A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

There is--as one might expect--an awful lot of apologizing for Mary McCarthy in this story:

In 1998, when President Bill Clinton ordered military strikes against a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan, Mary O. McCarthy, a senior intelligence officer assigned to the White House, warned the president that the plan relied on inconclusive intelligence, two former government officials say.

Ms. McCarthy's reservations did not stop the attack on the factory, which was carried out in retaliation for Al Qaeda's bombing of two American embassies in East Africa. But they illustrated her willingness to challenge intelligence data and methods endorsed by her bosses at the Central Intelligence Agency.

On Thursday, the C.I.A. fired Ms. McCarthy, 61, accusing her of leaking information to reporters about overseas prisons operated by the agency in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. But despite Ms. McCarthy's independent streak, some colleagues who worked with her at the White House and other offices during her intelligence career say they cannot imagine her as a leaker of classified information.

As a senior National Security Council aide for intelligence from 1996 to 2001, she was responsible for guarding some of the nation's most important secrets.

"We're talking about a person with great integrity who played by the book and, as far as I know, never deviated from the rules," said Steven Simon, a security council aide in the Clinton administration who worked closely with Ms. McCarthy.

Others said it was possible that Ms. McCarthy -- who made a contribution to Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 -- had grown increasingly disenchanted with the methods adopted by the Bush administration for handling Qaeda prisoners.

Ms. McCarthy, who began attending law school at night several years ago and was preparing to retire from the C.I.A., may have felt she had no alternative but to go to the press.

I beg to differ. I can think of at least one alternative: Don't leak classified information. We do not, after all, have any serious way to quantify what is a good leak and what is a bad one (except that some people appear to think that a good leak is one that harms Republicans), so perhaps it is a good idea to not leak when something is marked "CLASSIFIED."

Yes, I know, there will be those who protest and say that with this rule in place, no one will ever learn anything about the evil that lurks in the heart of some government officials. And yes, I know, there will be those who say that a CLASSIFIED stamp on a particular document should not mean as much as I seem to indicate it should mean; documents are classified on a somewhat willy-nilly basis. But note that these people really won't do much legwork in determining what constitutes a good leak and what constitutes a bad one, beyond merely equating the term "good" with "beneficial to my side of the partisan divide." If they went further than that, perhaps it would be easier to have a serious conversation with them about the policy ramifications afoot.

Until then . . .

(Cross posted on RedState.)