Reuters reports that the EU report on secret prisons got much of its information from anonymous US intelligence officers.
Dissident U.S. intelligence officers angry at former DefenseSecretary Donald Rumsfeld helped a European probe uncover details ofsecret CIA prisons in Europe, the top investigator said on Tuesday. Â
SwissSenator Dick Marty, author of a Council of Europe report on the jails,said senior CIA officials disapproved of Rumsfeld’s methods in huntingdown terrorist suspects, and had agreed to talk to him on condition ofanonymity.
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"There were huge conflicts between the CIA andRumsfeld. Many leading figures in the CIA did not accept these methodsat all," Marty told European Parliament committees, defending his workagainst complaints it was based on unnamed sources.
Which makes me wonder where Mary McCarthy is now. You remember–she was the CIA’s Deputy Inspector General fired last year for allegedly leaking classified information, including details on the secret prisons in Poland and Romania.
But another CIA officer — the agency’s deputy inspector general,who for the previous year had been probing allegations of criminalmistreatment 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 thediscussion of legislation that would constrain the CIA’s interrogations.
ThatCIA officer was Mary O. McCarthy, 61, who was fired on April 20 forallegedly sharing classified information with journalists, includingWashington 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 hadconducted abusive interrogations but also because its policiesauthorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading.
WhetherMcCarthy’s conviction that the CIA was hiding unpleasant truthsprovoked her to leak sensitive information is known only to her and thejournalists she is alleged to have spoken with last year. But thepicture of her that emerges from interviews with more than a dozenformer colleagues is of an independent-minded analyst who becameconvinced that on multiple occasions the agency had not given accurateor complete information to its congressional overseers.
I think it relevant to ask because it sure seems like we’ve got a lot of potential witnesses to Rummy’s abuse out there, just waiting to speak to the appropriate authority. Now that we’re in the majority, why aren’t we contacting these people?