Mary McCarthy seems to be an equal-opportunity speaker of truth to power. It's only Republicans who can't seem to handle her.
She stood up to Clinton.
In 1998, when President Bill 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. Ms. McCarthy's reservations did not stop the attack on the factory, which was carried out in retaliation for Al Qaeda'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.
Clinton didn't boot her. But being a holdover from the Clinton administration did put her in a dubious position with the radical and deeply partisan Bush administration.
McCarthy may simply be the victim of the total mess within our intelligence agencies. Apparently they have never been in a worse state than they are today. Dangerously out of whack. In need of reform. Illused, badly managed, politicized, demoralized and humiliated.
And we to equate lodging a caution (retracted via her signatory approval of the action in question), internally to others with security clearances, as equivalent to illegally leaking classified information to the press?
I'm not buying that rationale for a nanosecond.
Fault the current administration for allowing her to be rehired despite her political leanings, but don't fault them for escorting her out of the building post haste when she admitted to violations of the law.
Posted by: Terry Ott | April 22, 2006 at 11:30 PM
Political leanings?
Posted by: PW | April 23, 2006 at 08:12 AM