We were going to write in praise of fired CIA official Mary O. McCarthy for her assumed role in leaking the details of the Bush Administration’s network of overseas secret prisons for captured terrorist suspects, but then the admirable lady threw a monkey wrench into our plans by denying that she had done so.

We call McCarthy “admirable” because her career suggests that that is what she is. When she worked in the Clinton White House handling liaison between the National Security Council and the CIA and other intelligence outfits, she was so disturbed by what she considered to be the sketchy evidence on which President Clinton based his decision to bomb a Sudanese drug factory suspected of being a terrorist cover that she went through official channels and personally wrote Clinton a vigorous letter that is seen today as something of a rebuke.

This nugget of seemingly ancient history is relevant today because Washington is not a city that cherishes soreheads. It takes courage and conviction for a relatively faceless government functionary to go up against a president. So at minimum, we should consider McCarthy a woman of substance — even if she’s not the leaker who wounded Bush.

The fact that she is a person of substance — as opposed to suspected leaker Karl Rove and indicted leaker Scooter Libby, who, with the connivance of Vice-President Dick Cheney, blew the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame — makes McCarthy a perfect scapegoat for the sleazebag Bush administration.

To the vicious thugs employed by Bush, it was bad enough that McCarthy worked for Clinton. She further demonstrated her expendability by contributing $2000 to the presidential campaign of Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Democracy, or at least the Republican version of it, is something you export to Iraq, not something you respect or practice at home.

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Washington is a city, if not of frequent lies, at least of constant illusions. Things are rarely what they seem to be. It’s possible for Valerie Plame to be a woman professionally wronged by Bush and for her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, to be a smarmy self-server who nevertheless did the nation a service, first by determining that Saddam had not acquired the uranium necessary to build atomic weapons, and then by going public with the news.

In the hit-and-run culture of Washington, it is easy to find scapegoats. And at the time that we are writing this, it appears that that is what McCarthy is: another scapegoat for the criminally inept Bush administration.

Consider the sequence of events. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker captures international headlines with the news that Bush is contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s fledgling nuclear-weapons effort; Dana Priest of the Washington Post wins a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the news that Bush maintains a secret network of overseas prisons; James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times win a Pulitzer Prize for their exposé of Bush’s warrantless domestic wiretapping; the highly political CIA director Porter Goss dismisses McCarthy; the news is leaked to MSNBC; over the weekend, newspapers nationwide carry reports of McCarthy’s dismissal for her presumed leak to Priest. Bingo. Scapegoat found. The message is loud and clear: leakers will be punished — unless they are the president and the vice-president, of course.

Once again, the supposedly fearsome and adversarial national press corps did a piss-poor job with the story. It’s true that McCarthy declined any comment. But even a cursory glance at Priest’s well-sourced story would have revealed that she relied on multiple, perhaps even dozens of, sources. But the Bushies accomplished their goal. They constructed a false reality that McCarthy was the one responsible for Priest’s devastating scoop.

The lies of the Bush administration are legion. And these people will stop at little to silence their critics and to intimidate those who are even thinking about going public with criticism. That’s what this latest bout of McCarthyism is all about: intimidating whistle blowers and scaring the press away from printing their stories.

That said, McCarthy’s role — real, imagined, or concocted — is almost beside the point.

As Senator Kerry, drawing a parallel between McCarthy’s situation and the Plame case, said: “You have someone being fired from the CIA for allegedly telling the truth, and you have no one fired from the White House for revealing a CIA agent in order to support a lie. That’s what’s really wrong in Washington.”

Is it possible that McCarthy, despite her denials through second-party spokespeople, is in some way involved in the Priest revelations? With all due respect to McCarthy, we’re sad to say that, this being Washington, anything is possible.

Could McCarthy be guilty of little more than consorting with the press? That, too, is possible.

What is most likely is that the Bush administration stage-managed a charade, the details of which will become apparent in the coming weeks or months.

Whoever leaked to the Post, the Times, the New Yorker, and other outlets determined enough to report the truth deserves this nation’s unrestrained gratitude.

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers, he revealed the lies with which the Johnson administration prosecuted the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration, which had its own lies to worry about, tried but failed to put him in jail.

Those who blow the whistle during the Bush administration may not be so lucky. And this time, there is no reason to believe that those who do the leaking will be the only ones to face imprisonment. The press is the next logical target. Bush will stop at nothing, unless the nation makes it clear that it won’t tolerate him. But so great is this man’s arrogance that he seems unrestrained by the latest polls, which show that only 32 percent of the nation endorses his rule while 60 percent disapproves of it.