CIA Leaks

On April 20th Mary McCarthy, a top CIA employee, was fired for leaking classified information to the Washington Post. Maybe she didn't know there was a law against that. CIA director Porter Goss has started an investigation using polygraph examinations (including one on himself) to see if anyone else has a strange idea about how he is to do his job... and keep the government's secrets.

Kenneth R. Timmerman writes for Front Page Mag:

One thing is certain: the firing of Mary McCarthy is far from the end of this drama, which began with the forced departures in the weeks after Goss arrived at CIA of top managers and covert operators who had profound political disagreements with the new Director and with the Bush administration.

For the ideological divide currently paralyzing our intelligence community runs deep and is not limited to CIA or State Department analysts. It involves top officials, who believe they have a moral “duty” to prevent the President of the United States from executing policies with which they disagree.

I call this sabotage.

I would call it treason, but I've always had a penchant for the dramatic, and cannot be trusted in these matters.

Timmerman continues:

Some in Congress are attempting to encourage the leakers and to intimidate those who keep secrets, by threatening legal action against intelligence officers who fail to inform Congress of clandestine operations.

This is how far we have come in Year Five of the War on Terror.

Members of the United States Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives do not seem to agree with the president of the United States that our nation is at war, and that war requires a vigorous intelligence establishment, willing to take risks to protect the nation. Instead, they are seeking to bend the law and enhance their own powers, to intimidate intelligence officers out of doing their jobs.

This, too, is sabotage.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22241

McCarthy and liberals in Congress have strange notions about how they should conduct themselves in a time of war. They just don't seem to appreciate the need to protect secrets (or the citizenry for that matter) when wild-eyed religious basket-cases are seeking to blow us all into little tiny bits and pieces. Somehow that fails to make their list of urgent concerns, or their list of "things to do" while they are busily fiddling about, slandering our kids in the military, sliming the intelligence community, and generally hamstringing the President in his efforts to keep us safe and conduct the war.

In moments of quiet repose, I sometimes fancy that these tireless public servants are not well suited to run the our government in perilous times. But that's just me.