.

(Or else maybe it was Kevin Bacon.)
 
Mephisto said:
I think we can both agree that a horrible and dangerous security violation has occurred, and involving foreign journalists
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I believe Priest is American, AFAIK. Works for a U.S. paper, anyway.
Just so we're straight on this; are you more concerned about the security violation or the fact that we're apparently running secret (I remember some here scoffing at the speculations) prisons where we can torture political prisoners behind the eyes of the world?
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The former. If there's an entire culture in the U.S. intelligence community that thinks it has the duty to override and sabotage the president's decisions regarding foreign policy, it means we have an intelligence community the president can't rely on when making national security decisions. It's one thing when the president has to assess how good the information is that he's getting from his analysts, while keeping in mind that they're human beings and can make mistakes. But it's a disaster when the president has to wonder if those same analysts are sabotaging his decisions.

And I would say that if John Kerry were president, if Hillary Clinton were president, or if Al Franken were president.
 
varwoche said:
Too late.
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You missed post # 24 below that.

Anyway, it does get thicker. Dana Priest's husband,William Goodfellow, is the executive director of the Center for International Policy, an outfit that gets Joe Wilson speaking engagements.

So now it's the McCarthy-Wilson-Plame-Priest-Goodfellow connection.

All coincidence, I'm sure. All easily explainable. In fact, I'll bet Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest is getting the goods on this right now. And if she isn't, ABCNNBCBS is right on it.
 
BPSCG said:
I believe Priest is American, AFAIK. Works for a U.S. paper, anyway.
The former. If there's an entire culture in the U.S. intelligence community that thinks it has the duty to override and sabotage the president's decisions regarding foreign policy, it means we have an intelligence community the president can't rely on when making national security decisions. It's one thing when the president has to assess how good the information is that he's getting from his analysts, while keeping in mind that they're human beings and can make mistakes. But it's a disaster when the president has to wonder if those same analysts are sabotaging his decisions.

And I would say that if John Kerry were president, if Hillary Clinton were president, or if Al Franken were president.
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On the other hand, our government is supposed to work for *us*, and we can't make informed decisions if our government hides important details. Secret prisions and torture would be important details, since many Americans would not want their government doing that in their name, regardless of what benefit the president thinks he gets from it.
 
Alright...I'm confused now.

I've checked CNN and Wikipedia...How come I can find no mention of this man or his organization on either site?

Not to sound crazy, but is this craziness?
 
wastepanel said:
Thanks for the google. However, is there any mention of this organization on any credible news website? If that is the case, I'm sure the administration would take great pleasure in getting it out everywhere.

Where's the credible mentions??
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I'm sure ABCNNBCBS is working on it.
 
I have always advocated that operations are perfectly legitimate to be kept secret under force of law. However, policy is not a legitimate state secret--it's our business. So a leaker who reveals a secret policy should be considered an honest watchdog.

(so long as what they "leak" is true to their knowledge).
 
Mephisto said:
Very interesting material, and I'll have to admit I was a little dismayed that the thread had been (effectively) derailed so the subject became the polygraph rather than whether or not a government employee can be fired for blowing the whistle on an illegal government operation.
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John Kerry said:
A CIA agent has the obligation to uphold the law and clearly leaking is against the law, and nobody should leak. I don't like leaking. But if you're leaking to tell the truth, Americans are going to look at that, at least mitigate or think about what are the consequences that you, you know, put on that person. Obviously they're not going to keep their job, but there are other larger issues here. You know, classification in Washington is a tool that is used to hide the truth from the American people. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was eloquent and forceful in always talking about how we needed to, you know, end this endless declassification that takes place in this city, and it has become a tool to hide the truth from Americans. So I'm glad she told the truth but she's going to obviously -- if she did it, if she did it, suffer the consequences of breaking the law.
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It's hard being John.
 
BPSCG said:
If there's an entire culture in the U.S. intelligence community that thinks it has the duty to override and sabotage the president's decisions regarding foreign policy, it means we have an intelligence community the president can't rely on when making national security decisions.
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Perhaps there are agents in the intelligence community who don't trust the President's inability to maintain his common sense and NOT sabotage their identities on a whim. I'd also be interested in how keeping secret prisons in other countries helping our national security?

I'm not saying it's right, but the President has kept an "us against them" policy regarding those not loyal to his policies. Maybe there are those who feel it's their right to "fight back" against what they believe is wrong.
 
Yep...it's been expressed. I was all but called a woo. I shan't further digress.

We shall see.
 
Mephisto said:
Perhaps there are agents in the intelligence community who don't trust the President's inability to maintain his common sense and NOT sabotage their identities on a whim.
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This is idiotic. "I don't trust the president to keep secrets, so I'm going to teach him a lesson and jeopardize national security by revealing secrets."

Andrew (no relation) McCarthy put it the best I've seen so far:
The case against McCarthy, moreover, is said to involve not just a single illegal disclosure of the Nation's secrets, but several. One prominent instance is reported to involve alerting the press that the CIA had arrangements with overseas intelligence services for the detention of high-level al Qaeda detainees captured in the war on terror — from whom the culling of intelligence is critical to the safety of Americans.

The so-called "black site" prisons were later publicized by Dana Priest of the Washington Post, jeopardizing not only the detainee intelligence stream but, just as importantly, America's relationship with the cooperating governments — on whom we rely because of our global dearth of intelligence assets, and who are now incentivized to cut-off information exchanges because they believe (with some obvious justification) that our intelligence community is not trustworthy.
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And the best defense of that is, "She did it in the national interest." News flash: She's not paid to determine what is in the national interest. We have elections to choose who will, and Mary McCarthy wasn't elected to anything.

I'm not saying it's right, but the President has kept an "us against them" policy regarding those not loyal to his policies. Maybe there are those who feel it's their right to "fight back" against what they believe is wrong.
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If they think something illegal is going on, they should report it to the CIA inspector general's office. Andrew McCarthy again:
Mary McCarthy's position — the post from which she is likely to have learned the most sensitive information at the heart of the leak controversy — was inside the CIA's inspector general's office. This is the unit that investigates internal misconduct. This is the unit to which government employees are encouraged to report government abuse or illegality so it can be investigated, potentially reported to Congress, and prosecuted if appropriate.

That is, it is the legal alternative to leaking national secrets to the media.
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That's rich. The office McCarthy was supposed to inform if she thought the CIA was doing something illegal was her own office.

Instead, she hit her speed-dial button to Dana Priest. She should be in handcuffs.
 
BPSCG said:
Instead, she hit her speed-dial button to Dana Priest. She should be in handcuffs.
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And yet, she is not.

Consider, They used the polygraph results to [publically] fire her for releasing information on a program that they [still] don't admit really existed.

Something doesn't add up. Somebody is being played.

I suggest not a 48 hour rule, but perhaps a 48 day rule.

There is much we don't know.
 
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