McCaffrey: The Back Story

David Barstow's superb account of the corrupt relationship between Barry R. McCaffrey and the broadcast networks (in today's NYT) is a special case of a general scandal Barstow spotlighted last spring. In an NYT Q&A on the earlier piece, Barstow explained why he didn't publish sooner:

...it took us two years to wrestle 8,000 pages of documents out of the Defense Department that described its interactions with network military analysts. We pushed as hard as we could, but the Defense Department refused to produce many categories of documents in response to our requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act. We ultimately sued in federal court, yet even then the Pentagon failed to meet several court-ordered deadlines for producing documents. Last week, the judge overseeing our lawsuit threatened the Defense Department with sanctions if it continues to defy his deadlines for producing additional records.

Meanwhile, Glen Greenwald completes the picture with this indictment of NBC and Brian Williams for their shameful role in the business.