United States: The sacking of CIA analyst Mary McCarthy for leaking details of a network of secret prisons throughout the world has sparked a debate in Washington over the ethics of disclosing secrets.
The CIA sacked Ms McCarthy (61) last week after she failed a lie detector test and admitted passing information to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. Ms Priest won a Pulitzer prize for her reports last November about the secret prisons, some of which were sited in eastern Europe.
Senate intelligence chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, said that Ms McCarthy deserved to lose her job and should face prosecution.
"Those guilty of improperly disclosing classified information should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," he said.
The sacked intelligence analyst's supporters argue that she leaked the information as part of her duty to expose government activities she believed to be unlawful.
"This is a matter of principle where she said my oath, my promise not to reveal secrets is superseded by my oath to defend the constitution of the United States," former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told ABC News.
An expert on Africa who has written a social history of Ghana, Ms McCarthy was a National Security Council aide under the Clinton administration from 1996 to 2001. She is reported to have opposed a 1998 US attack on a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan, warning that the intelligence was inconclusive.
The administration later admitted that the strongest evidence linking the factory to chemical weapons was a single soil sample.
Ms McCarthy testified to the September 11th commission about the reorganisation of the intelligence agencies and at the time of her sacking she worked in the CIA's inspectorate general.
The Bush administration was so anxious about the secret prisons leak that it put pressure on the Washington Post not to report the story. CIA director Porter Goss wrote in the New York Times that the leak had helped America's enemies and undermined his agency's relationships with foreign intelligence agencies.
"Such leaks also cause our intelligence partners around the globe to question our professionalism and credibility. Too many of my counterparts from other countries have told me, 'You Americans can't keep a secret'," he said.
Democrats have accused the Bush administration of hypocrisy over leaks, in view of revelations that the president ordered classified material to be leaked to a sympathetic journalist. A special prosecutor is investigating the White House leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
On Saturday, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice dismissed as "utterly false" a lawyer's claim that she leaked national defence information to a lobbyist from the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, who is charged with receiving and disclosing such information.
The CIA is viewed with suspicion by some in the Bush administration and intelligence officers are angry that "faulty intelligence" is blamed for the decision to invade Iraq.
In an interview due to be broadcast on CBS's 60 Minutes last night, the former highest-ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, claims that the administration ignored crucial information obtained by the CIA.
Saddam Hussein's foreign minister Naji Sabri had done a deal with the CIA but when he reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction programmes, the White House lost interest. The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested.