CIA officer purged for objecting to lies -- shocking

Fired Officer Believed CIA Lied to Congress
Colleagues Say McCarthy Learned of Denials About Detainees' Treatment

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 14, 2006; A01

A senior CIA official, meeting with Senate staff in a secure room of the Capitol last June, promised repeatedly that the agency did not violate or seek to violate an international treaty that bars cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees, during interrogations it conducted in the Middle East and elsewhere.

But another CIA officer -- the agency's deputy inspector general, who for the previous year had been probing allegations of criminal mistreatment by the CIA and its contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan -- was startled to hear what she considered an outright falsehood, according to people familiar with her account. It came during the discussion of legislation that would constrain the CIA's interrogations.

That CIA officer was Mary O. McCarthy, 61, who was fired on April 20 for allegedly sharing classified information with journalists, including Washington Post journalist Dana Priest. A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that "CIA people had lied" in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading.

(The rest of the story is here.)

TM note: I worked with McCarthy at the NSC. The Post article seems to have described her accurately. Her firing appears to me to be a political purge, something that is completely in character for Porter Goss's CIA.