NYT: what former CIA employee wanted to tell you about Iran

Everyone’s up in arms about this op-ed piece that was reviewed and redacted by the CIA, and apparently, the White House (see related discussion here). When I first saw it and read the first couple of paragraphs of the op-ed, I was shocked—as it appears many others have been. “Holy shit! The government’s taken over the newspapers,” I seethed. Then I thought, “Maybe the government’s finally had enough of treasonous insiders with government clearances handing over classified information to the press, and the press claiming it has zero responsibility to refuse to publish that material!”

But no, that wasn’t it. Luckily, I controlled my attention deficit disorder and continued reading long enough to discover that an author of the op-ed was a former CIA employee. In case you weren’t already aware of this, former CIA employees and others who have had access to classified information have signed an agreement with the government to go through this review process when they plan to publish books or newspaper articles, movie scripts, and so on, that could involve classified subject matter related to their work. In other words, this former CIA employee who wrote a newspaper article about foreign affairs with Iran was subject to this review. So when you (and I) first got the impression that the White House showed up on the steps of the NYT with a gang of redaction thugs to take over the newspaper, that’s not what happened. The NYT submitted the article for review and the government had its way with it.

That’s not to say the government wasn’t ridiculous about it, because they probably were; the author had written about these topics before without redaction. Over-classification of really mundane facts is a huge problem within our government, and how things are classified is not a perfect science and sometimes done inconsistently. But I’m only clarifying that one point about the former CIA employee’s responsibility, not justifying what the government did with its opportunity to review. I do not think this point was well emphasized in the NYT piece, or at least it looks like others who are writing/blogging about the article are not paying much attention to it. Mainly they’re thinking about “dictatorship,” “police state,” and such concepts. Which the NYT knew would happen when they published the piece; this was clearly their goal. But de-sensationalized, this was part of a normal, albeit flawed, process that goes on all the time.

Here’s a weird thought: major MSM outlets leaking their own stories to underground media for publication….