| Sunday, April 23, 2006 |
| Sources and methods |
File this one under eerie. I know Mary McCarthy. To be more precise, I don't mean "know" in the sense of Christmas card exchanges, weekly phonecalls or other such familiarity, but in the sense that we've met, and we've talked on a couple of occasions. Ms. McCarthy was one of the federal officials and quasi-officials provided to a group of fellows, of whom I was one, at the University of Maryland in December of 2003. We were all writers -- mostly editorial writers and columnists, but also a few freelance journalists (including, Jon Stephenson, a colorful New Zealander with whom I and a few others formed what, for journalists at least, constituted the bad kids on the bus). And during our fellowship with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, we were paraded before a slew of Pentagon officials, including Doug Feith and Stephen Cambone, plus a key military official responsible for crafting the Jessica Lynch fable, and other folks from the Brookings Institute, etc. Most spoke to us on the record, but a few, including Ms. McCarthy, gave us briefings on background. (At the time, she was not working for the CIA).
I had occasion to speak with Ms. McCarthy a couple of times after the fellowship. She was always polite about taking my calls and always informative, off the record. She struck me as no anti-administration crusader. Indeed, she has friends -- high placed friends -- at high levels of Team Bush. And while I believe she was a holdover from the Clinton administration, she struck me as careful, thoughtful, and in no mad rush to criticize the current administration's policies -- even on background. In fact, in one conversation I had with her, I pressed her about a certain Bush official, whom I viewed negatively, and about whom I was writing a column. She pushed back quite firmly, defending this person, whom I won't name, and vouching for the sincerity of certain aspects of the Bush policy framework. From my brief encounters with her, I wouldn't for a moment characterize her as the kind of person who would compromise national security for politics or any other reason, or as the kind of woman who would talk to a reporter about something that is classified, unless she really believed it was either illegal, or (my word) un-American.
Perhaps that close encounter with Ms. McCarthy is why I'm reluctant, to say the least, to pass judgment on her for her alleged leaks to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, which exposed the secret prisons being run by the CIA around the world, with the secret collusion of friendly governments. For America to be in the gulags business strikes me as anathema to everything this country is supposed to stand for. Worse, for us to be tolerating torture at those prisons, seems to me to be both morally indefensible and un-American. If Ms. McCarthy agreed with that assessment, and so leaked the information she did in order to protect the good name of this country, then I solute her. Bob Bennett be damned (well, Bob Bennett be damned anyway, since I care about as much about his opinion as I do about that of the average Klansman).
And another thing, the present government "leaker purge," including the use of lie detector tests on employees of the federal government, is a scandal in and of itself, particularly because for all the right wing bluster, the point isn't to ferret out traitors or spies -- those have been fairly well tolerated, if not encouraged, if you look at the Larry Franklyn and AIPAC cases, not to mention our friendly Iranian spy, Ahmad Chalabi, all three of whom operated quite literally from within the United States Pentagon. The point is to stop the kinds of leaks that could embarrass president Bush. Stalin would be proud.
Tags: Leaks, CIA, Politics, Bush administration, Iraq, NSA, News, War on Terror |
posted by JReid @ 9:49 PM   |
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