In late 2009, the Washington Post closed its last U.S. bureaus outside of the D.C. area, including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. (It also closed bureaus in Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro and Berlin.) But what of its 11 D.C.-area bureaus? Now there will be two.

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And the stories were about Tucson and she's from Tucson. So it didn't make any sense.

And but then, the Post named her today and published her apology, and said they'd looked at all her stories from "this year" (this calendar year?) and spot-checked some older work, and found no other evidence of plagiarism. (I would go a little deeper? But, sure, I know, who has time.)

So she's been suspended for three months, and not fired—because they have both familiarity bias and probably resume bias too. (Also: it would be stupid to fire her anyway.)

But in her apology, she touches on neither how or why it happened, and that's something I'd love to know. How do you end up with 15 paragraphs of someone's story in your own? That's literally impossible to execute as an "oh my sources document got mixed up in my story" maneuver. (I think so, at least? I mean, maybe someday it'll happen to me! Everyone is afraid of doing something stupid.) So but how? It's either a cry for help, a statement of anger at the institution or the act of a person so preoccupied with other things that she no longer is even thinking about her job. In plagiarism cases we so rarely understand why it happened, and this is frustrating, because we almost have a window into finding out.

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Previously: Ad Obliterates 'New Yorker' Website.

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The series to which they referred, "Top Secret America," by Dana Priest and William Arkin, began today and is certainly a barn-burner. It features an enormous database detailing the thousands of complex connections between private business and the evidently-misnamed intelligence community. The story has been tearing up the Internets all day long, even though Priest and Arkin don't really reveal much that we didn't already know, or at least that we didn't suspect: the government is a mess! 9/11 persuaded everyone that we ought to throw every available dollar into "fighting" the "terrorists," which somehow translates into reading everyone's email and forcing you to pour shampoo into tiny bottles every time you want to get on an airplane!

Ka-ching for "security" companies all round, as every bit of information that can be vacuumed up is recorded eight times and then dumped into a dozen different computer systems that can't talk to each other! The government's secret intelligence-gathering has cratered into a bottomless pit of wasteful, pointless, expensive makework that is not making Americans any safer, but is instead reaping huge profits for the herds of greedy contractors who aid them in recording so much information that nobody will ever in a million years find the few bits that might ever have been of any use.

And we kind of knew this part, too, but the scale of the intelligence ramp-up in the last decade really is astounding:

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

It's the detail that clinches the deal, here. The amount of work that went into the preparation of the story is monumental. A volvelle-like chart breaks out the top-secret work done by each agency; the searchable database names nearly 2,000 companies involved in top-secret work, and furnishes the locations of over 10,000 locations all over the country where such work is performed. My favorite one is this!

In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building.

Someone please explain this to me. It's an office building cleverly designed to look like an office building? It's that there are no real windows, I suppose, so that Jason Bourne won't be able to get a look in.

Emptywheel and Rayne over at Firedoglake have already got spectacular analysis of Top Secret America.

Emptywheel:

I've got a ton of respect for Priest's reporting and therefore would guess that the article is designed to reveal the truth about the IC and DoD. And yet the intelligence community, inside its bunker, perceives a search for the truth as a design to portray it unfavorably.

What an apt explanation, then, for the problem with excessive contracting: when a reporter avails herself of Constitutionally protected rights to act as a watchdog on our government and its contractors, the government itself assumes that must be an attack. Hell, the IC has had time to preemptively respond to some of the problems Priest is about to reveal (and, as I said, Shorrock gave them a head start two years ago). [That would be Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire.]

Rayne:

But note, too, that the military itself has had ample time and opportunity to deal with the issue of scale. Recall that last November the House Oversight Committee requested a head count of contractors and subcontractors from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, giving him 30 days to provide the numbers.

It does not appear that this information has yet been furnished, nearly eight months later. If it has, it's not been widely reported. And we already knew that there were extremely large variances between contractor numbers reported by different groups.

The situation makes for a lot of interesting questions:

o Why is ODNI squirming about revelations from WaPo's Priest, but not the Pentagon?
o Why aren't the contractor/subcontractor numbers being disseminated widely?
o How many of the intelligence contractors aren't actually contracted by CIA but by DIA?
o Just how many of these intelligence contractors are not only working in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in places the American public at large doesn't think of as threats – like Central and South America?
o And how many of them are in Pakistan – intel or military – in which local sources report a very large complex rivaling the U.S. embassy in Baghdad is being built and guarded by private security contractors?

I've got two questions myself. One is, what was the exact role of Wikileaks, if any, in helping the Post reporters gather their material? Their coy Saturday tweet wasn't the first word on Priest's project; Marc Ambinder, The Raw Story and others noted on Friday the panic among intelligence officials rising in advance of Monday's Post. But I've noticed that @Wikileaks doesn't seem to comment much on stories they've not been involved in themselves.

My second question is, will the rats really leave, just because someone turned the lights on? Seriously, how are they to be removed? I hope that prediction is accurate, but these aren't ordinary rats, one feels compelled to observe. These are like, rats with billion-dollar defense contracts. Rats at an infinite trough of hot bread that just keeps right on comin'.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

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In your "interactive poll" on whether it is too soon for Tiger Woods to return to playing golf, you instructed those who selected the "not sure" response to "please explain in the comments." So here is my explanation for responding that way.

Normally I would say yes, of course it is too soon. After all, Tiger Woods apparently committed adultery, and therefore should probably never be allowed to play golf again for the rest of his life. Or, at the very least, I think he should be prevented from playing golf for a very long time. Many years from now, when he's in his 60s perhaps, he might be allowed to return and play on that old-man tour if he told us again how very sorry he is – but certainly not now.

Despite my certainty on this point, however, I chose "not sure" because it I had to consider a few conditions under which it might, in fact, be appropriate for him return to professional golf today. For example, if he played while wearing a large, red letter "A" on his Nike golf shirt, that might be acceptable. But I don't know if Woods would be willing to do that, which accounts for at least part of the uncertainty expressed in my poll response.

Furthermore, this "scarlet letter" plan would raise a few uncertainties of its own. For example, what if the public were to mistake the letter for some kind of corporate-sponsorship logo? One way to counter this would be to require that an asterisk appear next to the A, along with a footnote on the back of his shirt that says: "*THIS MEANS I AM AN ADULTERER." But then he might do something to hide the footnote, like tying a sweater around his waist. They could assess a one-stroke penalty every time he did that, of course – but only if they invented a special rule in advance to cover that situation.

So you see, Washington Post, deciding on when this man should be able to return to work is a complicated matter that involves many issues. While some people may be inclined to rush to judgment, I like to be fair and consider all sides of a question like this before coming down with a firm "yes" or "no." After all, this is a man's career we're talking about.

Yours truly,

Ned in Connecticut

Ned Frey is a corporate writer who pens occasional reality show linkbait posts for Gawker as "MisterHippity."

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The newspaper division's annual loss was actually 15% less than last year-even while 2009's revenues were down 15% from last year. So this year, they had an operating loss of only $163 million-while for 2008 that loss was almost $193 million. (Last year: terrible. This year: bad.)

The company's magazine arm, however, had a significant downturn. That division "had an operating loss in 2009 of $29.3 million, compared to an operating loss of $16.1 million in 2008." So revenues for magazines there were down 27% over last year.

There was a similar decrease in their profitable television division, even! Revenue for that department was down 16% in 2009 from 2008, though it had an operating profit.

So let's look at some recent history!

The operating income of the newspaper division in 2005: $125,359,000
The operating income of the newspaper division in 2006 $63,389,000.

That's a decline of almost 50% between 2005 and 2006.

In 2007, however, they held pretty much steady with operating income of $66,434,000.

So you can imagine that their operating loss in 2008 of $193 million was stunning.

Let's look back at the trending of the newspaper division's yearly pure revenue, setting aside the final income numbers:

2003: $872,754,000
2004: $938,066,000
2005: $957,082,000
2006: 961,905,000
2007: $889,827,000
2008: $801,265,000
2009: $679,282,000

So revenue began trending down from a 2006 high and then, in 2009, massively sagged. I don't really need to graph that for you, do I?

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