In Joseph Heller\u2019s anti-war satire, \u201cCatch 22,\u201d the hero, Yossarian, is assigned to a censorship detail. He amuses himself by deleting all the adverbs and adjectives from soldiers\u2019 letters, then all the articles, then everything but the articles, and so on. His job was to delete details that threatened operational security. The result was gibberish.<\/span>
<\/span>It seems the Central Intelligence Agency was inspired by Yossarian\u2019s example.<\/span>
<\/span>The C.I.A. was given the task of censoring the Senate Intelligence Committee\u2019s report denouncing none other than the C.I.A. for torturing prisoners, lying to its overseers in Congress about the torture, and exaggerating how much valuable information the torture provided (if any). The result was predictable and proof, if anyone still needed it, that having the subject of the report censor that report is a very bad idea.<\/span>
<\/span>When the White House approved the C.I.A.\u2019s censorship (the term of art in Washington is \u201credaction\u201d) and sent the report to the Hill, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, said in his usual sneering way that 85 percent of the report was intact and that half the blackouts were made to footnotes.<\/span>
<\/span>The issue, of course, is not merely how much is deleted, but what is deleted. On Monday, McClatchy reported that C.I.A. censors had blacked out the pseudonyms used to protect the identities of agents involved in the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. That, McClatchy said, rendered parts of the report unintelligible.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cRedactions are supposed to remove names or anything that could compromise sources and methods, not to undermine the source material so that it is impossible to understand,\u201d said Senator Martin Heinrich, the New Mexico Democrat, who is a member of the intelligence committee. \u201cTry reading a novel with 15 percent of the words blacked out.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>Asked about the dispute, the White House press secretary Josh Earnest, offered the usual boilerplate about national security reviews. Here\u2019s how Yossarian might have quoted him: \u201cIt is BLANK that a BLANK process be carried out that BLANKS sources and BLANK and other BLANK that is BLANK to our BLANK BLANK.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nLet me be clear: this is not one of the unsigned Times<\/i> editorials, and as such, it is not as official as that would be, but this is the f%$#ing editorial page editor of the f%$#ing New York Times<\/i>, and as such, is arguably the 3rd<\/sup> most official statement from the paper. (something from publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. coming in at number 2).<\/p>\nAs I have said before, Obama, and the rest of his national security troika, fetishize secrecy, and you can expect a good faith declassification from them, so the Senate Intelligence Committee should exercise its statutory authority, and declassify the report on its own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you recall, the Times was forced to publish its story about NSA spying on Americans when their James Risen, who co-wrote this story announced that he was going to publish on its own. The “Gray Lady” has a long history of kowtowing to the US state security apparatus, which is why we see an …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,970,1032,969,1102,1168,1173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-corruption","category-crimes-against-humanity","category-evil","category-intelligence","category-torture","category-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185834"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}