[R] Redaction

Dear Friends,

The Obama Administration is at it again.  Not only do they not want to hold people accountable for their misdeeds, they do not want to permit anybody to talk about the mistakes that our government has made.  The New York Times published a story entitled "C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book about 9/11 and Terror Fight" by Scott Shane (here).   The facts are very straight forward, Ali H. Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who spent years fighting terror wrote a book which details among other things how the C.I.A. failed to follow up on intelligence that might have prevented 9/11 and how the C.I.A.'s torture (for some reason everybody including The New York Times calls it harsh interrogation techniques) really did not work. Well surprise surprise the C.I.A. redacted significant parts of the book supposedly based on national security and the disclosure of classified information.  Not true says the article.

Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.
Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.
The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.

It is clearly true that history is written by the victors, but I thought that President Obama was going to at least try to transform Washington but alas he seems able to out do even President George W. Bush when it comes to protecting those in power.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal