Re: Media Censorship
On Dec 23, 2006, at 11:00 AM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
So it is overstating matters to say that this is chilling censorship.
THe associated explanatory article by the authors
Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no
classified material. These passages go into aspects of American- Iranian relations during the Bush administration’s first term that
have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department
policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy
to Afghanistan, James Dobbins.These aspects have been extensively reported in the news media, and
one of us, Mr. Leverett, has written about them in The Times and
other publications with the explicit permission of the review
board. We provided the following citations to the board to
demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is
already in the public domain. Unfortunately, to make sense of much
of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for
themselves. (See links at left.)The decisions of the C.I.A. and the White House took us by
surprise. Since leaving government service three and a half years
ago, Mr. Leverett has put more than 20 articles through the
C.I.A.’s prepublication review process and the Publication Review
Board has never changed a word or asked the White House for
permission to clear these articles.