The Pentagon's book-burners

The Pentagon is negotiating to buy up the press run of a military intelligence man's book concerning his experience in Afghanistan, the New York Times reports today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10books.html

The publication of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, has divided military security reviewers and highlighted the uncertainty about what information poses a genuine threat to securit, writes Scott Shane.
 
Shaffer's Army superiors had cleared the book, but the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA and other spook outfits decided that he'd blown important secrets. So the publisher issues a redacted book and the Pentagon burns the current copies.

Just one problem. Copies of version 1 have already been sold on the internet. So an adversary can simply compare that version with the version 2 to find out what the spooks consider to be damaging disclosures.

This whole deal may be some kind of spook head game, for all I know. The author was booted out of the DIA because of his advocacy of Abel Danger, a Pentagon data mining operation that supposedly fingered Mohamad Atta and other purported 9/11 attackers well before 9/11. The Pentagon tried mightily to deny the Abel Danger program and its revelations. Officers were ordered to keep quiet and relevant materials were destroyed.

Still, books by ex-spooks are notoriously unreliable and it has happened more than once that a phony controversy is generated in order to promote disinformation.

Another possibility is that the Obamites are so nutso to block leaks that preventing the public from reading information already available via the internet seems OK to them.

And, we hear that Wikileaks is poised to release a vast new trove of Iraq war messages, whether the Pentagon approves or not. This time activists are screening the data for matter that might threaten individuals' safety.  Several news organizations are already combing this trove, it has been reported.

Of course New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is absolutely correct when he says that a Florida pastor has a First Amendment right to burn a copy of the Koran on Sept. 11. Bloomberg's media company also has a First Amendment right to connive with the conspiracy of coverup of what really happened on 9/11.

However, as mayor, he doesn't have a First Amendment right to obstruct justice by failing to alert prosecutors about many things that don't add up concerning the government's 9/11 tale. Oh yes, he's the guy whose flunkies killed the ballot query about whether a new probe of 9/11 should be conducted -- even though enough signatures had been gathered.

No need to remind voters, already wary of his third-term bid,
of his abysmal 9/11 record.

Anyway, I'm sure that all sorts of people all over the country will be burning Korans on 9/11 -- though in most cases there will be no media attention. The absurdity is that al Qaeda had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, other than as clownish dupes in minor roles.