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July 23, 2006
Blogger Fired from CIA for Comments on Classified Server
The only thing that would make this story perfect is if this woman is a blonde:
A contract employee working for the Central Intelligence Agency said she had been fired recently for posting a message on a classified computer server that said an interrogation technique used by the agency against some terror suspects amounted to torture.
The employee, Christine Axsmith, kept the “Covert Communications” blog on a top-secret computer network used by American intelligence agencies. Ms. Axsmith was fired on Monday after C.I.A. officials objected to a message that criticized the interrogation technique called “waterboarding,” a particularly harsh practice that the C.I.A. is known to have used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who is widely regarded as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
She is getting paid for this? There's more:
Ms. Axsmith, a computer security expert with a law degree [like that matters], posted the message this month, shortly after the Bush administration decided to grant some protections of the Geneva Conventions to suspected terrorists in American custody. She said that her message began, “Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong.”
Ms. Axsmith’s firing was earlier reported on several blogs including Wonkette.com on Thursday, and in Friday’s Washington Post.
A computer security expert decides she's also a human rights attorney.
“I wanted an in-house discussion,” Ms. Axsmith said in an interview on Thursday in her home in Washington. “Something where I would be educating people on the background of the Geneva Conventions."
Instead, Ms. Axsmith was fired by her employer, B.A.E. Systems, which has an information technology contract with the C.I.A.
Ah, yes. She wanted to educate people on the Geneva Conventions and instead learned about a little thing called "at will employment."
Besides losing her job, Ms. Axsmith also lost her top-secret security clearance, which she had held since 1993 and used for previous work for the State Department and National Counterterrorism Center.
She said she feared that her career in the intelligence world was over. “It was like I was wiped out,” she said.
Too bad, so sad. Cutting her teath at the State Department during the Clinton administration is the likely reason she lost all since of reality and perspective.
Posted by Aaron at July 23, 2006 10:42 AM
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