The White House also has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials.

But government officials familiar with the matter confirmed to NEWSWEEK that McCarthy, a 20-year veteran of the CIA's intelligence--or analytical-- branch, was the individual in question.

Today at Informed Comment, we are going to play the game of "All Right, Not All Right," known in Washington, DC, as "business as usual," but otherwise castigated by the moral philosophers as hypocrisy.

She violated her highest duty because her political beliefs were opposed to the policy that the President had established. Her disclosure was politically motivated. She wanted to thwart the policy of the President, and she achieved her goal by committing a felony. McCarthy should be prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent the law allows. As should her fellow CIA leakers and manipulators of policy. McCarthy took advantage of the position she had been entrusted and violated her legal obligations. Serving in the CIA's inspector general's office, she had a special responsibility. The IG's office is legally authorized to be privy to compartmented information, the highest level of classification. Other CIA employees only see bits and pieces of such information because the compartmentalization system is designed to prevent all but a few top people to see all the pieces and know what they mean in the larger context. She violated her highest duty because her political beliefs

The liberal media is so consumed with its hatred for George Bush that it has lost any sense of loyalty to our nation. This year it gave its highest professional award -- the Pulitzer Prize -- to Dana Priest for her CIA prisons stories and to James Risen, the New York Times reporter who wrote the stories that revealed the NSA terrorist surveillance program. There is not even a debate among the press about whether these reporters should be chastised instead of rewarded.

You have to put this in context. The Bush administration has been conducting a purge of intelligence analysts. Now this would not necessarily be a bad thing if the analysts being forced out were the ones responsible for promoting some of the faulty intelligence that Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq. However, they are not doing that. Instead they are trying to get rid of those analysts who do not show enough political loyalty, in other words, they want to reward the very syncophants who will give Bush what he wants to hear even if it is unreliable and leads to disastrous consequences like Iraq. For the Bush administration political loyalty trumps everything else, including loyalty to one's country. I can think of some people who have been punished for speaking truth to power during the Bush administration. Can anyone think of a single person who has been in any way punished for passing along the bad intelligence that helped get us into the Iraq mess?

This looks like the beginning of a political purge of career public servants at the CIA -- those whose loyalty is to the facts and the people, not to the White House's political agenda -- with the leak as a handy excuse. For Iraq, independent CIA agents were strongarmed into submission. For any future military action (Iran anyone?), with the White House's credibility now shot, they can't afford to have any dissenting voices in the intelligence community. So perhaps, they're planning to kick them to the curb ahead of time.

"On a scale of one to ten, if Mary McCarthy did what she is accused of doing, it would be at best a six or seven," said one former senior intelligence official, whose position required involvement in numerous leak investigations. "What Pat Roberts did, from a legal and national security point of view, was an eleven."

Noting that McCarthy was only ten days short of retirement, Cobb said: "Her hope had been to leave with her dignity and reputation intact, which obviously did not happen."

On a scale of one to ten, if Mary McCarthy did what she is accused of doing, it would be at best a six or seven," said one former senior intelligence official,

On a scale of one to ten, if Mary McCarthy did what she is accused of doing, it would be at best a six or seven," said one former senior intelligence official,

"What Pat Roberts did, from a legal and national security point of view, was an eleven."