What if she did do it? That, says Rush, is because she is a "Clinton person."
In his Monday broadcast, Rush Limbaugh, the radio personality, called Ms. McCarthy a "Clinton person" and part of a "shadow government in opposition," suggesting that she was one of a number of C.I.A. officers who had worked against the White House. "When we've said that the C.I.A. was at war with the White House, we were more right than we knew," Mr. Limbaugh said.
Larry Johnson, former colleague of Mary O. McCarthy at the CIA, wrote a few days ago for TPM Cafe:
...There are some things about the case that puzzle me. For starters, Mary never worked on the Operations side of the house. In other words, she never worked a job where she would have had first hand operational knowledge about secret prisons. She worked the analytical side of the CIA and served with the National Intelligence Council. According to press reports, she subsequently worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 2001 thru 2005. That is a type of academic/policy wonk position and, again, would not put her in a position to know anything first hand about secret prisons.
Sometime within the last year she returned to CIA on a terminal assignment. I've heard through the grapevine that she was attending the seminar for officers who are retiring while working with the Inspector General (IG). Now things get interesting. She could find out about secret prisons if Intelligence Officers involved with that program had filed a complaint with the IG or if there was some incident that compelled senior CIA officials to determine an investigation was warranted. In other words, this program did not come to Mary's attention (if the allegations are true) because she worked on it as an ops officer. Instead, it appears an investigation of the practice had been proposed or was underway. That's another story reporters probably ought to be tracking down.
Mazzetti and Shane report in this morning's New York Times:
The lawyer for a Central Intelligence Agency official dismissed last week after being accused of leaking classified information said on Monday that his client denied disclosing any classified information and was not the source for newspaper articles about secret C.I.A. prisons abroad. Ty Cobb, a Washington lawyer recently retained by the official, Mary O. McCarthy, who was fired last Thursday and escorted out of agency headquarters, said his client had never been granted access to the information she was accused of leaking, referring to material used in Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in The Washington Post about C.I.A. prisons.
"She categorically denies leaking classified information," Mr. Cobb said by telephone on Monday. "She denies having access to the information attributed to her."
Mr. Cobb, whose comments about Ms. McCarthy's denials were first reported on the Newsweek Web site, said his client had also told him that she never admitted leaking any classified information before she was terminated. She believes she was fired solely because she failed to report contacts with journalists to her superiors, he said.
Larry Johnson, again, this morning:
The firing of Mary McCarthy and her trial in the media is a travesty. Particularly when George Bush continues to harbor leakers who put selfish political motives above the welfare of this nation. It remains to be seen if Mary McCarthy had anything to do with the leak of secret prisons. There is no doubt, however, that Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, Dick Cheney, and George Bush directly participated in a campaign to leak misleading intelligence information to the American people. Patrick Fitzgerald's court filings make that point abundantly clear. Under George Bush, America is being asked to tolerate Gulag Politics. That is something I find intolerable and unconscionable.
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