The article doesn’t convince me. It talks about people losing their security clearance after going to the press, which seems the minimum penalty one would expect. Going to the press isn’t part of the whistle-blower procedures.

It was difficult to tell from the other examples given how far the official process went in any of those cases.

If the whistle-blower program is broken, that is a big story and very important. If that is true, and Mary McCarthy wanted to serve her country she should have followed the procedure and then, if she could show that the process was broken, go to the press with that story, which is vastly more important that secret prisons.

The story would have contained who blocked her and how, her attempts to get action from intelligence committee lawmakers and how that failed. That would be a very important story.

I haven’t seen any evidence at all that any of this happened.

I don’t know enough about the Mary McCarthy case to know if that excuses her alleged disclosures or not. Just passing on some relevant data.

I actually agree with her premise that there are times when a person’s moral code demands the breaking of laws. In this case, she has argued that her oath to the constitution superceded her oath to not reveal secrets.

I agree, too. But there’s this: when you take a grand principled stand in defiance of the law, you expect to be punished. The insistence that she can’t or shouldn’t be punished because she followed her conscience is very wrongheaded.