Fired CIA intelligence analyst Mary McCarthy has reportedly
confessed to leaking facts about the CIA’s top-secret terrorist
jails in Europe and Southwest Asia to Dana Priest of the
Washington Post. As Priest basks in the glory of the
Pulitzer Prize she won for those stories, McCarthy is alternately
being investigated for criminal prosecution and hailed as a brave
crusader for truth, justice and The American Way.
McCarthy is not, as one pundit said, a courageous American
citizen exercising her First Amendment rights against an outrageous
government policy. If there are no restrictions enforced by law,
then there are no secrets. McCarthy is a traitor, someone who
leaked top secret information and damaged our national security,
risked the lives of Americans fighting a war, and disrupted our
relations with nations that had been working with us against a new
kind of enemy. McCarthy was an employee, not a policy maker. She
has never been elected by the American people or appointed by the
President to a position that would have entitled her to disclose
that information. (And neither have the senators and congressmen
who have leaked facts just as sensitive as those McCarthy passed on
to Dana Priest.) Comparing McCarthy’s crime to the President’s
decision to reveal details of a National Intelligence Estimate is a
political argument based on a falsehood. The PPresident is the
ultimate classification authority. When he decides to reveal
information he is exercising one of the powers of the office to
which he was elected.
McCarthy took advantage of the position she had been entrusted
and violated her legal obligations. Serving in the CIA’s inspector
general’s office, she had a special responsibility. The IG’s office
is legally authorized to be privy to compartmented information, the
highest level of classification. Other CIA employees only see bits
and pieces of such information because the compartmentalization
system is designed to prevent all but a few top people to see all
the pieces and know what they mean in the larger context. She
violated her highest duty because her political beliefs were
opposed to the policy that the President had established. Her
disclosure was politically motivated. She wanted to thwart the
policy of the President, and she achieved her goal by committing a
felony. McCarthy should be prosecuted and punished to the fullest
extent the law allows. As should her fellow CIA leakers and
manipulators of policy.
McCarthy was not alone among the CIA’s analysts and decision
makers. As I have written many times, the CIA has been in open
revolt against the President since 9-11. Failing to foresee the
fall of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks before, including
and after 9-11, and just about everything else that mattered, the
CIA has been an utter failure in the mission it was created to
perform. Instead, it has been operating covertly against the
government by mounting operations such as the Joe Wilson Niger
trip, which was planned and performed only to discredit the
President’s position that Iraq was seeking uranium for a revived
nuclear weapons program. CIA bureaucrats have been spending a lot
of time and effort to discredit the President while fighting
against the change that will transform it from the failure it has
been to an agency that can meet the needs of a nation at war. And
in doing so it has fueled the opposition press with these
leaks.
America’s free press is supposed to be one of the guardians of
our freedom. But while the press is free it must also be
responsible, and in this it fails comprehensively. The New York
Times published the stories of the NSA terrorist surveillance
program even after the President made a personal appeal to maintain
the secrecy of one of our most highly valued secret programs
(probably leaked by McCarthy’s CIA pals or their cohorts in NSA and
other agencies).
We are at war. Every American, regardless of his job, has a duty
to protect the interests of this nation and to place his loyalty to
our nation above his own career or political agenda. We aren’t
talking about Washington gossip, little secrets leaked by little
people to raise their status from a “B-list” guest to the “A-list”
for the right cocktail parties. We are talking about the essentials
for fighting this war that, if revealed as the NSA program and the
CIA secret prisons were, can mean the difference between winning
the war and enabling our enemies to hit us again as they did on
9-11.
The liberal media is so consumed with its hatred for George Bush
that it has lost any sense of loyalty to our nation. This year it
gave its highest professional award — the Pulitzer Prize — to
Dana Priest for her CIA prisons stories and to James Risen, the
New York Times reporter who wrote the stories that
revealed the NSA terrorist surveillance program. There is not even
a debate among the press about whether these reporters should be
chastised instead of rewarded. To the contrary, these Pulitzer
Prizes make every reporter more eager to discover and publish
America’s secrets regardless of the consequences to our soldiers
and our nation.
How many times have we seen the president subjected to lectures
about introspection and demands for apologies by the White House
press corps? If reporters, editors and publishers were publicly
subjected to that same critical examination they might regain their
sense of responsibility to the nation. And they might, in a moment
of private introspection, regain the perspective that freedom of
the press is not the only essential right enshrined in the
Constitution. If a free press is not responsible, it cannot be a
defender of freedom. It can become the enemy of all who fight in
defense of our way of life. What will they publish next?
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are
Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004) and the forthcoming book
(with Edward Timperlake) Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United
States (Regnery, May 2006).
