Friday, October 01, 2010
Upset over the first edition of the Afghanistan War memoir, Operation Dark Heart by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, the Department of Defense went about buying up all published copies and destroying them, claiming the book was too revealing of classified information.
A review of the original book and a copy that had been redacted by Pentagon officials revealed some instances of sensitive information that was released to the public. But there were also numerous details blacked out that were anything but secretive in nature.
Secrecy News reported that the most commonly repeated redaction was the author’s cover name, “Christopher Stryker,” that Anthony Shaffer used while serving in Afghanistan. The Pentagon also felt compelled to erase the source of the Stryker pseudonym, which was taken from the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie The Sands of Iwo Jima.
Defense officials also redacted references to the National Security Agency, its headquarters location at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the location of the CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, which has been published by Wikipedia. Another deletion was the name of a torture program, Copper Green, which had been authorized “at the highest level of the U.S. government.”
In addition, censors removed the name of character actor Ned Beatty for reasons unknown.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Behind the Censorship of Operation Dark Heart (by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News)
Operation Dark Heart Excerpts (by Anthony Shaffer) (pdf)
Secrets in Plain Sight in Censored Book’s Reprint (by Scott Shane, New York Times)
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