On Dec 23, 2006, at 11:00 AM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> So it is overstating matters to say that this is
> chilling censorship.
THe associated explanatory article by the authors <http:// www.nytimes.com/2006/12/22/opinion/22precede.html> says:
> Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no
> classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-
> Iranian relations during the Bush administration’s first term that
> have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza
> Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy
> Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department
> policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy
> to Afghanistan, James Dobbins.
>
> These aspects have been extensively reported in the news media, and
> one of us, Mr. Leverett, has written about them in The Times and
> other publications with the explicit permission of the review
> board. We provided the following citations to the board to
> demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is
> already in the public domain. Unfortunately, to make sense of much
> of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for
> themselves. (See links at left.)
>
> The decisions of the C.I.A. and the White House took us by
> surprise. Since leaving government service three and a half years
> ago, Mr. Leverett has put more than 20 articles through the
> C.I.A.’s prepublication review process and the Publication Review
> Board has never changed a word or asked the White House for
> permission to clear these articles.