CIA purge: No news in Denver

All you folks in from Jeff Goldstein's place, make yourself at home. If your local paper carried the Times story, let me know. It would be interesting to know if it's missing the same information.

So. The CIA fires classified-info leaker Mary McCarthy on Thursday, news breaks Friday and it's all over the blogosphere. I go out to the driveway Saturday morning (in pajamas, of course!) to get my newspaper and start looking for the story.

It's on page A25 of the Rocky Mountain News. Page. Twenty. Five.

Today's follow-up, at least, is on page 6A of the Denver Post (the Post and Rocky have a joint operating agreement; Rocky on Saturday, Post on Sunday). It's the David Cloud article from the New York Times, "Fired CIA agent 'played by the book'." That's the headline in the Post; in the Times it was "Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by the Rules."

If you want to know more about the story, A.J. Strata's got it covered and Michelle Malkin has all the links. This post concerns coverage.

The story in the Post struck me as a little strange, because I'd already read a lot of excerpts from the Times story. For one thing, it seemed short. The Times story was over 1,500 words. The Post, oddly, doesn't have the story on its web site, and I'm not going to count the words, but let's just say it's shorter. The Post story and the version in the Times also have completely different ledes, so I'll grant that maybe the Times moved a truncated version over the wire.

But somebody at one of the papers did a lot of very selective editing. So what's missing? Any indication that anyone in the intelligence community felt Mary McCarthy had done a bad thing. Any indication that she might have been acting out of partisanship. Any indication that she admitted to going to the Washington Post instead of going through channels to air her grievances, as she had done during the Clinton administration.

Let's forget for the moment the, shall we say, questionable news judgment of downplaying the story of a purge of unelected bureaucrats who've been at war with the elected government of this country since at least the summer of 2003. If you live in Denver and the Post and Rocky are the only places you get your news (and I imagine there's even less detail on TV), here's what you don't know:

-- McCarthy admitted to leaking. This isn't just an accusation. She flunked a lie detector test, she was confronted, and, according to the Times, "she disclosed having had conversations with reporters."

-- Mary McCarthy was not universally held in high esteem, even by anti-Bush ex-CIA types like Michael Scheuer. The Times:

Some former intelligence officials who worked with Ms. McCarthy saw her as a persistent obstacle to aggressive anti-terrorism efforts.

"She was always of the view that she would rather not get her hands dirty with covert action," said Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. official ...

-- She might have disgruntlement issues. The Times:

When President Bush took office in 2001, Ms. McCarthy's career seemed to stall. A former Bush administration official who worked with her said that although Ms. McCarthy was a career C.I.A. employee, as a holdover from the Clinton administration she was regarded with suspicion and was gradually eased out of her job as senior director for intelligence programs.

-- She was partisan. The Times, wonder of wonders, notes that she contributed $2,000 to the Kerry campaign. What the Times didn't mention, but which bloggers quickly discovered thanks to opensecrets.org and the FEC website, was that her (assumed) husband also contributed $2,000 to Kerry, and that she also contributed $5,000 to the Ohio Democratic Party. I'd venture a guess that she asked someone at the DNC where five grand would do the most good, and they suggested Ohio.

So I've got questions for Denver's newspapers: Who's responsible for editing out this information? The play you've given the story suggests a) you don't think it's important or b) you think the less your readers know about it, the more likely they are to buy into Democratic talking points.

It's bad enough that elements of the CIA have been at war with the elected government of the United States. It's bad enough too that the news media have been at war with the government as well since it was a government-to-be on November 8, 2000. But we ought to be able to trust the papers to report the facts. And these are facts that haven't been reported in Denver.