Retaliation?

Despite the crowing that conservative commentators and bloggers were doing after the firing of Mary McCarthy from the CIA last month, it's been revealed she actually wasn't fired for any leak related to the secret prisons in Europe...although it took the CIA a few days to clarify that, conveniently. What was she working on though?

McCarthy was drawn into the CIA's wrenching internal debate over treatment of foreign detainees when she was recruited by Inspector General John L. Helgerson in the summer of 2004 to oversee the agency's criminal probe of alleged wrongdoing in the war on Iraq. CIA Director George J. Tenet requested the probe shortly before he was replaced by Goss.

McCarthy's findings are secret. According to a brief CIA statement about the probe in a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, investigators set out to examine "the conduct of CIA components and personnel, including DO personnel" during interrogations. Tens of thousands of pages of material were collected, including White House and Justice Department documents, and multiple reports were issued. Some described cases of abuse, involving fewer than a dozen individuals, and were forwarded to the Justice Department, according to government officials.

Another report, completed in 2004, examined the CIA's interrogation policies and techniques, concluded that they might violate nternational law and made 10 recommendations, which the agency has at least partially adopted. That report jarred some officials, because the Justice Department has contended that the international convention against torture -- barring "cruel, inhumane, and degrading" treatment -- does not apply to U.S. interrogations of foreigners outside the United States.

Hmmm...no secret prisons in there. Though she may have been aware of plenty of other wrong-doing. Whatever her other traits, she apparently has a strong devotion to the rule of law:

"She gave the CIA a very hard time when she thought they were not doing what they were supposed to do," a former colleague recalled. "She wasn't snowed very easily. It is her nature to be a skeptic."

McCarthy tangled with the Directorate of Operations over whether some covert actions were still productive. She concluded that evidence linking a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant with al-Qaeda was thin, and she lodged a dissent with the national security adviser before U.S. cruise missiles were fired at the facility in 1998. She also fought for a year with James L. Pavitt, then the head of the directorate, who opposed a White House-backed plan to deploy pilotless Predator planes over Afghanistan.

In other words, she isn't a partisan; she was doing her job. Which is President Bush's administration, is plenty reason to get you fired.