All Blog Posts from Public Eye

America’s writers are taking home run swings at the home run king – even when it’s a bit outside the journalistic strike zone.

With Barry Bonds having tied the all-time longball record Saturday night – he'll be looking to break it tonight through Thursday against my Nats – it's gotten to the point where almost anything that can be said about him is being said about him.

Take for example today’s exclusive -- Oh, wait. I mean: take for example today’s EXCLUSIVE story about Bonds. (You know something’s big when it’s all caps.)

In today’s piece, Barry Bonds is not just a steroid user, but also something of a cyborg. A mechanical protective guard he places on his right elbow is now being viewed with suspicion. According to the EXCLUSIVE from Michael Witte, an illustrator who studies pitcher’s mechanics for baseball teams:

Beyond his alleged steroid use, Barry Bonds is unquestionably guilty of the use of something that confers extraordinarily unfair mechanical advantage: the “armor” that he wears on his right elbow. Amid the press frenzy over Bonds’ unnatural bulk, the true role of the object on his right arm has simply gone unnoticed.

This is unfortunate, because by my estimate, Bonds’ front arm “armor” has contributed no fewer than 75 to 100 home runs to his already steroid-questionable total.

I’d heard a lot of things about Barry Bonds – being a frequent and pathetic listener of sports radio – but had never heard somebody try to pin down an exact number of homers that his arm guard helped with. And I wasn’t quite sure how one would generate such a number.

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As we’ve been debating the issue of Mary McCarthy, the CIA officer fired last week, we’d be remiss by not noting for the record the denials made by her attorney in The Washington Post this morning. McCarthy, who had reportedly been fired for leaking classified information to reporters, including The Post’s Dana Priest, is now saying those reports are inaccurate. From The Post this a.m.:

A lawyer representing fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy said yesterday that his client did not leak any classified information and did not disclose to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest the existence of secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected terrorists.

The statement by Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the Washington office of Hogan & Hartson who said he was speaking for McCarthy, came on the same day that a senior intelligence official said the agency is not asserting that McCarthy was a key source of Priest's award-winning articles last year disclosing the agency's secret prisons.

McCarthy was fired because the CIA concluded that she had undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Priest, in violation of a security agreement. That does not mean she revealed the existence of the prisons to Priest, Cobb said.

And more:

Though McCarthy acknowledged having contact with reporters, a senior intelligence official confirmed yesterday that she is not believed to have played a central role in The Post's reporting on the secret prisons. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing personnel matters.

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This afternoon, I spoke to CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin to get a little context on the firing of Mary McCarthy, the CIA intelligence analyst who reportedly leaked classified information to the media about a network of secret CIA prisons.

Martin told me that people get outed as sources and punished "with greater regularity than people think."

"People get injured by being identified as a source," he said. "I can think of two people who were removed from their jobs at the National Security Council staff. They were put in dead end jobs. It effectively ended their careers in government."

Martin also discussed the circumstances that led the agency to aggressively seek out the sources for the story, noting that the Washington Post sourced its Pulitzer Prize winning story to current and former intelligence officers. "If they had just said intelligence sources, would that have prevented them from going after people still on the payroll? I don't know," he said. He noted, however, that the Post met with officials before publishing the story, and revealed to them that it had specific information about the location of the prisons. "They had pretty specific information and I think it would be logical for the government to assume that somebody who had the clearances for the program had to be a source," he said.

He lauded the Post for apparently describing its sources accurately. "Contrast that with Scooter Libby telling Judy Miller that some of that info he was giving her should have been attributed to a 'former hill staffer,'" he said.

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What responsibility do the Washington Post and other media outlets have in the matter of Mary McCarthy, the CIA intelligence analyst who was reportedly fired for leaking classified information to the media about a network of secret CIA prisons?

The Post's Dana Priest, you might recall, won a Pulitzer Prize for its story on the prisons, which US government officials have said damaged relationships between US and foreign intelligence agencies. The question now for the newspaper is to what degree to support McCarthy. The Post's David Broder articulated his understanding of the paper's position on yesterday's Meet The Press:

Well, I think the view that my paper has is that it's the government's responsibility to keep the government secrets secret. And the internal discipline that they have applied is basically their business.

I have to say that using lie detectors on government employees is a pretty extreme measure. I remember when George Schultz was secretary of state, and somebody proposed that they use lie detectors on him, and he said, "I'm out of here if you want to do that." But I have to say, as journalists, we have to let the government deal with its internal processes themselves.

That may seem a little harsh, because the Post clearly benefited from McCarthy's willingness to leak; now that she's been found out, the Post runs the risk of being seen as leaving her out to dry. Doing something on her behalf, however, would cause its own problems: If the Post were to provide her legal defense or financial support, it could justifiably be accused of an improper relationship with its source. McCarthy did know the risks of her decision to leak, after all. It's just somewhat troubling that while the Post basks in the glow of its Pulitzer, she's suffering the consequences.

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