Slashdot Mirror
Pentagon Makes Good On Plan To Destroy Critical Book
mykos writes "Remember when the Pentagon said they were arranging a taxpayer-funded, government-sponsored book burning a couple weeks ago? Well, they made good on that threat, purchasing 9,500 copies of the book to be destroyed. The publisher, St. Martin's Press, has redacted anything the Pentagon told them to redact in the upcoming second run of the book. They Department of Defense has not yet paid for the burned books, but says they are 'in the process.' Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. April Cunningham gave this statement: 'DoD decided to purchase copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security.' Whew, looks like we're safe now."
From the previous /. story that covered this, in the comments:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1784344&cid=33547938
"The blurb is intentionally misleading here. The govt gave the OK for the book but then upon a later review they were worried about some names released and a 2nd printing has already been agreed upon by both parties. They are just deciding what to do with 10k books that were already printed. Obviously the publisher spent money to already print them so they aren't going to just destroy them."
So nothing to see here, move along...
Yes, it is. Revealing them can allow us to realize whom we've been trusting with our money, our information, and to set policies. For example, Manuel Noriegas's status as a recipient of CIA intelligence and funding and trainee of the "School of the Americas" contributed to his eventual takeover of Panama and control of its cocaine trade. Don't you think it would have been helpful to know exactly what money or support he got from the US, and useful to know what gangsters we're currently supporting and funding worldwide? And wouldn't it have been helpful to know, in advance of the war, that the claims about Iraq purchasing "yellowcake" uranium ore came from, so that they could be exposed before a war costing billions of US dollars and thousands of US lives, and which cost us any hope of lasting victory in Afghanistan?
What's ludicrous is the apparent self promotion of the book.
So let's look at it from another perspective, perhaps the authors perspective. He wrote a book, submitted it to his CO instead of the pentagon for review. Ok honest mistake. The pentagon wanted some things removes, he was fine with that but printing had already started. So the government buys the first run of the print so no one is out any money and this guy isn't facing jail time for disclosing national security information or top secrete information. Along comes his publicists and says we need to spend X money to promote the book or else it won't sell that much. The publicists then says, we can save some of that money if you claim you are being censored unfairly and object to everything the government removed even though you are ok with it all.
So the author does an about face, goes all over national Television claiming he was wronged and the government spending a crap load of money to buy the first run of books is proof. He then adopts the claim that what the government removed was insignificant to the content of the book so buy it, it's still good. Hell, I bet you will buy the book just to see if you can tell what was removed from it.
It's nothing but a win-win for the author and his change of heart can be summed up as not letting a disaster go to waste. He benefited from writing the book, from getting it cleared the wrong way, from making the appropriate changes, and now he is benefiting from complaining about it.