The Times tells the story of Colonel Anthony Shaffer's book, "Operation Dark Heart." The new book is a military memoir that has been heavily censored by the Pentagon. The top brass of our military and intelligence agencies have been shown in recent years to be so incompetent -- and just plain silly -- that only their close ties to private interests keep them alive and unchallenged.
The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security.
Another supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.”
How does the Times know all this if the uncensored first printing was destroyed? Because the Pentagon didn't destroy advance copies. So now every blacked-out word can easily be restored. How come copies of the book got past the censors in advanced mailings?
The Pentagon’s intervention has greatly increased interest in the book: one uncensored copy sold for more than $2,000 this week on eBay, and when the story broke last week, preorders for the new edition pushed the book as high as No. 4 among best sellers on Amazon.
The Defense Department’s handling of Colonel Shaffer’s account of his experiences in Afghanistan in 2003 appears to have been bungled from the beginning. The Army reviewed the manuscript, negotiated modest changes and approved it for publication in January.
Then, in July, the Defense Intelligence Agency saw a copy, showed it to the N.S.A. and other agencies, and decided that some 250 passages contained classified information. But advance copies were already out to potential reviewers and the Military Book Club, and the first 10,000 copies were in a warehouse. Those are the copies the Pentagon is arranging to buy and pulp.
Why bother? Why are we paying for this idiocy? Come to think of it, why are we handing over to the Pentagon $800 billion every year?
