The Politics of Leaks

ROBERT PARRY
Parry, a former reporter for The Associated Press and Newsweek, has written a number of books about Washington politics including, most recently, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. He said today: “The Bush administration is cracking down on leaks and dissent inside the government not to protect legitimate secrets, but to reclaim control of the information so it can be parceled out in ways most beneficial to the White House. President Bush himself has protected leakers from his inner circle, when the goal was to discredit an Iraq war critic by exposing his CIA-officer wife. Now, Bush’s CIA director is taking extraordinary steps to punish whistle-blowers who disclose illegal behavior by the Bush administration, including cases involving torture and warrantless wiretapping.” Parry is the founder and editor of ConsortiumNews.com.
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LARRY JOHNSON
Johnson is a former CIA employee who also worked at the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, where he was deputy director. In an article titled “The Firing of Mary McCarthy,” he writes: “…Mary McCarthy may have been fired for blowing the whistle and ensuring that the truth about an abuse was told to the American people. There is something potentially honorable in that action; particularly when you consider that George Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak misleading information for the purpose of deceiving the American people about the grounds for going to war in Iraq. While I’m neither a fan nor friend of Mary’s, she may have done a service for her country. She was a lousy manager in my experience, but she is not a traitor and has not betrayed the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. That dirty work was done by the minions of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It is important to keep that fact in the forefront as the judgment on Mary McCarthy’s acts is rendered.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Cynthia Skow, (415) 552-5378; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167