Plumbing

So, the CIA has fired Mary McCarthy for leaking information about the "secret CIA prisons" in Europe. This is a bit confusing to me, becaue just a couple of days ago I heard that the EU had found that there was no substantial evidence that these secret prisons exist. If these prisons don't exist, then what information did McCarthy reveal that led to the firing? I can only surmise that the EU roport is wrong, and that the "secret prisons" were (or might still be) just a well hidden secret. Besides, I think that the EU report was just about the program being conducted in member countries. I don't know whether it also covered non-EU countries in Eastern Europe.

I really don't care either way. If you take terrorists alive, you have to keep them somewhere, so it may as well be on foriegn soil as domestic, if the host country gives permission, and it really makes very little sense to advertise the capture of possible intelligence sources. Better for the enemy to think that the disappearence of one of their agents means that said agent is dead rather than giving away all of their secrets. And still better to have the facility controlled by an agency of the United States, where we can be reasonably assured that the inmates are at least moderately well taken care of than they be victims of that Clinton administration invention, the practice of rendition.

Should McCarthy have been fired? If she did give away information about secret holding areas, yes, though from news reports it seems that she has admitted that she has done so. She gave away information to the enemy about our tactics that obviously would hurt our ability to use the prisoners as intelligence sources, and also hurt our relationships with some countries that had been helping in the War on Terror. Should she be tried for her the crimes? I qould have to give a qualified yes to that question. She should only be prosecuted if it can be done in such a way that other classified information is not made public as a result. If the prosecutors need to reveal too much to get a conviction, then I would argue that it would be the lesser of two evils to let her get away with her alleged crimes than to put the public at risk by revealing our tactics.