New York Times Op-Ed Censored by CIA
Friday December 22, 2006
Full Coverage: Civil Liberties and the War on Terror
My colleague Keith Porter calls attention to a New York Times op-ed on Iran that was heavily censored by the CIA Publications Review Board, the agency responsible for checking any material published by current or former intelligence agency employees for potential security leaks. The catch: According to the authors, all of the material blacked out has already been released to the public and published in other news reports. It's just that the material in question happens to cast the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda vis-a-vis Iran in an unflattering light. To highlight exactly what was being done, the Times took an unprecedented move by publishing the op-ed with the CIA's black marks preserved--leaving us with the chilling image of an article, published in an American newspaper, that has been censored by the government.
This is not necessarily a full-fledged challenge to the First Amendment per se, because employees of intelligence agencies sign away some of their potential future rights as authors and journalists, and agree to submit to the CIA Publications Review Board, when they come in to work for the first time. If I had written the op-ed in question, there would have been no legal requirement to vet it past the CIA Publications Review Board to begin with, much less to honor any of their censorship requests.
But this is still a cause for serious concern. Assuming that the CIA Publications Review Board did in fact censor previously published information based on political considerations, rather than for operational security purposes, then this represents a gross abuse of authority by the Bush administration--and establishes a policy that dictates that current or former CIA agents who criticize the sitting executive administration may be subjected to undue censorship. This is only the latest of many attempts by the Bush administration to conflate national security concerns with political concerns. We can only hope that when a new administration comes into power in a little over two years, it will be an administration that has more respect for our democratic tradition.
Zoom to:
My colleague Keith Porter calls attention to a New York Times op-ed on Iran that was heavily censored by the CIA Publications Review Board, the agency responsible for checking any material published by current or former intelligence agency employees for potential security leaks. The catch: According to the authors, all of the material blacked out has already been released to the public and published in other news reports. It's just that the material in question happens to cast the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda vis-a-vis Iran in an unflattering light. To highlight exactly what was being done, the Times took an unprecedented move by publishing the op-ed with the CIA's black marks preserved--leaving us with the chilling image of an article, published in an American newspaper, that has been censored by the government.
This is not necessarily a full-fledged challenge to the First Amendment per se, because employees of intelligence agencies sign away some of their potential future rights as authors and journalists, and agree to submit to the CIA Publications Review Board, when they come in to work for the first time. If I had written the op-ed in question, there would have been no legal requirement to vet it past the CIA Publications Review Board to begin with, much less to honor any of their censorship requests.
But this is still a cause for serious concern. Assuming that the CIA Publications Review Board did in fact censor previously published information based on political considerations, rather than for operational security purposes, then this represents a gross abuse of authority by the Bush administration--and establishes a policy that dictates that current or former CIA agents who criticize the sitting executive administration may be subjected to undue censorship. This is only the latest of many attempts by the Bush administration to conflate national security concerns with political concerns. We can only hope that when a new administration comes into power in a little over two years, it will be an administration that has more respect for our democratic tradition.
Zoom to:
- Censorship, Politics, and U.S. National Security (Keith Porter / About U.S. Foreign Policy)
Comments
No comments yet. Leave a Comment