Folks, this will be a short one.
Prior to the publication of Operation Dark Heart, By Lt. Col Shaffer, the media was flooded with suggestions that the Pentagon or CIA wanted the book canned, that when the publisher refused to budge they bought up over 10,000 copies to prevent publication, even after the publisher agreed to censor some parts of the book.
This is sensationalist and specious, for one: with the CIA’s budget if they truly wanted the book out of circulation the entire print run would have been purchased in advance before distribution, and pulped. Or simply made to disappear.
This has happened before, with authors like Peter Wright – former spymaster of the UK, Professor Anthony Sutton, Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky almost faced this fate but the publisher was able to move before Israel’s government was able to reach an accord with Canada’s (Ostrovsky was living and publishing in Canada at the time)
Every retail chain bookstore we visited in a large metropolitan area in the US Midwest had multiple copies on display – you are free to draw your own conclusions.
2. The “redacted” portions of the book are blacked out, in the classic “FOIA magic marker style”
This is obviously a lurid appeal to your imagination as a reader, and you should be insulted by such infantile appeals.
Look, it is simple: if the publisher truly excised significant passages then the editorial staff would have re-written the phrases and paragraphs in those sections so as to not alter the reading flow, or worst cases used an ellipse [..] to show where text had been excised.
Publishers routinely censor materials published in fields dealing with National Security – look at H.R. Haldeman’s diaries of his career working with Nixon (and Haldeman does drop information between the lines that a clever reader would wonder about) Haldeman openly states that he allowed the government to review his diaries before publication and censor material pertaining to National Security.
Reading through it you would never know, now would you?
This is just one example, there are countless others. Basically if the book published in the popular press has black mark-outs in it, due to “last minute” censoring done over 2 months before publication, then know you are being lied to and these black-outs are simply just window decoration to add an air of realism and authenticity to the work.
3. This press campaign insured great sales for the book, which of course is ostensibly – one thinks – what the CIA or Pentagon wanted to avoid, right?
Unless the real point of this was an information operation to actually get you to read Operation Dark Heart, because there is something in it that they want you to read.
Consider that possibility, very carefully.
cool