The CIA announced today that it has fired an employee for leaking classified information to the news media.
The termination of the unidentified officer was announced to CIA employees yesterday after an internal investigation of the leaks. The terminated officer failed a polygraph examination, according to an agency official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"A CIA officer has been fired for unauthorized contacts with the media and for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano confirmed in a brief telephone interview. "The officer has acknowledged these contacts." He said the disclosures violated a secrecy agreement that every CIA employee signs as a condition of employment with the agency.
The CIA declined to identify the employee by name, assignment, gender or any other characteristic, citing the Privacy Act.
Now that's the official government spin. Now here's the fun reason for this CIA employee's firing:
The information included highly classified material regarding a network of secret CIA prisons in foreign nations in which terrorist suspects were held, the official said. The prison system was revealed by The Washington Post last year. The Post's Dana Priest won the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting this week for her stories about the secret prisons and other national security matters.
The fired employee is said to have given information not only to Priest but to other reporters as well.
This CIA employee was a whistle-blower. He saw that the Bush neocons wanted to build these secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, so that suspected al Qaida terrorists could be held there indefinitely, without any sort of trial or legal counsel given to these suspects. Of course, the Bush White House didn't like the fact that these secret prisons were exposed, as their own actions were pretty much breaking U.S. law. So, the Bush White House had to get back by finding out who leaked this embarrassing scandal. Continuing on with the White House spin:
CIA Director Porter J. Goss told Congress earlier this year that the agency was determined to get to the bottom of CIA leaks about such matters as the secret prisons, saying the disclosures had caused serious damage to U.S. national security.
"The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission," Goss testified in February. He told lawmakers that he wanted to see a federal grand jury empaneled to investigate the source of intelligence leaks.
In addition to the CIA's internal investigation, the Justice Department reportedly has launched a probe of the leaks with a view to the possible filing of criminal charges.
Why doesn't that spin surprise me? The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission! In secret, of course, without any Congressional oversight. The damage here is that the Bush administration couldn't operate their secret prisons, where they could employ torture techniques or just let these prisoners rot in their cells. That is the simple issue regarding this story. Throughout this post-911 period, the Bush White House has been pushing this extreme view that terrorist suspects are "enemy combatants," that have no U.S. or international legal rights. The Bush administration has been fighting this legal battle regarding the al Qaida prisoners at its Guantanimo Bay prison. So instead of moving suspected prisoners to Gitmo, where the White House could be forced to allow legal counsel and trials against these suspects held in U.S. prisons, the Bush administration decided to skirt the issue by holding these suspected terrorists in Eastern European prisons, where they would not be subjected to legal rights under U.S. law.
But the Bush White House was caught in pursuing this despicable act. And this whistle-blower is paying for it.
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