A great hitter. . .not as good a lawyer, LOL.
Posted on 04/24/2006 11:46:21 PM PDT by STARWISE
Excerpt:
"She did not leak any classified information, and she did not have access to the information apparently attributed to her by some government officials," said Washington lawyer Ty Cobb, who is representing veteran CIA analyst Mary McCarthy.
Government officials have linked her to the Post's story about the CIA's covert sites in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, used to hold terror suspects. The disclosure of the facilities caused an international clamor last fall because of the legal and ethical issues they raised.
McCarthy was fired on Thursday for knowingly disclosing classified information. But Cobb said she hopes to find a way to clear up the allegations and move on.
"Her hope is to be able to pursue her planned retirement from two decades of distinguished public service to do community service law," Cobb said. She wants to focus on adoptions.
Earlier Monday, another McCarthy friend also asserted she was not the Post's source. "She was not the source for that story," said Rand Beers, who has spoken with her.
Beers headed intelligence programs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. He said McCarthy authorized him to make the brief statement, but he declined to discuss the issue further.
Senior Bush administration officials have vowed to make clamping down on leaks of classified information a top priority — to the dismay of whistleblower advocates who find merit when the disclosures unveil wrongdoing.
Stephen Kohn, chairman of the National Whistleblower Center, said he believe McCarthy could have a strong case to contest her firing.
"If she was blowing the whistle on something that's illegal, it's our position you cannot classify the illegal conduct of government. You can't say that's a secret," Kohn said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Ping
rand BEERS
My money's on Goss.
It's our position you cannot classify the illegal conduct of government. You can't say that's a secret."
AND THEN:
"She did not leak any classified information.
Let's summerize.
She decided to say it was illegal, therefore it couldn't be classified, therefore she did not leak classified info.
What a bitch.
Yep. He has plenty more up his sleeve, guaranteed.
= left-wing anti-male advocacy probably at taxpayer expense
Precisely .. it's all about THEIR interpretation (and agenda).
Thought I had read the bitch admitted she leaked the EU prison bit?
Why should we believe her friend?
Yeah .. "for the chillren" ... won't Shrillery love it?
A great hitter. . .not as good a lawyer, LOL.
This is serious stuff and would carry 20 years federal time. McCarthy is following the defense of her mentor, bill pigton, in just going down the denial route.
Of course by the time this is over she'll be innocent, a national heroine, and get full benefit of federal pensions, etc. and end up on democraptic talk show circuits talking about the culture of fear in America.
This woman should be up on treason. She'll probably make millions on the speaking circuit.
"Goss sounds very definite and emphatic that this B. is guilty.
My money's on Goss."
I'm in a non-partisan mood this evening....Goss has credibilty issues.
Sounds like she took a deal deal to get out without losing her pension. She KNEW she was nailed, maybe by being fed false info. So, babe, you get yer ass outa here, or get hard time and NO federal bennies. She took the deal deal,,,and was damn HAPPY to do so.
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Funnily enough, I actually used to know a man named Ty Cobb ( I assure you, he is NOT this one !), who was a relation of the original Ty Cobb.
That's what I heard she did, too.
Also, he was a well known "spiker", when sliding into bases.
For some interesting speculation and theorizing take a look at The Belmont Club:
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/04/mary-mccarthy-i-did-not-do-it.html
This is one of those stories where, if you miss the first 48 hours, you end up feeling so far behind the curve that you tune it out and never bother with it again. So here’s a round-up of news and blog coverage which, while longish, will bring you up to speed. As of this writing, McCarthy “categorically denies” being the leaker, according to former counterterrorism official/Kerry campaign staffer Rand Beers. So the jury’s still out – although government sources are telling Newsweek to fret not, for the leaker is most definitely she.
First, background. McCarthy joined the CIA in 1984. Fourteen years later, she’d risen to the position of senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council. How fast was her ascent? “Meteoric,” according to Spook86, a blogger claiming to be a former intelligence official who wonders whether the rapid promotion of comparatively inexperienced officers like McCarthy explains some of the pre-9/11 intel failures under Clinton. If so, then the Reagan and Bush I administrations should share some of the blame: according to the New York Times, by the late 1980s McCarthy was already chief of the CIA’s Central America and Caribbean section despite having no experience in those areas. By 1991 – just seven years after joining the agency – she was a top deputy to Charles Allen, then-national intelligence officer for warning. McCarthy inherited that position from Allen in 1994, then went to work in the Clinton White House in 1996 before replacing Rand Beers as senior director for intelligence programs in 1998.
Bear all this in the mind the next time you read or hear a news report suggesting she was some no-name “analyst.”
Bonus fun fact #1: the guy who appointed her to the position of senior director in 1998 was then-NSA Sandy Berger, who was last seen pleading guilty to destroying intelligence documents after smuggling them out of a National Archives reading room. In his pants.
Bonus fun fact #2: one of the Freepers recognized that from June 1997 to July 1998, McCarthy served on the National Security Council with none other than Yellowcake Joe Wilson, which naturally led some to speculate that McCarthy might have had a hand in sending him on the now-infamous trip to Niger. (McCarthy’s expertise is in Africa.) Her career arc makes this unlikely, though. McCarthy did stay on as senior director after Bush took office but only until July 2001, when she left the NSC to join the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (Curt at Flopping Aces has her CSIS bio – which, he claims, was conveniently expunged from the organization’s website shortly after the leak story broke on Friday evening.) Wilson’s trip to Niger didn’t occur until February 2002. Unless CIA operations have an awful lot of lead time, she probably had nothing to do with it.
McCarthy worked at CSIS and on a terrorism task force organized by the Markle Foundation for the next three years and testified before the 9/11 Commission in 2003 about improving counterterrorism measures. According to the Times, she returned to the CIA in 2004 – specifically, to the Inspector General’s office - and later allegedly leaked the story about secret U.S. prisons operating in eastern Europe to the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, who won a Pulitzer for the story a few weeks ago.
So far, so good. Now, here’s what Saturday’s Washington Post (ironically enough) had to say about the Inspector General’s office:
[A]s the person singularly responsible for sensitive internal investigations of alleged wrongdoing at the agency, the inspector general is routinely granted extraordinary access to secrets ordinarily not shared with others inside the CIA.
The inspector general’s combination of independence and access may have been combustible in McCarthy’s case, if allegations about her involvement in leaks prove true.
Emphasis mine. From the same article, this quote from former IG L. Britt Snyder:
The IG, he said, “gets into everything, including personal things. That makes it a little different than other places.”
Also from the same article, we learn that Porter Goss personally oversaw the McCarthy investigation instead of handing it off to the DOJ per standard protocol. Why? Maybe because he wanted to send a message to other CIA employees. Maybe because the story she spilled the beans on was so sensitive. Or maybe because McCarthy, by virtue of her position in the IG’s office, is perfectly positioned to roll over on other leakers inside the agency. If anyone’s likely to know who else is leaking, it stands to reason it’d be someone within the CIA’s version of internal affairs; possibly Goss figures that if he knocks her over, a lot of other dominos will tumble. There do seem to be plenty of other dominos out there: nearly every story this weekend about McCarthy emphasized that her dismissal is part of a broader campaign to ferret out leakers in various parts of the intelligence community. This AP story – illustrated with a photo of Scooter Libby, natch – claims there are “dozens” of leak investigations under way. And one sensational report from MichNews quoted former DoD official (and current NRO contributor) Jed Babbin as saying the crackdown may lead to polygraph tests for Democratic Senators Jay Rockefeller and Dick Durbin, both of whom have been accused of leaks in the past. It’s not clear from the article whether Babbin has an inside scoop or whether he’s just thinking out loud, but wild speculation sure is fun!
So extensive is the crackdown on leaks, and so adamant has Goss been about plugging them since becoming DCI in 2004 (and with good reason), that some bloggers wondered whether the story about secret prisons might have been floated to McCarthy intentionally as part of a sting. The sting theory stems from the fact that a recent EU probe into the prisons uncovered no evidence of illegal CIA activity there – which some took to mean that the prisons were fictional, and Priest’s story bogus. Not so; as Rick Moran explains, Priest had multiple sources for her report. What’s more, it simply beggars belief to think that CIA higher-ups would have concocted a story as incendiary as one involving secret prisons in the expectation that it might end up in the Washington Post. In all likelihood, it was the fact that McCarthy worked in the rarefied air of the IG’s office that led investigators to her. Quoth WaPo: “[Some intelligence officials] pointed out that the information in question was known by so few people that the number of suspected leakers was fairly small, enabling investigators to work swiftly.” (emphasis mine) There was no sting; McCarthy simply got caught.
And man, did she ever get caught. WaPo says she failed multiple polygraphs before confessing. AJ Strata cites reports describing a “pattern of behavior”. But what’s really got right-wing bloggers exercised is the discovery that McCarthy and her husband have donated upwards of $10,000 to Democratic political campaigns and organizations since 2004. Curiously enough, certain mainstream media outlets have had trouble nailing down the exact figure despite the fact that Ace and Tom Maguire were able to find it on OpenSecrets.org in about thirty seconds. And that’s not the only convenient omission from their predictably sympathetic coverage. Sweetness & Light looks at two of the press’s go-to guys on this story – former CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson – and reveals a few salient facts about their views on intelligence that somehow have managed to fly under the media’s radar.
Righty bloggers have also been having fun playing connect-the-dots with the various moonbat hearthrobs making cameos in this story: McCarthy, Beers, Richard Clarke (for whom McCarthy once worked at the NSC), Joe Wilson, John Kerry (who received the lion’s share of the McCarthys’ political donations), and Dana Priest and her husband William Goodfellow, who happens to be Executive Director of the Center for International Policy, which advocates rapprochement with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Smells real bad, but there’s much less here than meets the eye: as mentioned above, the best anyone’s been able to do thus far conspiracy-wise is put McCarthy and Wilson on the NSC at the same time eight years ago, which is hardly damning. Some bloggers have attempted to link Goodfellow’s CIP to something called the Iraq Policy Information Program, which allegedly arranges anti-war speaking gigs for Joey Yellowcake. I’ve tried Googling the IPIP, though, and I can’t even find independent confirmation that it exists. The only mentions of it come from Discover The Network, FrontPage, Free Republic, and a few righty blogs. If anyone can help, I’d appreciate it. UPDATE: Existence confirmed. See below.
And with that, you’re more or less caught up, except for the 75 links people will send me telling me what I missed as soon as I post this. Keep your eye on Ace of Spades, Protein Wisdom, Flopping Aces, Strata-sphere, Just One Minute, Sweetness & Light, Riehl World View, Rightwing Nuthouse, Former Spook, and Belmont Club for more in the days ahead.
UPDATE: Just got an e-mail from Jennifer Verner, author of the FrontPage article that first brought IPIP to the blogosphere’s attention. Turns out the reason you can’t find any mention of it elsewhere is because FrontPage erred slightly in rendering the group’s name: it’s the Iraq Policy Information Project, not Program. Here’s the Google cache of the press release at Fenton Communication confirming that CIP was indeed involved in creating IPIP and that Yellowcake Joe was a consultant on the project. The press release also lists IPIP’s homepage as http://www.iraqpolicy.com, but that address now belongs to something called middleeastpeace.org. Not sure if they’re related to IPIP or not.
Source link:
http://hotair.com/archives/the-blog/2006/04/24/cia-leak-a-blog-primer/
Note that Goss used the word "discussions", a plural; that means that McCarthy is a serial leaker. I would lay dollars to donuts she has been leaking since Bush took power in 2001. How many of us screamed that after coming aboard in 2001 that Bush should clean house of the Clinton leftovers? Bush's Christian charity is nice outside of Washington; inside the Beltway he never has learned how to work the Satanic snakepit.
bump for reference
Ty Cobb is a big bug in Hogan & Hartson LLP based in Washington D.C. Although they like to say they are equal-opportunity opportunists when it comes to politics (and they point to the fact that John Roberts was employed before joining the Supreme Court), the outfit is decidedly Democrat. So much so that a couple of its employees were fined $67,000 for funding activity in support of the Bill Clinton re-election in 1996. Since then, the outfit has been much more careful. McCarthy and her husband must have some big bucks; Ty Cobb doesn't come cheap.
TRANSLATION: "She wants her government pension check back that she just forfeited, and she wants it now."
"If she was blowing the whistle on something that's illegal, it's our position you cannot classify the illegal conduct of government. You can't say that's a secret," Kohn said.
Let me understand. She was not the source of the story but IF she was, she was blowing the whistle on something illegal? Are these explanations convoluted or is it just me? What is amazing to me is the ability of the press to put contradictory quotes in a story and never highlight the evident contradictions.
According to the washington post, even if she was fired she wouldn't have lost her pension. Something else is happening here.
I think that what you are seeing here is a whole bunch of suddenly very panicky people trying to put the toothpast back in the tube.
Bump for reference.
Thanks for all your great research on this. You know, bloggers are the "illegal aliens" of the journalism profession...they do the work (research, fact checking, etc) that "journalists" won't do.
Right on target, according to this CNN story (which is surprisingly balanced -- see the quote by McLaughlin at the end):
A U.S. official told CNN on Monday that the CIA officer fired for leaking classified information was accused of a "pattern of behavior," including multiple contacts with more than one reporter.
There's more than a bit of speculation out there concerning McCarthy's demotion -- in prestige, if not in salary -- under the Bush regime, which would give her a very personal reason, in addition to her political connections, for undermining the administration -- a useful idiot, perhaps, being used by bigger game?
Well, if their claim is that because what she 'reported' was illegal government activity it becomes THEIR responsibility to PROVE that what the governmnet was doing was actually illegal.
I really doubt that they can prove that, and am certain that this is all shilling for the press.
She did the wrong thing, admitted it privately and took the best deal she could get.
This, too, will die off the front pages quickly.
Polygraphs give cover to supervisors who want to be able to say, "Hey, he passed a polygraph, so you can't blame me for not noticing misconduct."
They have nothing to do with whether the test taker was lying or not. They are useless as "lie detectors."
I am not saying you are wrong, just that the polygraph doesn't contribute to Goss' credibility.
Polygraph or no, I'm still waiting to hear somebody explain to me why Porter Goss has ANY problems with his own credibility.
I see Director Goss as the first DCI in MY memory (and that memory goes back to the 60's) to actually start digging out the traitors and moles that in a time of war (like now) can be fatal to America.
The only thing that should have been done differently was to put Porter Goss into the director's office on January 21, 2001, and that goofball Tenet should have been shown the door.
I tend to agree. Most likely we are seeing the time-honored defence of "Accuse the accuser."
Straight from the Clintonista playbook my FRiend, you are 100 percent correct.
Bump /marker
Thanks, Back. Great stuff.
two decades of distinguished ............Treason!
Appreciate your comments.
One other thing that has struck me about the online community is how much better many of the writers are, at writing, than many so-called journalists.
Steve Janke ( Angry in the Great White North ) and Kate at Small Dead Animals come to mind, but there are many others who routinely dash off fast missives that are better than 90% of the stuff pounded out by "professionals."
Thanks for looking.
The left knows that they can lie when not under oath without fear of refute by the agenda media. The new media, hopefully, has changed this a bit since the ex42 administration. Lying under oath can still be done, but may have to be paid for (disbarring, etc.)
"Stephen Kohn, chairman of the National Whistleblower Center, said he believe McCarthy could have a strong case to contest her firing."
Whistleblowers come forward, Traitors are caught.
McCarthy was caught for a false polygraph.
"A great hitter. . .not as good a lawyer, LOL. "
And a racist. Which meant he probably was a Democrat.
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