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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Co-Workers Cite Fired CIA Analyst's Integrity, Virtue In 1998, when President Clinton ordered military strikes against a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan, Mary O. McCarthy, a senior intelligence officer assigned to the White House, warned the president that the plan relied on inconclusive intelligence, two former government officials said. McCarthy's reservations did not stop the attack on the factory, which was carried out in retaliation for al-Qaida's bombing of two American embassies in East Africa. But they illustrated her willingness to challenge intelligence data and methods endorsed by her bosses at the Central Intelligence Agency. On Thursday, the CIA fired McCarthy, 61, accusing her of leaking information to reporters about overseas prisons operated by the agency in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. Despite McCarthy's independent streak, some colleagues who worked with her at the White House and other offices during her intelligence career say they cannot imagine McCarthy as a leaker of classified information. As a senior National Security Council aide for intelligence from 1996 to 2001, she was responsible for guarding some of the nation's most sensitive secrets. "We're talking about a person with great integrity who played by the book and, as far as I know, never deviated from the rules," said Steven Simon, a National Security Council aide in the Clinton administration who worked closely with McCarthy. Disenchantment Seen Others said it was possible that McCarthy - who began attending law school at night several years ago, made a contribution to Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 and had announced her intention to retire from the CIA - had grown increasingly disenchanted with the often harsh and extra-legal methods adopted by the Bush administration for handling al-Qaida prisoners and felt she had no alternative except to go to the media. If in fact McCarthy was the leaker, said Richard J. Kerr, a former CIA deputy director, "I have no idea what her motive was, but there is a lot of dissension within the agency, and it seems to be a rather unhappy place." Kerr called McCarthy "quite a good, substantive person on the issues I dealt with her on." She was known as a low-key professional during her time at the White House who paid special attention to preventing leaks of classified information and covert operations, several current and former government officials said. When she disagreed with decisions on intelligence operations, they said, she registered her complaints through internal government channels. Some former intelligence officials who worked with McCarthy saw her as a persistent obstacle to aggressive antiterrorism efforts. "She was always of the view that she would rather not get her hands dirty with covert action," said Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official, who said he was in meetings with McCarthy where she voiced doubts about reports that the factory had ties to al-Qaida and was secretly producing substances for chemical weapons. Evidence Was 1 Soil Sample In the case of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, her concerns may have been well-founded. Sudanese officials and the plant's owner denied any connection to al-Qaida. In the aftermath of the attack, the internal White House debate over whether the intelligence reports about the plant were accurate spilled into the media. Eventually, Clinton administration officials conceded that the hardest evidence used to justify striking the plant was a single soil sample that seemed to indicate the presence of a chemical used in making VX gas. There is no evidence McCarthy was involved in any disclosure to the media about the incident, but she was concerned enough that she wrote a formal letter dissenting to Clinton, two former officials said. Over the past decade, McCarthy gradually came to have one foot in the secret world of intelligence and another in the public world of policy. She went from lower-level analyst working in obscurity at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to someone at home "downtown," as Washington is called by agency veterans, where policy is more openly fought over and leaks are far more common. Married with one child, she began attending law school at night, two former co-workers said, and talked about switching to a career in public interest law. After an article in November in The Washington Post reported that the CIA was sending terror suspects to clandestine detention centers in several countries, agency director Porter Goss ordered polygraphs for intelligence officers who knew about certain "compartmented" programs. Polygraphs are given routinely to agency employees at least every five years, but special ones can be ordered when a security breach is suspected. Government officials said that after McCarthy's polygraph examination showed the possibility of deception, the examiner confronted her and she disclosed having had conversations with reporters. Some former CIA employees who know McCarthy remain unconvinced, arguing that the pressure from Goss and others in the Bush administration to plug leaks may have led the agency to focus on an employee on the verge of retirement, whose work at the White House during the Clinton administration had long raised suspicions within the current administration.
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#1. To: Eoghan (#0)
McCarthy seems like a woman of conscience and integrity...just the sort of person bushwhacho's cronies would single out for scapegoating.
"America? Don't worry about the Americans. We own America." - Ariel Sharon at the Knesset, on October 3, 2001.
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