[IP] Weekly column: "In the name of national security"
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 13:12:06 -0500
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@xxxxxxxx>
http://news.com.com/2010-1028_3-5101121.html
In the name of national security
November 3, 2003, 6:37 AM PT
By Declan McCullagh
Nobody likes to be criticized in public, especially all those politicians
in Washington who fervently hope to be re-elected.
But the Bush administration has taken the desire to avoid critical
commentary to an extreme. In incident after troubling incident, federal
agencies have been quietly censoring information that previously had been
available on their Web sites and otherwise curbing public oversight.
About a week ago, the U.S. Army surreptitiously pulled the plug on one of
its more popular Web sites, call.army.mil, after The Washington Post wrote
about a report that had been posted on it.
The Post's October 25 article said "the U.S. military intelligence
gathering operation in Iraq is being undercut by a series of problems in
using technology, training intelligence specialists and managing them in
the field," citing the report prepared by the Center for Army Lessons
Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The report, which the Post had the
foresight to mirror on its own Web site, talked about the "poor quality" of
mission planning and "marginally effective" training for certain reserve
troops.
The report was not classified. It was merely a sober analysis of the Army's
problems in Iraq. It had the ring of truth to it, unlike Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld's appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, which he
used to blandly reassure viewers. "We can win this war. We will win this
war," he said.
[...]
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